Board of Education Meeting of July 21, 2020

001this is the meeting of the west hartford public schools board of education um and cami can you start with the roll call please dr steinberg here dr thomas ferguson here mrs wilcox here mr zadanowitz here thank you and uh dr chang will you lead us in the pledge of allegiance please and we're going to say the pledge of allegiance in honor of representative john lewis his dedication to our country fight for peace and justice i pledge allegiance to the flag of the united states one nation under god indivisible with liberty thank you and we do not have a revision to the agenda order before we continue our community experienced a tragedy over the past week and on behalf of the board i want to express condolences to the family and friends of johnny benjamin adams

002a recent graduate of king phillip middle school our thoughts are with all who knew johnny please know that there is a box set up at king philip if you'd like to leave a condolence card or a memory for the family you can do so by leaving that in the box which will be available from 8 am to 7 pm this week and next week this is another tragedy for our community and i hope our community will rally its support on behalf of johnny's loved ones and ask for a moment of silence please thank you with no student participation we will move on to public comments as a reminder for members of the public we take public comments uh three minutes per individual and 21 minutes per subject board members do not respond to comments though

003i suspect you may receive some answers to any questions or concerns you raised during the reports this evening we will also have a public comment period at the end of our meeting this evening we did receive many emails as well and i know not everyone is able to call in this evening but please know that our the board members have received your comments and will take them under consideration and give them serious serious consideration so uh without further ado um i guess i'll just ask people to chime in or who wants to go first oh and if you're watching online uh cami will hold up a yellow card when you have one minute remaining and a red card when your time has expired all right if they come in for a phone call then um

004i will let you know when you have uh i'll let you know when time's up if you are not watching online thank you for that question okay um somebody can just go ahead and go first when you uh provide your comments please state your name and your address hi good evening my name is keisha ansar good good evening you can go ahead start with your address please and then thank you uh my address is 107 richard street in west hartford and my son is a recent graduate of connor'd high so i'm i'm just going to give a brief synopsis of something that occurred last year last august my son tyrek and his friend were doing fundraising after their football workout in west hartford they had on their clear packed jerseys that identified them as conor

005football players they went to a home and one of the residents called her husband who is a detective and told him that she's terrified because someone came to the door it was later found out that she is an actual detective that is trained to combat multiple assailants however she was supposedly terrified because two teenage black boys knocked on her door and then walked away some people in trying to justify the officer's actions are dwelling on the time of day however it was during the summer and it was still light out and more importantly the time of day is irrelevant as their civil rights were violated harper tv would like us to believe that the white did not know the voice race so how did the the vigilante detective and followers knew know that they were

006supposed to go directly to the boys if you read the report you'll see that the suv drove past them and then immediately made a u-turn and went to them superintendent moore i emailed you several times in 2019 to inform you of the harassment and updates you responded with encouraging words and so i'm surprised that you've been absent in this fight for justice i sent you an update about the unjust determination on june 16th and this email has remained unanswered you do have an obligation to inform the parents of west hartford of the policies that you plan to put in place to protect our children as these boys were active they were acting as ambassadors to your school when the harassment occurred and it was brought to my attention last night that there are many instances

007of where harper td actually violated west hartford residents one such instance was mentioned on the hartford city council meeting last night in 2018 sergeant barone and other officers of harper pb crossed over into west hartford and were caught on camera kicking a man that was already handcuffed my question is why is this a constant reoccurrence and what measures your leaders plan to put in place to stop this violation you all have a responsibility to publicly denounce the hartford police officers and make it known that such actions will never be acceptable in west hartford only then will they respect and recognize the values that our city stands for thank you thank you are there other people who wish to yes comment good evening hello yes the number ending in 2-3 yes hi this is tricia good

008evening my name is trisha pitter i live at 26 greenbrier drive and i am one of the edi parent leaders at aiken elementary school on august 7 2019 in arizona four young black boys aged 15 and 16 were going door-to-door fundraising for their school when they were met by a 46 year old white woman with a revolver we may think this was a one-time racial incident and could never happen in our town but clearly it did although tyreese and his friend weren't met with the same state as the other four young black boys they do share similar emotional response to the event that took place fear and trauma as a district there needs to be better protocols and practices in place to protect our students especially students of color because in this situation to be

009black and male is to be seen as a threat without just inequity therefore i am asking that the west hartford board of ed while reviewing updating your policy fixes to a moratorium of all students fundraising activities until the following was addressed update policy and soliciting a fund from and by students to ensure that safety and protections are established especially for bypass students establish the formation of a school district-wide task force that includes bypoc parents mental health and public safety professionals to review and recommend changes to school board policies to address race related trauma resulting from school district program activities and practices i emailed further information about the west harper board of ed earlier today along with this testimony update policy on public complaints now i understand that there is a chain of command for this

010however in a matter of series of tyrique and his friends this might take 11 months 349 days in approximately 50 weeks and counting the this is unacceptable it should never happen again the response time has to be immediate to make sure our students of color are protected and safe anti-racism practices and protocols need to be embedded throughout west hartford board of education policies it's trying to support and make big solutions in order to make the needed testing the specifications that dismantle the inequities that exist we can no longer justify and be okay with policies that continue to strip the basic human rights of our students we are at a critical moment in time so how we act is important and there should be no regrets thus it is imperative to be proactive and not reactive

011when bad things happen thank you so much for your attention and your time thank you who would like to go next hello hi uh the number ending in stick five go for it yeah hi my name is natalie de la cruz i live at eight ridge book drive and i'm a rising junior at connard i would like to start off by thanking you and all other officials who have worked to create the plan for the academic year that is being introduced tonight however i strongly believe that the student voice has not been involved enough in the creation of the plans in fact my peers agree i created a poll on social media where i asked do you think students have been included enough in creating the reopening plans for this year end quote and of

012the 100 students that i verified will be attending a whps school this fall 95 said that they do not feel included enough in the making of the plan you're unveiling tonight students live there at risk and too many of us have not been asked our opinion or given the chance to help guide the plan students are more than capable of providing valuable advice as we are the ones that know how our peers act and react and we are the ones actually attending the classes there is a survey sent out at the end of the academic year looking for feedback and there is a survey that is for parents to fill out for their children's intentions for the fall that is simply not enough i'm a member of many community and school advocacy advocacy groups such

013as the state school climate committee and yet no one has asked our opinion i personally do not feel comfortable going back to school because i know that a plan that does not adequately address the needs of students as told by students is destined to backfire of course this is not one person or group's fault but this needs to be addressed immediately in the next phase of implementing the plan this need there needs to be an open mind of communication between a large majority of students and those making the decisions that impact our health and safety principal demarcy did an amazing job of this every thursday during online learning he sent out updates and teachers were encouraged to talk to students about their experiences with distance learning as you all know there are usually student representatives

014on this board but as they're both seniors they graduated and retired from this position that means that there is zero student representation on the board of ed currently i asked students if they had something to add to my statement and here's what i received bella a rising junior at hall says emailing a couple of options for schools to students could help that we know what to expect ava a rising junior at connor says give students updates on the plans not just our parents avery a rising senior at connor says students especially high school students need to have a say lastly bridget a rising senior at hall says we need more mental health support for students especially for online class and want to know if there's a plan for that i couldn't i couldn't agree more

015with bridges sentiment as a member of the west harbor prevention council i carry an immense amount about mental health with the impact of the fight for racial justice on students of color the uncertainty that this pandemic has brought upon everyone on top of normal stressors mental health support needs to significantly expand this year students deserve a seat at the decision-making table thank you so much for your time thank you who would like to go next hi good evening good evening my name is amaryllis frangel and i live at 64 vine hill road and i have a daughter at kp i would like to share my concerns regarding the start of the school year my daughter anne-marie who will be entering the sixth grade was diagnosed with sickle cell disease at birth throughout her life she

016has been sickly and has been hospitalized every three to four months for sickle cell crises for the sake of time i will not explain what her condition is i can only ask that when you have the time you will take the responsibility of educating yourself regarding this because ultimately there is someone in your community living with it anne-marie's condition puts her at high risk and makes her prone to getting sick because her immune system is very weak not only does she have this chronic condition that lowers her hemoglobin and requires her to get frequent blood transfusions but she also has asthma i have already made the decision to transition to virtual learning because the beginning of every school year is the hardest time for her and now adding the concerns of covet 19 i cannot

017and will not risk my child's health and life during a time that is still unknown i am furious that as a parent with a child that has special needs and has been on a 504 plan for the last seven years that i am being forced to make a decision blindly because no one has reached out to me specifically or even as a group to let me know what the possibilities and or options will be for the fall you want me to tell you if i'm sending my child to school or not but how can i make that decision if i do not know what that will look like my daughter who was mentioned before has been hospitalized every three to four months since birth she has not been sick or in the hospital for the

018last seven months for us that is remarkable that has to speak for something the distancing we have been practicing is proving to be beneficial another issue that is concerning is that of transportation coming from smith a town magnet school we made the decision for ann marie to attend kp because familiarity is important i want her to feel safe and empowered among her friends that she already knows and who know her condition after receiving a call from transportation i am yet again being forced to make a decision because of the little time there has been to properly devise a plan that will benefit all we are not in kp district and because of social distancing requirements there will no longer be a bus to transport non-district children to school although i can appreciate being able to

019make the decision for my child to learn virtually i cannot help i cannot help but feel that we are being discriminated against we are told that the choice is ours but we don't even know if there is going to be a difference between a voluntarily a voluntary online learner and a child that involuntarily has to be home for online learning due to a health condition you're saying that you will be inclusive of children with special needs that there will be a place for them but how are they not being discriminated against when they have to sit at home and be isolated from their friends who don't have health concerns and are back in school it is unfair to make my child feel singled out because of her health in closing i want to state that

020in a perfect world i would not choose for my child to stay home and learn virtually but i feel like this is the best option definitely better than being in a hospital with no other support and much better than having to bury my child thank you for your time good evening thank you would anyone else like to comment hi i would like to all right my name is greta magndance and i'm a resident at 33 glen hollow and a rising senior at hall high school as a member of hall's community i strongly believe that the approach to this reopening must be an inclusive and supportive one as we all know covet has forced students and teachers alike to adjust in a multitude of ways attending virtual office hours communicating solely via computer and even taking

021ap exams online undeniably impacted students paul implemented weekly meetings by grade level in order to spread information with as little confusion as possible information was presented regarding the sats report card releases google classroom updates and even time management i believe that these sessions need to continue throughout the school year in order to keep students informed and comfortable i would also like to strongly advocate for the importance of smaller meetings in order to support students emotionally social isolation proved difficult for almost all of my peers although essential to maintain the physical health of the community as a whole quarantined had a detrimental impact for many of my peers continuing to hold advisory meetings will ensure that each student meets with a smaller group of peers and a teacher on a consistent basis making the advisory schedule

022as invariable as possible will aid students in developing stronger relationships with their advisor and fellow advisees hosting roundtable discussions within advisories may help advisors who gauge the emotional state of students regarding different topics for example hall's quote real talk for warriors end quote surrounding the black lives matter movement which broke participants into smaller groups of five to ten students and two to three faculty members dealing with tough situations and topics as a community should absolutely become a priority during this reopening not only will students become more informed they will feel more supported and heard by their school system as a whole lastly including students more deeply in decision making is essential many of my peers have expressed confusion distress and frustration about the school year to come surveying students about their thoughts surrounding the coming

023year may not only make us feel listened to but may present you all with more ideas on how to make this reopening go more smoothly as a group of bright and mature students we hope that you will take our ideas and feelings into consideration throughout the school year to come thank you for your time thank you would you like to go next hi this is kathy ryan star hi kathy uh kathy 113 washington circle i am a proud parent of a third grader and incoming pre-k 3 student at charter oak and i'm a graduate of duffy sedgwick and connored high schools i am a white parrot who desperately wants my children to be taught to live in the multicultural world that we live in and to end white supremacy and so i come to you

024as part of the equity diversity and inclusion team that's working town wide and i kind of i want to introduce some of what we've been working on that many of you know and some of you don't and then there are several other speakers who are going to speak to specific points we have edis at seven elementary schools and we are networked and working with parents in informal and formal ways at all three middle schools and both high schools we coordinate with community of concern and with losco in uh at the beginning of this month we sent a letter to superintendent moore asking for a meeting to talk about um something or issues we've been raising around equity equity for a long time board members and superintendent moore received this email about people of color parents

025being on the forum newly formed committees about reopening about expanding conversations about safety and social and emotional implants to include plans for keeping black indigenous and people of color children protected from racist harassment improving practices around parent communications and probably most importantly working towards an equity policy and equity audit in our district we want to thank rosina haskins for meeting with us we really really appreciate that and all of her work and we know this job is not hers alone we want to also thank deb paul and amanda aronson for meeting with us on behalf of all of the board members thank you for committing to meet with us on a regular basis throughout the year and we are eager for you together with the administration to move forward on equity and engagement with families

026in particular at the margins superintendent moore we are eager to meet with you we i know as a leader i am a minister right now that these times are just absolutely zany and we really really appreciate all the work that you all are doing and know it's almost impossible and it's in the most zany times that our priorities come forth so for me as a minister after george floyd was killed i dropped a lot of the things i was doing and showed up on the streets showed up with my black congregants and leaders and turned the tables upside down so superintendent moore we look forward to meeting with you in this zany time because if we don't put equity forward as the top priority right now we will continue to fail our students of color

027we will continue to fail our white students we will continue to fail our community when there is so much potential and there is so much in motion and we want to encourage you all into that motion thank you so much thank you who would like to go next hi i would hello my name is nadia ketchuah i live on 118 brunswick avenue and i am the mother to a seventh grader at cedric and a ninth grader at connard i became involved with the equity diversity and inclusion group after attending the family and schools partnership meeting with the edi and rosina haskins in the beginning of this year given everything that has transpired so far in 2020 i understand that the district has no easy task in creating a reopening plan for our school this plan

028will affect the entire community namely teachers staffing administrators parents and students as a single parent and a parent of color to two children in our schools i have many concerns with how our schools will open in the fall i am here today to ask that the district involve a a diverse group of parents and students in their process for reopening schools we not only need to look at safety with covid we need to consider equity and education both inside a physical classroom and with virtual learning possibilities and consider the emotional well-being of our students during a time when they have been greatly impacted by a pandemic and acts of racism that have divided our communities across the country tom moore made a very strong statement to the west hartford community about being actively anti-racist moving

029forward during his time as superintendent i am hopeful that that process has already begun i read on the whps website that there are a number of advisory committees that are helping to strategize as we move towards opening in the fall however this process has seemed to be close to the community as parents and members of the equity diversity and inclusion groups we want to be sure that bipac parent and student voices are represented on these committees as we move towards unknown territory it is so important that the needs of all the students are being considered how will we ensure there is equity for all students how will we deal with students coming together after months of being apart hearing their families different interpretations of the pandemic as well as different interpretations of the senseless killings

030of black men and women across the nation how will we ensure that our students are not only safe from covid but feel safe in their skin and able to express their views on the current political climate will there be social emotional resources such as counselors small support groups etc for students to utilize if things are difficult for them these are just some of the questions i have as we move forward and as a parent who is starting to get more involved in our school system i hope that the equity diversity and inclusion groups will have an opportunity to meet with tom moore to share our concerns and ideas now is the time that as a community we need to be open-minded to new and creative possibilities as we enter an unknown time in public education

031thank you hi my name is gigi bellen uh can you hear me yes go ahead sorry thank you i live at 31 brennan road in west hartford and i have four biracial kids one at bristow and the other three at braeburn school [Music] a couple of years ago i co-founded a parent-led equity diversity and inclusion group at my children's elementary school and that's where my volunteer work on equity in school began um and within the past year or so as more of these grassroots groups began at other schools parents at all levels have begun to work together and pull resources and efforts to work together on equity initiatives that would work with all parents throughout west hartford um together as kathy ryan had pointed out before we are part of the west hartford edi parent

032group and we had indicated before that we would like to meet with superintendent moore to discuss important equity issues and would still really like to do so at the beginning of june superintendent moore sent out a statement to the west hartford community it was a promise about west harker public schools being actively anti-racist moving forward in thoughts and actions and professional development and as someone who is passionate about equity in education and diversity and curriculum this this is a good thing and i can't wait to hear more but we need more than just a promise we need to hear more about what actions will be taken and what results the district will be looking for to make good on this promise and in order to effectively document progress uh we need an equity audit so

033we need the board and superintendent moore to lead on equity by making an equity audit and a district-wide anti-racist equity and education policy a priority when we had reached out to superintendent moore to meet with us we understand he is very super busy during this crazy time and he directed us to meet with the director of diversity advancement dr rosina haskins and we did have the opportunity to meet with her recently and we consider herself so fortunate to have her on her side and to work with her and collaborate as in as we did with the family school partnership series kickoff at the beginning of the year and we appreciate her partnership and her support however i want to stress that equity is not just for one department to deal with an equity lens should

034be used in all areas of west hartford public schools and curriculum and an administration professional development budgets hiring nurturing and retention of teachers even in student-centered equity initiatives so in almost every context it is the superintendent who has the ability to advance or hinder edi work and it is not enough to leave it to the department of diversity advancement to hire well and to expect them or in this case one amazing woman to do the daily work so we look forward to our the opportunity to meet with superintendent more soon um we greatly appreciate the board of ed taking the time to meet with us recently and we look forward to more productive conversations around equity in schools and thank you to the board superintendent moore and the west hartford public school administration for all

035your hard work and efforts during these past few months um it does not go unnoticed and i just wanted to extend a warm welcome to dr jason oliver chang to the board i am personally thrilled to know that you will be part of this important decision-making body bringing with you your background and knowledge around equity and diversity to our community so can't wait to see more thank you for your time thank you are there others who wish to speak hi can you hear me yes hi um this is nikia alexander i am a mom of two boys one entering into the sixth grade in the fall and my youngest one is entering into the fall at kp and my youngest one is at norfelt going into the third grade my address is to beacon hill

036drive um so my comment tonight is more of a series of questions that i have pertaining to the recently formed reopening advisories and i am aware the forum does not allow for you to respond my understanding is that there are five reopening advisory committees health and health and safety curriculum instruction assessment social and emotional impacts community outreach and employee workplace safety and it is also my understanding that these advisory groups consisting of parents and and administrators are essentially tasked with developing a plan and a blueprint for kids and teachers to be able to return to school safely in the fall so my questions are centered around the policies and practices the district is using to form these committees and advisory groups so for instance what is the racial makeup of each committee given that the

037population of students is 40 non-white are those committees reflective of our diverse community and did the chairs of the committees ensure that all voices are being heard what was the process for outreach were people of color proactively asked to be a part of the advisory groups what equity framework or lens was used if any by members as they evaluated and discussed plans for reopening to ensure those plans will work for all students if an equity framework was utilized did it take into account all of the distinct cultures and backgrounds experiences and learning styles of all students and particularly students of color to make sure they feel safe and supported as they re-enter school in the fall so again i realize this is not the form to get these questions answered hopefully or maybe at some

038point it will be but nevertheless i would like answers to them and i know many others would as well thank you [Applause] thank you go ahead yes good evening my name is hannah jackson i live at 32 walker lane and i have one child going into first grade at smith a rising sixth grader at kp and a rising eighth grader at kp um i am a participant in the edi group in town and it is my hope that through this participation we can elicit positive changes in policy at the board level to better reflect and support equity diversity and inclusion in our school system in all facets that being said an area that i would like to touch on tonight similar to what nikia just said is in regards to the school reopening planning that

039is taking place um well i recognize that this is a task that is overwhelming as it it is involving many scenarios and considerations i think it's imperative that teachers parents and students are deeply involved in how this process moves forward specifically i have questions about the advisories that were formed to aid in the plans for the reopening of the five committees my questions are what type of process was utilized to create these committees are there parents and students on all in any of these committees most importantly what equity lens was being used to ensure that these committees are reflective and representative of the 40 of our school population that is non-white i urge the board of ed to create and make readily available the process in which these committees were established so that parents can

040easily access the information that the committees are creating and be more a part of the process as a parent when i access the district reopening plan information online and when i click on each advisory i see a one-sentence blurb on what it covers and the name of the chairperson of the committee i'm looking for more transparency and more access to this process possibly posting meeting minutes online actively seeking parent representation from bipac parents and students in our communities as well as like others have said tonight superintendent moore meeting with the edi group to discuss further plans for making an equity policy and an equity audit the top priority this school year i think this is imperative to supporting the growth and development of our school system i realized that this is a very difficult time

041in many regards but i also think that this is the perfect time in many ways to make big moves on the equity front and to lead by example in the way that we apply new systems of equity and diversity in the west hartford public schools as a educator and a mental health professional i believe it's our duty to ensure that all of our children in our schools are safe supported and receiving an equitable education i thank you all for your time and consideration thank you is there anyone else who wishes to comment this evening hello yes hi my name is kalia austin griffin i live at 110 st james street in west hartford i have a senior at hall and an eighth grader at kp i'm looking to start an edi at hall high school

042i wanted to voice some concerns around the lack of communication and the reopening of school in a meeting i viewed on facebook live with jillian gilchrist and christine palm that was held regarding the plan to reopen some less harper teachers expressed that they were not consulted in these plans and that they had some serious concerns i shared in these concerns with the teachers concerned over monitoring children wearing masks all day the ability to keep kids safe with poor ventilated classrooms and wanting to know what happens when teachers get sick themselves another issue that was highlighted was mental health will additional mental health staff members be accessible to students due to the unprecedented situations that are being faced the kids are being faced with current teams are not equipped to handle these new challenges will it

043be adding on to an already overwhelmed system as a parent and social worker myself i realize that children will be coming back to school in the middle of a pandemic and racial crisis in our country many dealing with death for the first time and facing new fears that will need to be addressed we had a recent death of a child in our own town that affected many of our children and parents we are trying to deal with this as a community i know our children will need more support during this very difficult time the mental health of children in our town should be of great concern i would love to see some education around identified topics and an increase in access to support services for all youth as a west hartford resident i also would

044have liked to see more parent involvement in your planning our concerns and opinions should have been compiled as well as asked for solutions i did receive one survey right before school ended in the spring but many of my friends and neighbors did not that was curious to me i wonder how impactful it was if many people were not reached by the survey collectively we were not included in these plans we need more transparency at what point will all parents voices be included in your plan the communication needs to be improved between you and the community as a whole i understand that you have committees that you have some parents on there that you might have spoken to the teacher representative that's not enough there are so many voices that you haven't heard so many ideas

045and perspectives that are valuable and shouldn't be overlooked make an effort to reach out to as many people as possible there's still time include parents when making decisions about their children include a diverse population of people when making these decisions remember that west hartford services children from different ethnic and cultural backgrounds different abilities and disabilities please look at these plans with an inclusive lens i look forward to all parents being included in the school plans moving forward thank you we have reached our um limit for comments regarding um going back to school reopening concerns are there people who wish to comment on a completely different topic otherwise you're welcome to stay on and provide your public comment at the end of our meeting okay like i said we will have public comment again at the

046end of the meeting so we are going to move on to item number four um unfinished business actually before we do that i just want to thank everyone who took the time and effort to to comment tonight and to send emails to us regarding your concerns know that you're being heard and i think you're going to learn a lot more over the course of the next little while uh this evening and hopefully some of your concerns at least will be laid we don't have any items for unfinished business so moving on to item five new business a is proposed revised calendar for the 2020 2021 school year and the recommendation is that the board of education review and adopt a proposed revised calendar for the 2020 2021 school year um so i'm going to turn

047this over to superintendent moore as a reminder to board members if you do have questions uh question mark in the chat box and i will call on you um in order of those questions all right um so tom you're up sure thanks deb um so last week the state board of education passed a rule that shifted the 180 day school year to 177 days but only if you use those three days the beginning of the year for training health training and otherwise for the restart to school so that i consider to be a very positive development for us as i think it's natural to get people back in school we only had two days scheduled remember i can't just make up new days this is a i deal with teacher contracts and so as we

048go back we need that time for training we need that time for acclimating and um i think what what you'll see here i'm gonna uh share [Music] that's not sharing all right can you see the school calendar now no no no okay i know you had it up before the meeting started so all right now can you see it yes okay so what we see here is that the calendar in september would shift we're starting we have a late labor day this year so we were initially going to be starting on september 2nd this would actually push the start of school to september 8th the day after labor day september 8th would be a wednesday schedule as would september 9th this gives us the benefit of a full week of teacher and service that week

049this gives them more time for setup gives us more time for professional development gives us more time to go through health protocols with our teachers so i'm happy to answer questions about it but um i think it makes the most sense and it doesn't affect the end of the calendar as this has shifted school year down thank you are there questions from board members i just have one question not really a question a comment so much um is that we still have 179 days of school as opposed to 177 correct that is correct great um mark tom i just want to say that i support this um given the times uh anything that you can do um to help the teachers uh reactivate the school is uh a worthy cause and i think it just

050makes 100 sense and i i just want to applaud you and take an advantage back and using the extra days um to get those teachers um reacting to school if in fact that's where we're headed so thank you any other questions um jason yeah thank you um when you were talking about using these days to prepare teachers uh it made me think that there might be a possibility for um for using those days to also prepare families and uh to offer uh some other kinds of uh resources or uh suggestions for uh for getting families ready and beginning conversations that will be continued with when the school year starts sure yeah that's something certainly at a building level principles could reach out to people and talk about how things are going to look and that

051is something you'll see in the plan as we talk about it that's going to be a rollout throughout august i mean the the underlying point that you make jason that i appreciate is it gives us another three days to get all that information i mean more time right now is a good thing to get that information out to families and to make sure that we can get um that that sharing out there so certainly that's a that's a thought process here other questions i will take a motion then to approve the revised calendar is there a motion so moved ari steinberg thank you ari is there a second second marched it inward thank you mark um any further comments or questions discussion if not all those in favor please signify by saying aye oh shoot

052amanda i'm sorry we're gonna let amanda ask a question real quick pardon me i can wait till after the vote i have a comment okay um all those in favor of approval please signify by saying aye aye aye aye any opposed say nay extension the eyes have it and the vote is unanimous go ahead amanda thank you i just wanted to me i think this is a good time since it's early in the meeting for us to acknowledge that when we look at the school calendar typically there's reactions about excitement when are we going to have vacations how are we using our time and there's also a lot of anxiety well i need child care so as we approach this particular school year i really want to ask and encourage all of us as parents

053because many of us on the board are parents as well as board members to go into this calendar with a mindset of support for our teachers so that as we are thinking about our travel that we're making measured safe and restrained choices for labor day weekend long weekends weekends in general how we spend our time so that as the children are interacting with their teachers when the week begins the teachers are getting that reinforced idea that for this particular year as we meet the realities of our time that we have their backs you know that they don't want mugs they want to know that we are supporting their health and that we are doing that with our choices there's a lot of people now who up they are making choices to spend time in quiet

054you know distant areas they're talking about how they were masked how they were coming back and getting tested they're starting to build that culture around travel that will continue to help our teachers feel secure as they start to think about what their involvement will be with our physical classrooms so that calendar this year please if you are listening to this as a parent this is not the year to schedule a lot of far-off travel there's many opportunities for us to be each other's families this year and to help our community move through this process with restraint so that our teachers are getting that support for their own mental health their sense of safety that we are doing that with them in mind so i just wanted to take the opportunity to share that i know

055that's something that we've all been talking about at the board level and throughout the community thank you all right we're going to move on to staff communications and reports and to the superintendent's report tom you're on mute thanks deb um and i'm going to have paul call up our presentation about the reopening of schools and i have a couple comments to make at first about this um this document um knows a lot of comments about this before a lot of letters a lot of discussion commented meeting and we don't the board doesn't respond to comments but since somebody have come in it's incumbent upon me to say one thing if anybody expects me to apologize for this they're going to be sorely disappointed in my career there are very few things that i'm more proud

056that's been accomplished in three weeks than this document and i want people to remember a couple things about this because some people have come forward and said let tomorrow know your feelings about reopening by all means you can let your feelings be known to me about reopening but the decision to open and paul if you go to the next slide the decision to open was not made in a vacuum in west hartford on june 26th the governor made an announcement that he would be welcoming kids i'm sorry june 25th that schools would reopen in the fall would be welcoming our children back to school all children back to school on june 29th a state plan of 50 pages was issued that required us to come back with a design of three distinct things one a

057plan to provide for in-school instruction for all students on a full-time basis unless a family voluntarily opts into remote learning two a plan to provide both in-person and remote learning support options a hybrid plan accessing instruction curriculum online resulting in limited student population on school premises at any given time and sorry my lights go up and third a plan for total remote learning to provide a strategy for the potential of future cancellation of a certain class requiring all students to access instruction curriculum online for a period of time so the discussions that we want to have and as this became national all right and we look at national statistics and we look at people making bold declarations nationally about what should happen we have to understand different places are in different situations but one thing

058that is clear is that connecticut's plan still and this is the governor and state department of education and this guidance came out today at this time connecticut state law requires that access to public school classes be offered to students for 177 days if we make that and 900 hours unless um it becomes the waiver and then excluding public school students for certain days of the week for example having certain grades only attend school on monday and tuesday with remote learning the other day that is instituting a hybrid plan for this year is not appropriate under the model this is part of governor lamont's executive orders and this decision is about his decision is that um at this point we're planning for a return to school and planning for a hybrid plan and planning for a

059remote plan for those students that opt out in addition there's a third plan a hybrid plan that we'll talk about as we roll it out today but it's impossible to talk about this decision to real to reopen without understanding the emotions involved i get it i get the teachers and their fears i get parents and their fears i get people that absolutely believe because i got a call today if you don't reopen i'm going out of business and my family we will leave west hartford we won't be able to survive and i just want us as a community to please come together and have patience for each other and understand what people are going through because even little things in college i paid my way through college people know the story i'm the youngest of

060seven in my family a little one that went to college i paid my way through college by working in a bar i bartended i bounced if i was in college and this had happened i wouldn't be sitting here today and i say and everybody says bars have to close i get it but our society has not developed all the structures in place to take care of those people whose businesses and livelihoods close so i'm asking people to please please be patient and that there isn't one right answer here because we have to have sympathy for people who are worried about their livelihood we have to have sympathy for people that are worried about their health but we have to make sure that this isn't in us versus them because the decision about going back to

061school being politicized as if this is liberal or conservative this isn't this is personal this is mom and dad and kids and teachers and families and what we've put together is something that blends all those concerns and i would argue more than any other district in the state blends equity concerns and i think a lot of these questions about rosina about myself and about the position of director director of equity advancement you know i'll admit it's hard not to be defensive in that that exists here other people come to west hartford to try to emulate that i don't want anybody to minimize rosina's role rosina from the time i've worked with rosina 13 years ago if there is one person that dictates the way this district is moving it's rosina she is my greatest educational

062partner i've ever had and if you can convince rosina to tell me something you're going to get what you want because i listen to her more than anybody else so to lessen a meeting with rosina in any way is that that you don't understand rosina's role you don't understand what's happening in this district and lastly after four months of this i can tell you one thing and this may sound this is this is defensive and i make it a point to never be defensive but i'm gonna be tonight because every communication that i send out this is different than anywhere else when you reply that reply comes to me directly and i reply to the people that ask questions i reply to the people with their feedback i do it at night i do it

063on saturdays i do it on weekends you have an open direct line to me and believe me people use it and if over the past four months and especially the past month there's one group of people that i need to apologize to they're named tara jack and fallon they're my family because i've spent every waking hour on this planet that we're about to roll out and i can't thank rosina for help her help enough i can't thank paul rick gretchen andy and i need people to remember something about i know everybody wants a survey i know everybody wants feedback i know everybody wants everybody involved in something i was part of a mission statement creation 10 years ago and that mission statement took nine months to create we had three weeks to create a plan

064to re-enter kids into school we had three weeks it unveils on thursday and then we have three weeks because we need to find i get the point of how are you asking me to tell you what i'm going to come back to i get that completely without knowing what's out there except for we can't plan we can't hire without knowing where people are the results of the survey have basically come in now at about 75 percent planned to return to school which is about 5400 people 8.5 percent saying participate at home about 16.5 percent uncertain we need to know basically within the next week and a half and parents will be reaching out to people what their feelings are once they've had the opportunity to go through this plan this plan will go out to

065people on thursday everybody will have a chance to read it it's at the print shop now we have to go through things we have to go through edits as this goes out people have the opportunity to respond and they will be reached out from their principles because we have to populate those schools in those classes so a lot of questions will come up tonight during the presentation and i get that and there's frequently asked questions at the end of the presentation and i think it's important um for people to take time as they go through the document on thursday because it's hard to ingest it all at once all right um so we talked about the design requirements that's actually not one plan it's three distinct plans guiding principles we used four guiding principles that

066i discussed earlier student staff and community safety health experts are parts of our committee community experts department of public health that's our priority and part of that safety structure isn't any one thing this is based on layers that they are layers of what we have to do so that if any one of those things doesn't happen there are other layers and andy's going to talk more about that in his part portion of the presentation equitable educational opportunities for all students through on-site instruction and this goes to the point of people that are very quick to say it's not safe we need just to do virtual instruction and i get it and the numbers may go to a point where that's the answer virtual instruction isn't safe for everybody either we lost a percentage of our

067kids if we are concerned about equity as a driving force in our district as i am that's what i worry most about if we're all virtual because the equity issues there are exacerbated and the kids that are going to struggle the most are the ones we can afford the least to have struggled that much we understand if you surround yourself with people that are able to tell a commute and work from home we can complain about i have to teach my kid too and it's a pain in the neck and i'm not as good as a teacher but you're there there are other kids that their safety net is school that where they go to feel safe is school so this this weighs greatly on me about our decisions third is high quality alternatives for

068remote online learning coupled with family choice regarding on-site school instruction or remote learning there's a lot of places that their plan for online learning is turn a webcam on that's not online learning there will not be a district in the state whose online plan is more robust than west hartford's but to make to get this across to people what this means is that in six weeks we have to build two brand new schools one a k5 school and one a six to 12 school we have to put teachers in place we have to build the classes we have to develop our course offerings we have to develop a schedule to make sure that that online learning experience that a parent is opting into for very good reasons and i get it we need to make

069sure that that's up to the standards of west hartford public schools education and then integration of a full range of services inclusive of social emotional program to support student needs during reintegration and beyond um this is one of our committees people talk about reintegration social emotional needs this is where one of the this isn't a common committee frankly around the state and it's something we're committed to to understanding both the cost if kids are out and the adjustments that are going to be needed when kids come back that's incredibly important a guiding thought there now the committees themselves i want to thank the committees because they're working they're ongoing and um all the committees will be posted with all the names of all the members that they're actually already are posted but they'll be included

070in the plan at the end of the plan uh health and safety is headed by dr morrow curriculum instruction and assessment is headed by paul bycenas social emotional impacts headed by dr gretchen nelson employee workplace safeties headed by rick ledwith and community outreach is headed by rosina haskins when we talk about teacher input these committees um we asked our wha leadership to appoint teachers to these committees um you know i said to teachers the other day in the in an email i know people would like to be surveyed but um that decision about opening or not um that's that's going to be the governor's decision at this point not mine the survey i asked parents about was so that we could populate our classes it wasn't um it was to gain specific information that we

071needed as we move forward basic precautions and this is we're going to start with masks this is a non-negotiable in west hartford okay and i can tell you we have spent money on masks and we have more masks than you would know what to do with we have hall masks if you're loyal to hall in the north end of town we have red masks if you're on the south end of town we ordered 8 000 and we're the only ones to get them so i've actually sublet them out to other districts because dr morrow thought ahead and got them clear masks where you can see my lips because we have american sign language and we have hearing impaired and deaf students that that's going to work the best for with 8 000 of those we

072even have and you won't find me as adorable probably as the children that will wear these but we have children size masks for pre-k kindergarten and um we've got a lot of these coming in in addition to disposable masks for people so we want to make sure kids are safe and masks every day a new study comes out that shows the importance of masks and i will say it directly to people if you don't want your child to wear a mask or you believe your child cannot wear a mask out of convenience and i don't mean convenience they're not going to like it then you need to choose online learning now there are a few exceptions and that that is basically there are special education exceptions and students with needs and even in those cases

073we're working through so i'm asking parents from here through the start of school if your kids are coming back get them used to wearing masks it takes a while there's no doubt about it but i've seen kids at all different ages now that are getting used to it that people that told me my kid will never be able to wear it that are wearing it and during the school day we'll have mass breaks we'll talk about that um but that's a key key component distancing we'll talk about as much as possible one of the key elements of masks is anybody that tells you everybody always be six feet away they're lying to you that will not happen in a school and there could be some setups the reason i don't have any numbers in this

074is because different buildings have different sized rooms and so what's appropriate in one building may not be appropriate in another building and we're going to do the best we can without necessarily being able to change our physical space going outside as much as possible sorry people should at least be pleased that i'm energy conscious um going outside as much as possible is going to be something that is a key part for our teachers um could be for eating outside good beef class outside could just be for a break outside and that's going to be something that we talk about hvac andy's going to talk about we've hired outside people to talk to come and talk about hvac all of these things unfortunately have one big evidence they cost a lot of money this spring i

075fear well before this spring you know one of my roles as superintendent that i have to do is operate within a budget i'm not i'm not operating within that budget that you passed that the board of education that the board of education and then the town council passed we had to hire a consultant to address facilities requirements including hvac we had to order 1500 desks to replace tables because k-2 had historically been tables over the years now a lot of them are being replaced by desks we had to remove extraneous items and rent storage space jandy will talk about we have to rent storage space for the air because our classrooms all those things have to be moved out we don't have the space to put those in and when this is all over those

076things can come back basically all those soft surfaces plexiglas shields for teachers desks we have over 900 teachers that's a lot of plexiglas shields plexiglas shields some for students desks when there's issues with the student some of those in some places tables for outdoor instruction spread around the district um and some tables for uh picnicking outside spread across the district signage um systems controls purchasing of different vents filters during the year something like running our hvac systems longer if we run our hvac systems longer twenty percent maybe you'll talk about that that's three hundred thousand dollars during the year okay um cleaning supplies soap hand sanitizer all of those masks bus monitors the first couple weeks of schools student devices all those devices that we have to make sure kids have then teachers we're still

077getting information from our teachers about how many can't come back and so rick will talk about this but we have a disability problem and we have a hiring their replacement problem or for that number all those costs come back now even if those teachers are teaching in virtual world the problem is it's not like it's a class from one school going to virtual world and that teacher just travels with them it's culled off the top of all the places and remember we can't just make our class sizes 25 in those places and combine them people talk about mental health certainly those needs cafeteria costs substitutes it's easy to say everybody stay home if you don't feel good but somebody's got to be in there to teach the kids and so all of those costs that

078come through teaching assistance to help cover that and then more custodians because of increased demand during the day all these things go forward we're not talking a couple hundred thousand dollars talking a few million dollars during the year and this is really a test for west harbor because people have a lot of demands in west hartford and i get it and i answer those demands all the time and um we've proposed ventilation year after year and people always say air conditioning you've heard of people like in that air conditioner like no it's ventilation well it's been eight years running that i've been proposing that in cip and those are the kind of things that we have to make a decision on a town level and we have to make it at the worst time because

079our economy is also suffering but one thing that i think about sometimes with financial implications of things is we brag about being 110 in per pupil expenditure out of 169 cities of towns and i'm very proud of the efficiency we operate with and the product that we put forward but what i noticed i get these recruitment letters from other districts from other states and the first thing they say is we're first in our state and per pupil expenditures and that's something that's interesting to be bragging about too because west hartford asks for a lot and in the spring we're going to be asking for a significant budget number not just for this year but for next year and if opening schools is as important as we all believe it is doing it safely and if

080we're not going to get money from the federal government which we should and if we're not going to get more money from the state government which is also asking for federal assistance then it's on us and that's just the reality of the situation and i want to move away from the plan itself because i'm excited for you to see the plan because it is so well designed and well thought out and uh the people who wrote the various points but it would be impossible not to talk about the cost of this and so with that i'm going to ask andy to take over the next part and begin talking about the um health and safety measures uh can i just jump in real quick um i think that we've decided it's best to keep all

081of our board questions until the end of the presentation because i feel like some of them might get addressed yeah i think i greatly appreciate yeah i greatly appreciate that because i think a lot of it is reiterative from the different parts and kind of circles back so certainly all right great thanks tom and good uh evening everyone uh before i go ahead and review the operations and the plan i'd like to just give a thank you to a couple of people to to bob palmer to paul edlund mike longo bill phibbs all of our plant uh and services team across the district they have been really working non-stop since may and will continue throughout the summer to get us ready on top of the usual summer work and the construction that we do which

082is still ongoing and so the work that they do is amazing and it's greatly appreciated also eric densie and our security staff have been involved in our daily distribution efforts and are deeply involved and will be continued to be involved in assessing the safety of our plans eric is incredibly knowledgeable can't imagine doing this without his expertise the medical experts the emergency management professionals the teachers and the parents who are giving their time as part of our health and safety advisory their work and their contributions are proving invaluable as we planned for september and so you know to caveat a little bit well a lot of hard work has been done and gone into these plans already there's still a lot of work that we're continuing to do and that will still need to be

083done uh we're going to continue to work closely with the west hartford bloomfield health district with the state and these plans that we're presenting this week will be updated based on new guidance as we receive it from the cdc and or changes to the federal and to the state orders as tom had mentioned there really isn't one magic solution to this instead there's multiple factors that working together minimize the risk of infection and can help us keep our communities safe so i want to talk a little bit about what we're doing from a facility standpoint so bob palmer and i are working with each of our building principals to develop a plan for their school which addresses the cleaning the ventilation the classroom layout and the daily operations and as part of this we have

084a custodial task force that is looking at the custodial changes recommended by the the state department in connecticut and some of the things that they're looking at and doing is is reducing the clutter in the classrooms to create space for social distancing revising our cleaning and our staffing plans to increase cleaning frequency of high-touch surfaces during the school day to conduct thorough cleanings and disinfecting each night we will have designated people as you will see in the schools whose only job will be to go through the schools on a daily basis hitting those high-touch areas and to to make sure that bathrooms and those other areas are sanitized uh during the day as you see from some of the photos there one of the goals that we've been doing is is establishing room for uh

085classes to be able to social distance and so what that means is a lot of materials comes out of our classrooms anything really that we can't easily disinfect any soft surfaces and it's it's tough because we have spent the last 20 years in education creating very nurturing classrooms with reading nooks with beanbag chairs with a plate with small rugs and stuff like that and really all of that has to go uh this year and we have to pull all that out as you can see from the picture above we are busy uh pulling out materials like that things that that we can't easily clean excess furniture and such and we have uh rented a very nice warehouse in town that we will spend the summer moving those materials to so that we can then bring

086them back when it is safe to do so uh our staff will also be added to address frequent uh disinfecting of surfaces door handles i mentioned handrails playground equipment other shared surfaces and materials and where possible based on the recommendations we're also putting in place non-touch uses of items for doors for trash cans we in many places have bottled stations instead of drinking fountains so we don't have to be touching common drinking fountains uh in bathrooms you will see paper towels being used instead of blowers again following the recommendations there's also recommendations in the state plan for ventilation and as part of this we've convened a district hvac task force that's going to look at the department of public health guidance on actions that we should be taking to ensure that our ventilation systems are

087performing to to their ultimate capacity to help ensure the health of all the occupants and so part of this is the task force will review and develop each building uh within the framework that's being provided to us and develop an operational plan to increase fresh air uh ventilation and circulation as part of this one of the recommendations is to con side engineering firms uh and so we have contracted an outside hvac mechanical engineering uh firm that has the expertise the familiarity with some of our ventilation systems to really make sure that our plans make sense to review the plans from an engineering standpoint in addition to that we'll be contracting out with a group that will be dealing with our air balancing to find the optimum fresh air rates and circulation in all of our

088different buildings and another group that is going to be uh addressing our hvac control units to make sure that they're operating in a most in the most efficient way we've also convened a similar task force to comply with the department of public health uh return to service and examination of water systems and the west hartford town engineering division will assist us in this work as needed as i said we converted the majority of our hallway drinking fountains to bottle refilling stations we'll continue to go ahead and do that one of the the biggest issues that we've addressed and will continue to address as bob and i uh work with each of the principals uh last week this week etc is the classroom layout and so looking at the best practices and the guidances that we

089have we're working with each building principle to address social distancing in classrooms in hallways in bathrooms and also importantly at both entry and dismissal times we talk about making sure that we don't have 300 students all gathering in one area at the entry in the dismissal it's very different and it will look very different at a lot of our elementary schools uh social distancing as you can see in the picture will be uh between student desks will be maximized achieving again per the guidance six feet were feasible desks will be facing in the the same direction rather than having students facing each other across the room and as i mentioned before also to best utilize the space we're clearing it of materials that can't be cleared every day and a lot of the excess stuff

090that accumulates in the classroom over the years because again the idea is we want to be able to create as much space as possible to assist with circulation and ventilation classroom layouts in addition to maximizing the space between teachers and students we're also going to have physical barriers such as plexiglas that will be available for teachers for their desks and also will be available these are portable shields that will be available for instructional situations uh where physical distancing is not possible we've also added before a dozen new outdoor tables at each of our schools and teachers and principals are developing plans they will be encouraged to use the outdoor instruction where where conditions in space allow each classroom cohort will also have access to designated restrooms and washing stations as well as hand sanitizers as

091needed we'll talk a little bit about cohorting some of the the daily operation piece that is that is a key uh recommendation from the state and really a recommendation from a lot of different groups is the idea that limiting the number of students and staff if there is a transmission in the idea of cohorting a group of students at the elementary this is pretty pretty easy to understand because students are in a classroom and i may be in a cohort of 15 4th graders in my class with my teacher instead of however having these fourth graders walking throughout the building to various classrooms and and perhaps transmitting unknowingly we are going to have to follow the recommendations to have cohort stay in the same room as much as possible and so what this means at

092the elementary school is that these students the special teachers the art the music the language they're going to come to their classroom wherever possible instead of going to those rooms and we're also going to assign students to seats we're going to limit shared materials uh technology and supplies we've worked very closely with principals worked very closely with with our it group and so that we can are able to make sure that in a fourth grade classroom uh there are there are the designated uh chromebooks if needed so each student has one assigned to them and there's not this passing back and the sharing of the technology as well as art and all those other materials as well we're going to make sure that classrooms have bathrooms assigned to it meals will be served either in

093classrooms outside or in parts of the building cafeteria and otherwise that we can use to make sure that we keep cohorts together and that they're safe while they eat principles uh at the elementary level are developing recess plans with cohorts in mind to minimize exposure and contact and playground equipment and also multiple recess times to break up the instructional day recognizing if students are not going to be walking from room to room to room there will be other other needs and opportunities for them to to get outside to get up and to move at each middle school our team structures allow us to serve as cohorts and allow us to limit student contact and movement throughout the buildings we'll schedule students within their teams as much as possible and likewise at the high schools although

094we don't have strict cohort we will be able to schedule students with the goal of limiting exposure and movements and paul will talk about how the idea of the block schedule at the middle school in high school really cuts down on that traffic and is allows us to make much smaller cohorts and allows us to really control some of that transmission each building will be evaluated uh we will pull in the town engineers if needed to help us with traffic patterns to limit congestion where appropriate hallways and staircases will be designated one way floor markings will indicate traffic flow and at the secondary level we'll work with principals to make sure and maximize really the passing time and if we can stagger that for various parts of the building as needed to best accommodate student

095patterns so one of the the things that tom had talked about as well uh as far as transportation if you can move us over paul put in that yeah or i think you're out of order but that's okay there we go so for transportation um this is really a year that's going to require a lot of flexibility and a lot of understanding uh we're going to now that we've identified and will continue to identify over the next couple of weeks uh parents who will be returning the students will be returning to school we're going to be contacting those parents and surveying them on their intent to use busing as you know we transport approximately 6 000 students in west hartford uh each year and it's important that we really i don't know how to put

096it besides saying make sure that we're we're trying to to keep those bus seats available for kids who absolutely need them and so i i've talking in talking with a lot of parents being a parent myself and talking with a lot of parents i think a lot of parents have decided that yes we want our kids to go back to school but we're going to drop them off at school we're going to um we're going to transport them back and forth and won't be needing the buses and that's fantastic and so we will be asking parents if they can to transport students because we really try are going to try to keep that space available on buses for for kids who have no other way to get to school we're going to employ monitors at

097the start of school on all of our buses to help acclimate help enforce bus expectations and requirements we've gone ahead and already cancelled the open seat program that we usually open up in october which allows if there are vacant seats for you to join onto a bus and take advantage of our transportation it's just not practical at this point when we're trying to do our best to space students out and to maximize the space and the routes that we have where it's appropriate principals will be assigning seats and all students will be wearing face masks during transit both prior to boarding at the bus stop and these must be kept in place no if ands or buts we're going to continue to work closely with our bus providers to make sure that everything is safe

098we will make sure that our bus drivers will follow all of our health screening that we're going to be doing for our own employees we'll make sure that that's reinforced there one of the things that it's important to understand is that the transportation status of what we can operate under isn't determined by us it's determined by the department of public health in the state of connecticut and so i've put up there there's there's three status that they're operating under the the safe the low and the moderate we're currently under the low status which means that we can operate our buses up to full uh up to full capacity with mass requirements and loading and unloading restrictions what this means is we go ahead and we load as students come on the bus they load from

099the back of the bus forward and we dismiss from the front of the bus uh from the front of the bus back again the idea of trying to minimize the number of students that are walking past one another and in close proximity if we go to moderate status it's usually uh we'll have to operate at significantly reduced capacity and the the passenger density is at least halved in this situation because we would be operating under uh under at least the hybrid schedule with modified physical attendance but in that case we actually have to space students out at least six feet apart using alternate alternating diagonal seating and so there's a big challenge for that and there's a big challenge in making sure that we're able to safely uh transport students if we get to that

100point and so again we'll be going out we'll be asking parents to please uh if they can forego transportation and busing this year it would be greatly appreciated uh we'll also be spending time at each school and with each principal to talk about uh the parent drop-off understanding then if we're asking more parents to drive there will be uh more traffic coming into schools and we're going to have to make arrangements for that not only for the dropping off but then for safe entry into the building so that people are not massing in one area and so we'll address that as well with west hartford police and and with all of the all of the related groups for that so talking a little bit about health practice and protocols and i should um caveat and

101say like like any new situation and learning it's going to be important to take time to teach our students and our staff and our parents on the the practices that we're going to require to uh prevent the spread of diseases and that includes the social distancing frequent hand washing the the masks to cover the nose and the mouth are cough etiquette and again the enhanced cleaning and the disinfecting of surfaces and so i know rosina will talk a little bit later that the community outreach advisory is working with principals to create age-appropriate lessons to review these policies and these practices and we're going to have those in place across the board uh across the school system and across the community we're also going to dedicate extensive time beginning of the year as well as frequent

102reminders as the year goes on to review these policies and procedures making sure that we're educating our community on the health practices so that they can make appropriate decisions and comply with our policies and our practices it will have adequate supplies for all of the systems and the guidance in place as tom mentioned we have adequate ppe we have a pipeline to ensure the continued sourcing of ppe of uh of sanitizers of soap of towels of disinfectant of masks and we will continue to monitor the use on a weekly basis to track this usage usage and to make sure that we have the adequate supplies maintained in talking about illnesses and reporting illnesses and monitoring illnesses it's important that families and staff be informed about when to stay home if they're not feeling well and

103may have had exposure to covet we're going to be communicating this information frequently through mailings through emails to websites through building notifications through newsletters and our health and safety advisory along with our nursing staff nursing supervisor is working closely with the west hartford bloomfield health district to develop these guides and and protocols for parents that address a couple of of the following the idea of the self assessment health screening requirements and the checklist for both staff and for students to complete on a daily basis uh prior to to leaving for school to identify symptoms and to identify that they are healthy and are able to attend procedures and for parents and for staff to confidentially inform the school in the district if they are sick or have had no one contact with someone we are

104considering and developing district-wide protocols and materials consistent with both the department of public health and with cdc guidelines that include the signs and symptoms and that address procedures for symptomatic students and staff and the protocols for monitoring this information and possible illness again with the idea of complying not only with the privacy and the health regulations that we have but also the goal of decreasing the spread and contacting contracting the virus so as far as the containment plan that we're required to put together we're in a little bit of a holding pattern with some of the specifics because we've been told that the connecticut department of public health will be providing a tiered system to assist uh leaders and define the decision making approach should there be a partial or a full cancellation but what

105we are doing is working with guidance from the cdc the american academy of pediatrics the connecticut department of public health the west hartford board uh and bloomfield health department and our health and advisory and safety advisory we're considering and finalizing a medical policy that's consistent for the school dismissal of a student or a staff member who exhibits symptoms and this will outline clear medical pathways and decision-making protocols and will communicate when it's safe and approved for a student or staff member to return to school as part of this as part of the requirements each building and we've had to identify a uh an isolation room if a child or a teacher exhibit symptoms of cloven 19 and is deemed to possibly be infected we've identified a room in each building to accommodate these students until

106a parent or guardian can arrive and pick them up again there's very specific requirements for this room uh the use of the room is logged the person's supervising is equipped with uh the proper ppe per the guidance and so forth it's cleaned after each use we've also added a separate air filtration system into each of these rooms so we will be able to if there is a contamination go ahead and clean and change out these filters as well if there's a confirmed case of covet 19 per the current guidance and again this may change as the department of public health and and other groups are are working to so to finalize their guidance if currently if a student a staff member or a visitor has a confirmed diagnosis of coven 19 the superintendent of schools

107notifies the west hartford bloomfield health department director and we assist with their assessment of the exposure and the contact contact tracing and based on their current recommendations and their and their guidance the superintendent will make the decision on the closure of a school building for two to five days to allow for cleaning and disinfect disinfecting per the cdc guidelines on cleaning and disinfecting and the evaluation of the spread via the efforts of the health department's contact tracing in some cases uh based on smaller cohorts this might be limited or contained to a smaller cohort in some cases this might be uh involving a larger uh a larger number of students or even more than one school so again there's lots of information and uh more details in the report that's going to the state later

108this this week i guess to reiterate what's important to remember is that none of these things work on their own but it's the combination of the hand washing of our intense focus on sanitation and building cleaning on mask wearing on physical distancing all of these together will allow us to mitigate the risks and to safely return to our schools thomas if i could before paul one thing i i want to add and because it's really important about these health and safety metrics and this is one of the biggest questions that we have what happens if somebody gets sick what happens if somebody gets a fever jesus one thing people have to know people will get a fever people will get sick on a given day at our small schools there are 20 to 30 nurse

109visits a day okay and so we know that early on that's going to lead to concern from people but it just is what happens and they're going to be cases where we say well you need to stay out until there's a test or something else depending on what those symptoms manifest themselves as but one of the other things that we need to stress with parents parents are going to want to know who is that kid we will not and cannot by law share the name of any child any staff member or anybody else that tests positive for any disease just as just as has been our practice in the past we can't do that without somebody's permission and so this is really important to understand that we'll notify people as we always do we'll share

110the information with people but we won't be specific about things because we can't by law that that's the way we have to operate in school paulie great good evening everyone paul vicinis uh and i'm going to talk about school operations and academics i'll go through the piece on what it looks like at the elementary school secondary and then dr nelson is going to talk and i'll and i'll chime in a little bit on special populations we'll also be joined by dr haskins and together they'll talk about social emotional learning which is a component of our in-school instructional planning we'll talk about community outreach and we'll wrap this up with professional development before we turn it over to rick but before i begin my piece i just wanted to also give a thanks to our uh

111toward west hartford education association teresa mcewen specifically our union president and all of the teachers the many many teachers that have worked not only on my committee but on all the committees that have really given voice to teacher perspectives and i'll also go back and i and i'd like to say you know we had some great students uh speaking earlier tonight and i just want everyone listening to know that the meetings that we sat in on at the school level and the surveys that we did have have definitely given voice to our online plans in terms of what worked for students so i do appreciate that input and i just want to make sure that folks are well informed on the process in terms of the return to school you just heard uh very very

112specifically the comprehensive measures that andy morrow and our entire school health and safety committee have looked at with the efforts and support of health officials so i'm not going to necessarily repeat that information but i'll just talk about the additive pieces that we have we do anticipate uh more than ever smaller class sizes we know that so that physical distances is important we're also aware that there is a significant percentage of our population who are making the choice not to return to school whether that be for um you know for medical reasons personal reasons or otherwise we respect that choice and and that you know the state mandates that but it's important to us as a community even if the state didn't that we were able to enable that choice so as we subtract out

113those folks that won't be returning and as we do our outreach to those who have yet to decide uh it's clear to us that we will be able to achieve smaller class sizes and that we will arrange those in as andy mentioned in classroom assignments at the elementary level which will represent a stable cohort it's not to say you know we recognize kids go home it's not to say that school is the only cohort and that everyone's moving in together there are going to be others but our job in the school and our planning is to find the measures by which we can reduce those numbers of transitions and so one way that happens naturally at the elementary is in the classroom assignment the second way is to bring the specials the arts instruction music

114library media world language into the classroom into the grade level teachers classroom to the greatest extent possible we'll do that we'll at the same time reduce shared materials uh by having devices whether they're computer devices whether they're art supplies assigned directly to a student where feasible so they're not doing a lot of sharing it also cut down on the necessary cleaning and sanitation of shared equipment that doesn't necessarily mean if i'm going to school that every computer will necessarily go home it just means that you know i may have computer 7 and i'm the only student in in mrs jones room to use computer 7. for library media we may do library on a cart we can we can look at things like a menu system where i come in and i've described some books

115and you kind of choose what you'd like and then i'm able to bring that book to you as opposed to uh students in large numbers going to a common space and kind of applying and touching all the materials there again reducing our need for the cleaning protocols we will do you know the one thing i'll say i won't repeat what andy said but i will mention that we will do instruction with our students on what our proper hand washing procedures what's the length of time how do you need to do it what's the appropriate wearing of a mask how do we make sure that we're wearing it correctly and we'll do you know make sure that students understand what six feet of distance or what appropriate physical distancing looks like in in those settings last

116thing i do want to mention because it has come up from teachers in terms of finding dedicated time for our classroom teachers for their planning we will have workspaces that are dedicated outside the classroom so that when the specials area teachers are coming in our grade level teachers will have a place to go where their materials are and they'll be able to plan and make all of those take all those appropriate actions that they would normally do in their classroom at the middle in high school very similar again we will have smaller class sizes and in terms of cohortings obviously the middle school teams by themselves represent a stable cohort they break a grade level down by at least a third and we are planning to institute a block schedule at both middle school and

117the high school in order to reduce the number of transitions that students have that's going to serve a number of different purposes it's going to it's going to reduce hallway traffic and the potential for any exposure in that regard it's also going to reduce in terms of number of classroom interactions that a single student has should there be anyone who is positive anyone any potential transmission it's going to reduce the number of number of transitions that students have to eliminate or at least reduce risk excuse me in that regard our block schedule i'll show you a picture of that in a in a moment in terms of what it looks like but essentially we go from an eight period day to four periods a day with an increased time and i'll talk a little bit

118more about it on the next slide again we'll utilize the same procedures to reduce materials through the assignment of devices as necessary but at the middle and high school levels we'll also look at a bring your own device um opportunity where students if they have one from home can bring that in and utilize that right within the classroom so that they're so that they have their own equipment that they're maintaining themselves that they're cleaning themselves and that's not definitely not being utilized by other folks a picture of the schedule of what a schedule could look like this isn't the exact schedule uh down by the minute but it's pretty darn close in terms of what a schedule may look like at a high school the middle school schedule looks very very parallel we would be

119dividing the day into an a b rotation so every other day you'll have either your odd periods or even periods essentially four periods of the day um there will be a 30 minute lunch dedicated each day at the high school we would plan for a weekly community or advisory type period where we have already planned for not only our social emotional learning but how we're going to attend to our anti-racism education at the middle school we would intend for that advisory type period to be daily we're increasing passing time as i think dr morrow mentioned so that we could potentially stagger a dismissal of classes by grade level or by area of the building to ensure that again the fewest number of students are in contained spaces like the hallway at one time we are

120going to preserve at the high school the lab period connected to our science classes so there will be additional time built into the school week for labs that's going to happen on a four-day rotation so as you look across the monday tuesday wednesday thursday of this week you see that there's period four lab on tuesday or thursday so the students would have lab on one of those four days in that period and on the opposing day they would either have their pe class or they would potentially have a study hall we would definitely be looking at our schedule to try to make to maximize the number of times if a student was assigned a study hall that that happened either at the beginning of the day or at the end of the day so that

121we could also maximize early dismissal or late arrival for any student and we would remove restrictions where that would not only be available to upperclassmen but we can make that available to all students again our middle school schedule will look very very similar with the with the exception of an advisory period daily um in addition to this we are offering as we mentioned remote instruction for any and all students at a parent request at the elementary level uh you know at all of our levels it would it would look similar in terms of the fact that it's going to be delivered online using uh whether that's google classroom or whether that's seesaw or classroom dojo and we have some other features that are similar in terms of some of our programs such as elementary dream

122box or lexia for ongoing daily practice but the big difference will be we're planning for it to be much more synchronous meaning that there would be direct instruction by teachers through video conference on google meets you would expect at the elementary level between 90 and 120 minutes per day that's going to vary based on the age of students and obviously the developmental appropriateness for screen time and their ability to attend and focus uh on a computer for shorter or longer periods uh we would also post in those learning platforms asynchronous learning we'd post you know an independent reading assignment we'd post uh writing assignments potentially some things to do for exploration um and we would stagger and you'll see this in the next slide uh an arts rotation through the schedule daily so what a

123sample group uh could look like at the elementary level and group sizes at the elementary when they're online would be would be smaller they'd be between four and six students based on uh the size of the cohort and based on the age of the kids making them smaller at the younger grades students that 90 to 120 minutes would be broken out potentially as you see here a morning meeting time some longer blocks of instruction on math and literacy and again an arts rotation that would vary by day cycling our world language our music our art our pe and our library media throughout at the secondary level uh basically kind of the same idea only the blocks of instruction would be slightly longer again we would be utilizing a block schedule so students would only have

124to attend to four periods per day uh in terms of the feedback that students gave us for our remote instruction we would plan for a slightly later start at 8 30 you'll see that in a moment again we would hang a lot of the items in that google classroom but we'd provide for through video conferencing direct instruction daily uh in those classes we have the ability to do individual or small group breakouts during our live instruction and we'd also provide time for potentially we'd talk to teachers if we're doing say for instance in the sample schedule an hour we'd look for hey in the last 15 minutes that class if we need to provide some right then one-on-one support or small group support we could do that or some independent practice but we'd be asking

125our teachers to plan for a minimum of 45 and as much as 60 minutes of direct instruction again we'd look for whether that's a daily or a weekly advisory based on middle or high school we'd again be providing the same structure of a lab period so an additional period for science on that same four day rotation and as you can see at the bottom we would build in some kind of office hour times for teachers for guaranteed opportunities for academic support the biggest thing that i can mention on our online platforms especially at the high school is the notion that we're simply not going to be able to offer all of the wide dramatically wide variety of courses that we're able to offer during in-school attendance some of our classes we just can't offer for

126logistical reasons such as automotive technology manufacturing and woodworking things of things such as that and then certain courses that might be a low incidence a greek language or certain courses that are singletons you know it's just unlikely that we're going to have the number of students necessary in order to have a full cohort doing that so those are the big models that will be running both in the fall and the intent would be should we have the need to bring the entire district online and there were a large scale shutdown we would move the entire district over to the remote learning plan that you just saw there is also the potential for a hybrid should the conditions spike locally and the governor of the department of public health say that they wanted us to reduce

127the number of students attending by 50 percent we would we would move to a hybrid model where essentially we would have 50 percent of the school attending in person for a one week period and fifty percent of the school attending online for that same one week period and then alternate those groups uh would be intentionally split based on kind of balancing the class between different personalities and different needs and what our goal would be is it's not that you have like a week out of school a week off for school the goal would be that we would maintain continuous progress in the curriculum regardless of whether you were home or in school in order to do that we would need to make sure that the instruction and the activities were planned as if it was

128like an online environment we'd need to make sure that teachers were you know in their daily lesson planning they're planning as if it's online and they have the benefit of kids coming in for check-ins but we also need to build in time for students to teachers to be able to attend to their students that are home and not able to come in so what that could look like is something something like this where we go to an early release wednesday type schedule on all days of the week shrinking our classes down to about an hour for direct you know for in-person instruction with a grab-and-go lunch common across somewhere near say 11 30 to 12 o'clock and then the last two hours of that school day teachers would have the opportunity to engage those students

129at home in small groups for roughly a half hour period we'd still be able to do what some other school districts are doing you know turn the camera on uh when we were doing the in-class instruction but as tom mentioned you know we really don't think that simply doing that um suffices in terms of the students ability to necessarily engage in all the activities to be able to ask questions to be able to see and hear everything that's happening through a camera lens so we feel it's important to have that ability for the teachers to be able to connect with them a little bit more personally the last thing uh definitely not the last thing but an important thing worth mentioning in this hybrid plan is that we would also attend to special populations our

130intensive academic program intensive behavioral programs perhaps our reach program and some others to where they're already a small footprint in the school small numbers of students and we're breaking up the class in half and having them stay home a week and come in a week would be too disruptive relative to their very specific needs and as evidenced by the very specialized programs that they're in and so in those cases we would look to have those students attend regularly in the event that we were in a hybrid and that would have a minimal impact on the total footprint in the school at any given time so those are kind of the big picture ideas i'm going to turn it over to dr nelson and talk to us about special populations in special education specifically just before

131gretchen starts paul um i do just want to say specifically um that hybrid plan you won't see anywhere else i mean you'll see aspects of it the a b week but um when the state needs to look at scheduling paul vicenz does lose call just as rosine is a national expert um paul bystine has no schedules like nobody i've ever met and that creation of that hybrid plan is phenomenal especially the lunch at the end and kids coming in because it's really a re-centering of how you think of hybrid hybrid people are thinking of oh you get some of the kids some of the time and then the others they're offline that week instead you've got to think of it we're always teaching our kids online in one way but we get the opportunity to

132have kids in half the time too so it's kind of a re-centering and rethinking if we do end up in a hybrid situation i feel very confident in that plan so thanks now gretchen sorry thank you tom thank you paul and for everyone that went before me because it really helps make my job a little bit easier that they've explained all of the systems that are in place and in terms of developing the plan for the students who have an iep or a 504 plan i really turned to the teachers that work to the plan in the spring for their feedback as well as those teachers that are continuing to provide extended school year instruction over the summer we're about to finish that program this week and then we've also started bringing students in for

133one-on-one assessments so we have done some in-person programming already and we've learned from that we're also looking to offer a small very small extended orientation program for highly at-risk students who have not been able to access as successfully as we would like their individualized education plans for the month of august so or two weeks in august so uh so i have learned a lot from these processes as we've been going on and in special ed we are prepared to place the safety of students and staff as our primary concern as we look to reopen and this has driven much of our planning so while our responsibilities under idea and the ada 504 have not been absolved federal law does provide some flexibility for how we meet the needs of students and this is important as

134we consider safety requirements as outlined by the state of connecticut so we will look to explore and to partner with families on accommodations that will be necessary to make sure that our students have access to a free inappropriate public education the majority of our students with ieps and 504 plans will be able to continue to receive their services in school while observing safety measures and procedures their ieps and 504s will be implemented and their teachers will be working to make sure they can access their education but we acknowledge that there is a subset of special education and 504 students that will require a much more individualized and intensive training program to help them learn to follow the guidelines and requirements and to engage in a positive school experience these are also the students who needed

135the most support to access online education and are in need of our intensive and individualized support in school whenever possible so we are prepared to provide systematic and direct training for students who need this extra support while this is happening we will ensure that students and staff are safe through mitigating materials and procedures an example of some of the accommodations that we will be able to implement through very thoughtful and careful scheduling reduce class sizes for specialized instruction and related services strategic scheduling of adults to minimize exposure to multiple cohorts plexiglas and static partitions for staff and students face shields gowns gloves bins for individualized materials and very importantly very specific protocols for safety measures these protocol calls are being developed with guidance from the state to identify appropriate procedures for mitigating risk and safety

136for educational activities per the iep and required exemptions according to our state guidance this could include exemptions for specific academic interventions as required by the iep communication interventions otp services and working with students who may need support to stay safe staff will receive training on these protocols in the use of ppe prior to the start of school through virtual professional development sessions and video training materials additional guidance from the state department of education is expected at the end of the week or next week with an in-person program students will continue to receive iep and 504 services with some modifications to the structure of the cohort and block schedule model students in the online plan will continue to receive their iep and 504 services with increases in synchronous specialized instruction and related services directly related to

137their iep should we be required to move to a hybrid plan qualifying students will continue to receive full in person programming criteria for qualifying would depend on a student's specific needs around regression data a student's ability to independently access services and the level of in-school supports that they currently receive in a meeting today with the state division director of special education brian klimkowitz we learned that more specific guidance regarding essential topics including the definition of high needs students and clearly defined guidance around meeting safety with safety requirements pre-k guidance and distance learning requirements timelines and assessments is forthcoming i expect to make adjustments to the details of my plan as new information is provided and adjustments to the special education plan will be posted on our website as soon as they're available okay and that's

138all i have thank you so on to the next i have this slide as well so i had the pleasure of leading the social and emotional impact committee and i want to thank all of the committee members for their participation it was i think a very positive experience we met several times as a large group and then have continued to meet as small groups and will continue to meet through the summer and probably into the start of the year so these groups of stakeholders um the first question i asked them was who's missing who needs to be at the table and so we made sure that we had representation from multiple stakeholder groups and the folks that participated provided observations and recommendations to our reopening supportive students and families regarding their emotional health and well-being

139acknowledging that students have been impacted by kovid and the school closure along with racial trauma each student's impact experience is unique and we must prepare to meet all students where they are and support forward momentum so with that as our charge the stakeholders in this group included a board of ed member ari thank you for participating for joining us school administrators all at all three levels teachers and parents we had members of the edc and the edi join our committee and provide valuable input on social and emotional impact with an equity lens additionally i share information and progress with our director of equity advancement rosina almost daily and she brings uh concerns and questions from her committee back to the social and emotional impact committee so in that we have been collaborating from day one

140input from all of the stakeholders and both of these groups have contributed to the plan the social and emotional impact team has provided recommendations for an expanded orientation which includes selected in-person or virtual and written communications embedded social and emotional learning instruction within various structures pre-k through post-secondary enhanced classroom management with an emphasis on community building a review of discipline procedures to focus on restorative contact concepts trauma stress and informed practices enhanced behavioral and mental health support practices strengthened parent school communication and collaboration and professional development opportunities for both staff and families our blueprint outlines the recommendations but the real work is still happening as the elementary and secondary teams are currently developing action plans and resources our committee members continue to work on these action plans and they will do so until school starts

141it is our goal to facilitate equitable access for all students by addressing their unique circumstances and their unique needs all right thank you good evening and any viewing public still tuned in i have the privilege tonight to report on the work of the community outreach advisory and i just can't say it enough that i'm appreciative to have the benefit of this diverse highly skilled and brilliant think tank we have truly focused our discussions and attention on full safe and equitable participation whether students are returning to our brick and mortar physical spaces or to the virtual environment and our discussions truly have been strategic and planning and showing concern and care for the underserved underrepresented and marginalized students and families um so i do i want to pause just for a moment because i do want

142to acknowledge the public comments because at the june board meeting we heard similar public comments and i think that on that evening i must have looked so worn and wary because at least that's what my relatives who watch from west hartford north carolina told me but i hope that if they've tuned in this evening and really listen to the public comments i hope that they could see in my face just a growing sense of relief and empowerment as i listen to the parents and in particular the student voices so you know i want to say that i am grateful for um this incredible groundswell of public support for our work and demand for real deep and sustainable change if we were celebrating right now that just would be right so it does have me thinking

143though about how our discussions and these advisories and the energy around reopening schools are and can still be opportunities for all of us to position ourselves and this work for safe and equitable participation and i agree that it can't be the work of like one black woman and it hasn't been but as a leader in this work i am charged with you know really building the capacity for this for this um work to dismantle racist oppressive and unjust systems and in what i think are courageous and anti-racist ways for it to be effective so i needed to just like get that off my mind but one more thing before i transition to my report i do want to say something to tom because i can't get up and walk across the room right now but

144and respectfully as my leader my colleague my mentor my friend i don't feel defensive or offended because a group of parent group that i met with might have felt that a meeting with me was insufficient i do think that most people regard you as i do um as a brave and bold change agent for what's ethically and morally right for kids and families and honestly if i didn't work next door with you in the same suite i'd be banging on your door to meet with you because you give us hope um more so i hope you hear that and know that and i say to all the parents and students that um thank you just for tuning in and for speaking up instead of tuning out and being silent so i want to share how

145we have organized our work on the community outreach advisory i'm going to try not to repeat too much of what others have already said because there really is great overlap among the advisories we have organized our efforts and planning into two bodies of work the first involves a multi-phase process of raising equity focused inquiries that touch across all of the advisories all the program areas of school operations and health and safety provisions we've used live and shared a live and shared kind of coded system for directing our inquiries to the appropriate sister or sibling advisories gretchen in particular has been so gracious in receiving you know our questions and our requests and recommendations and just you know responding and reporting back on the status of those inquiries amongst ourselves and then our second charge involves

146more strategic planning to ensure deep and wide reach to primary stakeholders being our students and their families and then the secondary stakeholder groups being our community partners so on the next two slides i will share some of the responses that we have received actions taken and measures in place as part of our first change and i'll also share specifics of our strategic outreach communication plan so throughout the reopening schools process the community outreach advisory has really focused on raising really challenging and productive questions they've rendered very sound cautions and they've signaled thoughtful implications and have offered practical recommendations to support and inform the work of all of our committees and as gretchen said with an equity lens and so safety remains our number one priority above everything else and so we don't we know that

147we don't need brain research to tell us that students just cannot learn unless they feel safe connected in a sense of belonging it's just unhealthy to always live in a constant state of fight or flight so and for our educators too we know that so it's important for me to reiterate that we know fully well it is imperative that we give attention not only to the traumas of this present global health crisis but also close and ongoing attention to dismantling multiple forms of racism oppression human injustice and trauma of these acts as well as the systems which they breathe and we know that parents and caregivers they need our assurances and partnerships with our schools that facilitate measures keep our students safe so with that said we have our advisory we have weighed in on

148proactive and responsive measures for positive safe and healthy school climates so one part of that involves is gretchen talked about the social emotional learning we couple that with anti-bias anti-racist and social justice education as paul referred to and across all grade levels building levels and in various classroom and school-wide community settings and more explicitly this teaching involves like really empowering students and showing them how to see and name and challenge all forms of racism discrimination and oppression and injustice and then we assure ensure alignment with our recently released commitment to equity and racism and uh you know we make some promises as gigi berlin mentioned and we are going to show we're going to act accordingly um and so this what this is one way another important component of our safe school climate measures include

149reviewing our expectations and reinforcing policies on prohibition against discrimination and bullying no for students to know where to go for help when behaviors are of concern arise are really important considerations for our for the members of our advisories so here's what parents and students can expect as we do annually during the first week of school and we'll do it throughout the year as andy mentioned teachers and administrators will conduct a review of discipline procedures and that will include reporting protocols whether it's in school or online whether it's direct or anonymous reporting we want to talk this year more about investigation like how we really take reports seriously because it's really important for students to feel like they've been heard and it's being addressed and then our responsive actions are not limited to restorative and collaborative

150student-focused problem-solving and the other part of that is that we will review our school support resources and there are plenty but you know we want to make sure that students know where to go how to access them how to seek help for themselves or for others how to um access those support resources and like when to do it like don't wait um always feel like there's someone there for you and we have provided our sibling advisories input on orientation events transition events that will allow you know students who are transitioning to new grade levels in new buildings and it allows them to meet new teachers and review the grade level expectations and they'll be virtual alive or pre-recorded but it also allows for the introduction of new faces without mass so people can really see

151each other and we are encouraged to know from our other advisories that there will be opportunities for parents to share experiences and concerns and goals for their children in the upcoming year we heard and we were heard in one of our recommendations and that was to expand the parent pd offerings that we piloted in the spring at the secondary level we paused because we thought well we're talking about google meet and um we don't know that we realize not every parent knows what that is or how to use it how to access it how does this work turning the camera on and off and muting and so we paused to have a parent um pd session on that and so we saw some benefits of that so we really want to expand that and we've

152got lots of interest across the advisories to do that the next item i want to talk about is the remote learning um in addition to the social emotional mental health uh supports that gretchen and her team of outline we must ensure that students have essential technologies and material so that they can really be a part of a positive and productive learning environment a learning culture when they're home but we do have assurances by our i.t department and jared moore and rit director is on our advisory as well we are well equipped to distribute technology and provide free wi-fi access to families with need more seamlessly than we did back in march and april so deployment of chromebooks and ipads and mobile hotspots and other devices will be publicized and available to families and when we

153are examining or have been examining our remote learning plans we've we've reflected on the various home dynamics and circumstances that play significant roles in the efficacy of student learning so we are using what we learned from the spring school closure to suggest solutions and resources that are flexible and accommodate differences in learning and variations within family households um one other thing we found what we found to be interesting is how parent and teacher conferences used to be constrained by time and location and transportation and it's you know it's a wonder now how this virtual platform we've had for quite some time um has largely removed those barriers and constraints that in person conferences once presented so we are reminded um to think about better utilization of our current resources like powerschool and saw and class

154dojo reminded support and list goes on and on and finally like while we don't have many of us don't have landlines anymore i don't but the phone is still hanging on the wall um traditional phone calls in email it's still important though personalization is just really important so those are just a few family supports um you know offering that help desk for support once when families need it with technology pieces and um again our parent caregiver virtual workshops and information sessions will be designed and offered on various topics of need and interest we are going to do our very best to um publicize one-stop shopping kinds of resources for like crisis services mental health healthcare legal grief loss food insecurity i mean the list is long but we want to really access some of our

155community members who can help us find and identify specialized services that support our bipart communities so we want to we want to access that rosina this might be a good time to also talk about the additions in your department i am okay i'm just going to do nutrition services and which is the last one on this page um and i will i'm going to transition to that because my my title has been used differently twice tonight but finally just in this section i do want to discuss nutrition services because we 27 of our students meet the eligibility criteria for free and reduced price lunch and our committee was very concerned about like ensuring that our district follow all the eligibility and operational requirements of the federal state nutrition program guidelines we have tim perzinski our

156nutrition services director on our advisory so all students that receive in-person instruction will have the option to have meals provided to them during the school day or they can bring their own bag meals and snacks and we will continue to provide fresh and shelf-stable hot and cold meals so students who are regular paying students will be provided the option to purchase meals and students who are enrolled in the free and reduced lunch program will receive meals at no cost or reduced cost so on the next slide i do want to talk about the ways that we aim to share this information all of this information with our students parents caregivers and family members so we recognize that this year will not be a smooth or easy one but we can i'm confident we can get

157through it if we're united in our aim for full safe and equitable participation so one community one year is a theme that our committee selected for reopening schools 2020 and the one community conveys a message of unity and lifting each other up and one year recognizes that there will be challenges and sacrifices that we all have to make but i want to quote one of our parent partners trisha pitter who spoke earlier in her public comment vacant parent and she she so eloquently framed our theme she says this will be a year of healing recovery and reimagining that will lead to sustainable change for the well-being and equity of our community so if you think um that if you think of it as one year 2021 it seems manageable it's more impactful to think of

158the lasting change that our collective efforts can produce over the course of the year our message content is um it's simple it's it's grounded in full safe and equitable measures for participation but there are key messages that we want to reach we want to reach all community members like the health and safety rationale about like well why do we have to wear a face mask and the health and safety um how to like how to put it the correct way to wear it and handle it and then equally important the positive and safe school climate measures that gretchen and i both mentioned earlier we want to we've identified our primary audience being our parents and our students but we want to think outside of our town line we want to ensure that [Music] our students

159west harbor public school students who reside in hartford and attend our schools through the open choice school integration program are included i mean they make significant sacrifices to enrich our schools and to be enriched by our schools similarly our half-day magnet students who travel to other towns for their education they need to be in the know too now they're navigating between you know two districts and we've been really trying hard to acknowledge the loudest voices but also center ourselves to seek out those um who are underrepresented underserved and marginalized so our committee does meet live and asynchronously we have a shared drive as i mentioned to share recommendations that like get us out of bed in the middle of the night or keep us up or make us lose sleep or jump out of bed

160in the morning but we can write that down or send it somewhere and other people can grapple with it until we meet again and we do have community members who bring voices to the table of um those who aren't present in our meetings like last the other day i heard from a clergy on behalf of working in single parents or we have someone in who's an early learning provider and she spoke on behalf of adult education learning learners and i was just in that role last year i hadn't really considered that um our esl adult learners from school age to children for whom we present a so we're fortunate to have you know those contributions on our advisory and um finally for this communication piece we have designed this is what i'm most excited about

161we've designed our outreach and communication strategy around multimedia multilingual multimodal interactive like you can read it you can watch it you can listen to it you can engage in it we are we are committed to expanding our reach to the bipark communities and hearing their voices and elevating their visibility in this too like i said this is not the end and we're going to need all hands on deck and we have embedded in one of our later phases sometime for reflection and and assessment what's working what's not what we can do different and then so next week our principals are going to be kicking off our one community one year school-based community engagement campaign and we want everyone to see themselves in our community in the reopening schools process we're going to make it fun

162make it engaging but make it meaningful and support our effort and aim for full equitable and safe participation we recently released our um anti-racism equity and anti-racism statement and we're grounding this work in that so i think we're gonna okay before we cycle to paul i want to come back to um what tom wants me to talk about so we've heard my title or heard me referred to as director of equity advancement and so there are going to be some changes in our structures to better support our commitment for example my office title and my office and my title will be office of equity advancement and director of equity advancement director of diversity advancement it had its right time and its place and its purpose and now we really need to shift and deepen our

163focus language matters but in addition i'm also excited that you know we know that we there's so much work to do and and with our family school partnership so we've gained you know some really you heard them say earlier we gained some nice synergy in the winter before we were handed this pandemic but i'm happy to announce that joining me to focus more intentionally on family school partnerships is dr scott rashford as an educator on special assignment for equity advancement and scott rashford is coming to us from kingfield middle school as a school psychologist well known and respected but he has served effectively in other leadership roles in our district and outside of our district he's come back home he's really um he's really focused and energized around this work and he brings to our

164redefined anti-racist structure for equity diversity and full inclusion and extensive knowledge and experience relevant to family and school community partnerships so he has served for the last two years on our edc family and community engagement subcommittee as a chair and he's led our district through the welcoming schools assessment process along other family partnership processes and activities at kp for later next month or earlier next month dr rashford and i will be reaching out to all of the parent and community groups that have supported our work i've developed a contact list there are 10 of those groups that we talk regularly um but they support and we want to listen we want to work with them we want to listen to learn and really engage in some strategies to strengthen our partnership to set some goals

165for deep change and we are talking about you know a a process and a framework for transparency and accountability to shape our new structure and our new mission so my clothes were saying that i i am committed um and i'm in this all the way i'll give it to you rick thanks rosina hold on not so fast rick go ahead sorry one quick one and and i'll just take one minute uh hard to follow rosina but um you know it was nice to hear uh one of the parents who spoke earlier talk about you know the importance of the work that rosina leads for us as a district and you know wouldn't it be great if it were integrated into the curriculum and to into our systems and i just want to point out you

166know i i hope you heard how yes of course um and and that is the work that we do and it it relates to the slide on professional development but um you know when you hear about all that you hear about how that work will intertwine with specialized programming with the curriculum with classroom management with behavioral policies with student and staff conversations with parental and community conversations you know there's a dramatic need for ongoing professional learning tom already mentioned the fall teacher work days so i won't reiterate that there's also summer opportunities that we've been working on that touch not only on this work and our planning as you heard gretchen say you know some curriculum writing that relates even to our social emotional learning that's happening but we do have teachers involved in ongoing

167summer professional learning they're volunteering their time we have five full days of teacher workshops at the beginning of the year to bring them up to speed not only on this anti-racism which is dramatic enough the social emotional learning the pieces that you heard relative to structured classroom activities how it interplays with their classroom management how it interplays with proactive behavior management and the various clinical supports we have technology integration that we're working on safety protocols that you heard that we need to educate our teachers about and how to educate students about we have block scheduling which will be new how to how to adjust your pedagogy and your teaching style in an environment of physical distancing and and what those curriculum revisions are in order to afford the time for these new pieces all of

168that will be part of our ongoing professional development on csi wednesdays and we're we're dramatically thankful for the support of the board to be able to do that because with the volume of priorities uh that we have in front of us that that structure that west hartford is known for and unique for with professional learning um is is just pivotal to our success so uh with that i'll turn it to rick thanks paul um and good evening everyone as we have learned tonight we know that as of now anyways a majority of our students will be in school with a smaller percentage uh opting for our online model this of course creates a challenge from a staffing point as tom indicated when he in his opening if for example we need 25 teachers to teach

169online we're going to need 25 teachers to replace them in the classroom first our strategy to fill the online teaching spots will be to utilize our current teachers who've requested to teach online over the last couple of weeks we've talked with about 50 staff members who've expressed concerns about returning we will make every effort to grant requests from faculty and staff to work or teach remotely or for other reasonable accommodations in light of this pandemic we're very mindful that individual circumstances make some individuals more vulnerable than others to the effects of this disease and as always employees entitled to reasonable accommodations under the ada will receive them beyond that we're going to prior prioritize requests from those who are at higher risk for severe illness as well as anyone with a household member at higher

170risk outside of those categories we'll make every effort to grant reasonable modification requests for example we do have staff who may not have an underlying health condition but they're simply not comfortable working in this environment if there's not an online option available for them we'll grant these individuals a leave of absence now ideally the number of staff requesting accommodations will match the number of online teaching teaching assignments that we have if that doesn't happen we will work very closely with the whea to prioritize these requests now knowing we need to hire ideally most likely a couple dozen new teachers we posted several positions in anticipation of these openings with the board's approval of delaying the first day of school to september 8th thank you by the way we now have six and a half weeks

171to hire and onboard these teachers not ideal but we have the leadership team and the teachers to help us with that and we know that we will have every classroom fully staffed for the first day of school that's where we are now the connecticut state department of education has provided districts with a tremendous amount of flexibility in the event that we're struggling to find teachers by amending their guidelines for hiring long-term substitutes and for teachers in shortage areas like bilingual education special education math and science so that will be helpful if we've run into any issues there another area that the connecticut state department of bed has helped with is allowing districts to hire daily substitutes without an undergraduate degree so we're going to be recruiting college students who are majoring in education or who

172have experience significant significant experience working with students to supplement our current substitute pool in anticipation of increased staff absences we've also started hiring additional teaching assistants for each building and their roles in each of our buildings will be to serve as daily substitutes this will also help to have the same team in the building every day and not rely solely on daily substitutes who may be moving from school to school on a daily basis though we know that will happen to a certain degree based on our daily absence rate so while we're talking about absences if we can just turn to the next slide paul if you're there you go now one of the things andy summarized in the work of his committee is we will be asking employees to monitor their own health every

173day by reviewing a checklist with a series of a dozen or so health related questions if we answer yes to any question we have to stay home period we will stress this before the school year starts and every day we are in school this plan that we're talking about this evening our plan only works if we continuously monitor our own health then stay home when we're not feeling well particularly for displaying any any of the symptoms associated with the covet our employee workplace safety committee is presently working on a coveted 19 lead policy that will provide our staff with the greatest degree of flexibility while also adhering to the eeoc and ada we do not want people who do not have accumulated sick leave balances to come to work if they're not sick want them

174to stay home get well and our policy allows them to do that without worrying about sick leave time so for example this question came up earlier someone contracts covid or they've been exposed to covid they will quarantine at home for 14 days and that time will be covered under the family first corona by coronavirus rights act our employee uh workplace safety committee is also working on uh safe workplace policy which addresses the safest and cleanest work environment for our employees to work in it will address the use of ppe and how to clean uh ppe it'll address social and physical distancing our committee is also working on a travel policy which addresses the mandatory quarantine required for individuals who travel to one of the 31 states that increased from 22 to 31 today under governor

175lamont's executive order so as folks know if a resident or an employee most importantly travels to one of these states they're required to quarantine for 14 days we will be monitoring this and we will be enforcing this order in terms of training uh everything we've discussed tonight talk paul talked a lot about the pd but certainly from a safety standpoint that will be rolled into all of our professional development and that goes beyond words in this presentation or policy those first few days of this school year thank you again will allow us to address all of the pd that's a related to uh training and safety and health and wellness when do i stay home how do i properly wear a mask and clean a mask how do i safely inappropriate wash appropriately wash my

176hands how do i safely remove and clean my gloves so all of those things and everything else that's been mentioned tonight will be addressed in our training and that will occur during that first week of the school year certainly and then as we're onboarding folks throughout the school year because that will happen inevitably they will be brought into that training as well and that includes all of our daily subs who will be working in our buildings every day so in closing out my portion of the presentation uh i think amanda said this a lot more eloquently than i can at the beginning of the presentation tonight we've talked a lot about student social emotional and well-built well-being rosina gretchen paul have all touched on that but i wanted to take a moment to remind our

177staff these are stressful times for everyone and as adults we need to take care of ourselves most importantly and with the help of our eap which is uh done through the lexington group we're going to be providing our employees with strategies and programming that we can implement to make sure we're taking care of ourselves every single day so that we're in a position to help our students day in and day out and provide that most positive uh as possible of a school and a classroom culture for our kids to learn in so um that wraps up my piece i don't know tom i'll turn it back to you for any closing comments thanks yeah i am you know we'll open it up to questions now and um but before i do i hope you sense

178because i like you're my leadership staff not to ever be defensive that it's our enemy and i hope you see why i was defensive not just because of the work itself but the people that did it and um like i said three weeks this this was presented over two hours there's about 50 pages coming out thursday i don't know how long it'll be once it's formatted or all this is also detailed it'll be put out in multiple languages to reflect the 70 um different languages spoken in the homes of our community we will make sure we get it out to people and here's the piece now and you know the truth is anybody i mean the irony of anybody feeling like i won't be i'll be with anybody i people will tell you i love

179to hear myself talk and i like listening um i just can't do it in july that's been the thing because now with this creation with this rola and i'm rolling it out with different groups this week and we'll send it out this week um now a lot of the work goes out to our schools which is appropriate because that's where our kids are home and that that is contacting from the principles about we need to know what people's choices are more fully now but it's also about this is what lineup looks like here this is what our classroom looks like here is what recess looks like here for julio and dan student involvement from this point forward is intense as we as they meet with their various committees that's what we're going for we had

180to get this document out and for people that thought the process was too rushed if you think you thought it was too rushed how do you think i feel um like i said we had three weeks and the fact is there's one other thing i should say the governor said today this is the plan we'll make a decision in august so i kind of thought the decision had been made but that could change and i just hope it's made sooner rather than later and i know we want to wait as long as possible but we have real decisions we have to make about spending about staffing about physical locations that can't really wait so we have to go forward with some operational now the one thing i will say there are people that have said

181to me won't you be ticked off if you did all this work to do a reopening plan and then it becomes virtual right away or it goes hybrid right away no we're going to be in school someday we're going to be in school someday and we're going to welcome kids back someday and we don't know how long this is going to last but it's going to end at some point we're going to learn to live with it better there are currently 23 different is it 23 different vaccines in global health trials right now i'm a big believer in science because i'm a big believer in education see that when people say to me why are you so intense about trying to get this going it's because education's the answer education is the answer for equity

182i've said this before the difference in the protest movement this time is that for 40 years 50 years kids have been taught that the civil rights movement leaders were heroes martin luther king jr at the time of his assassination people talk about the holiday now the time of his assassination he only had approval of 35 percent of the population according to gallup polls other people thought of him as a rabble rouser now he's a hero and we see it in our kids and we see it in this movement on the streets today and we see it on people demanding justice and demanding equity so anybody that wants to help us get to equity we're all in we're all in but before we can get to equity we got to get in we got to get

183in somehow we got to find a way to make sure we're reaching all of our kids all of our families every day every district says they're proud of their plan some places hire outside consultants to write their plan i know they do and i know the price that's not what we do i am so fortunate to be lifted up by the experts that just presented before you and they did an unbelievable job because the truth is i'm a who believes in a few things i'm a plumber's son who education saved my life these people are geniuses at their work and i'm so fortunate to be uplifted by them and i just hope the people of west hartford understand the work the effort the diligence that that's gone into this and i hope our teachers understand

184we get it we understand your fears i get it and we're here to help and to do everything we can to make sure that this year this year one community one message one voice that we come together that we get better and that we do all we can to educate our kids the best they can no matter what method we're so with that i'll take questions but i'm going to defer most of your questions to the people that are the experts instead of just rambling on myself so all right great so um if you have a question just put a question mark in the box i'll do my best to call on you in order and as a reminder to board members before you ask your question please state your name so that those who

185are on the phone um don't have the benefit of seeing your name underneath your face know who you are no one has any questions no board members have any questions that can't be true sounds good to me deb let's go is it just that it's so late really no one has questions okay amanda oh sorry yep all right we'll do amanda then ari and then mark they all came in at the same time okay hi no i think we were just waiting just to make sure that other people had a chance um so we have read the plan in its entirety not the highlights that we went over tonight so we know and we have the the benefit having seen this process from the back end of feeling so much more comfortable with this than

186the community um would have the opportunity to because we've seen it along the way so i know that i sit here as a parent of two children feeling no hesitation whatsoever about how we can move through this year and that it is a distinct year i might i don't have a question at this point because most of my questions are going to be probably covered by other people but i want to say the teacher side of me when i was reading through this plan and i got to the pieces about block scheduling and the smaller class sizes and more frequent time outside more frequent time spending time with cohorts of people it reminded me of when i taught with block scheduling and they're so there are fewer transitions throughout the day the pace of the

187day is so much slower the learning is so much deeper and there were so many times when i stopped as i was reading that plan and thought that we are going to see some added benefits out of this that are unexpected because as we take time to care for the social emotional needs of our children and our staff the pace of the day in and of itself is going to be slower and they are going to be outside more and even though it's winter you know people experience winter in minnesota and michigan and other states and do things outside it's not something that we have to fear as much as we do here in new england but we the that pace of the day in and of itself is also another support and there are

188some very significant learning things that are going to come from that so one of the first things i wanted to mention was that i appreciate some of that planning um from a curricular standpoint but also from the support of social emotional health and um we also haven't met since since graduation and i just wanted to take a moment to acknowledge that you know you are tasked with creating that bright spot for our kids who are graduating this year and you did it and it was amazing and it was a bright spot for the whole community and i don't want us to forget that there have been really special moments that have come from all of this that you've created for our community and that is also going to happen this year so it's going to

189be a different year but it doesn't mean that there aren't going to be good moments in it so um i think my specific question is really you know parents and we've gotten a lot of notes personally as a board about the different pieces that they're curious about that are specific to their their ages their kids their classrooms when will that communication turn over to i'm assuming to the principals so that they can start getting the answers and they can start asking those questions because we don't have time this evening because it would take us several hours to go through all of those individual questions that people really would love to know the answers to but i think what they're really wondering is when are we going to make that transition so that they can ask

190for instance for the little ones you know how will young children be comforted in those early days of school with social distancing things like that that are specific to it to the little ones yeah i can you know i'll jump in first anybody else that wants to um talk about so the plan this week is we've had to scrub our response list because as we put out the request and then we had our building principles called some people responded twice making sure that we knew and so we had to go through and remove every duplicate and kind of we had to do that by hand over the weekend um and actually i think we just finished that tonight so now we have to turn over those lists to the principles at each individual school and

191so once the plan goes out on thursday at the end of this week they'll begin the process of reaching out to their school communities both with messaging and also with targeted questions for individuals that are okay um for some reason you didn't respond um just so you know here's our plan maybe another link and um we need to know because we have to settle our class list so those kind of questions um that's that's when it's going to be shifting basically the end of this week into next week um is when it shifts to the local although of course they're going to be inundated right away and rosina you have some communication ideas about this also we've been talking about how parents can reach out a little bit and i don't i don't know if

192you want to add in oh you're going to still you're going to steal the thunder of uh we're going to have lots of there's going to be lots of videos like i said it's just going to be very very interactive and um thank you tom for doing the first demonstration of the mass the difference because that's been on people's minds but our principles are going to be giving virtual tours of the building so that families and students can see you know what is spacing when they say spacing what does that really look like what is my because it's going to look very different andy anti-alluded to that and still just kind of trying to acclimate them but there's just a lot of uh i think there's a lot of good energy around it there's we

193know that there's angst and uh some people are just very eager so we want to just be mindful of all of that and it's it's one year and i think we can see some really lasting good change come out of it all right we'll go to ari and then mark okay um again i just want to reiterate what amanda said i just um i'm amazed at the the plan that you guys were able to put together in three weeks um super comprehensive again i did feel a little um lucky to have some insight into the plan and it helped with my confidence as a parent um you know to be confident in sending my son back um to hall next year um so i i i'm excited for other parents in the town to have

194this exposure so that they can they can know what's happening and feel as confident as i do so my question again knowing my background you can probably predict um in terms of the pd days uh professional development days i'm just wondering have they already been um kind of scheduled and planned in terms of what will be um presented to the teachers and um if not um uh are there gonna be is there gonna be some specific training um to help teachers with regard to their competence um and abilities to assess and address uh mental health issues in their students something like a mental health first aid or something to assist them in that level of confidence because as we know um i think we're going to have an influx of students who are experiencing some

195um significant emotional behavioral um issues and concerns uh tom is it okay if i address this by all means i was hoping you would okay so ari every year our teachers go through training on how to identify students that are at risk in a review of our referral systems and our referral processes and so as we enhance that professional development this year we will include many other factors um with regard to new information that we've learned new information in terms of covet impact of racial trauma all of those factors will be included in that we are also looking at a a screening tool that we will use for most students or all students uh in terms of social emotional learning needs so very different from mental health needs we want to make sure that anyone

196who's doing any type of screening is qualified to respond appropriately mental health but in terms of social and emotional impact and needs the state has introduced the idea of a universal screening and if they can get it to us in time that will be fantastic in the not in the meantime i've been looking into a backup plan for that so i think it's really important that we identify those needs not only to make sure we're providing the appropriate resources but also to look at it in terms of a baseline because we want to make sure that what we're doing we're doing well and we're we're taking a look at that so those are all pieces that it will be put in place thank you and if i can figure back one thing just to remind

197the board um gretchen i think you reported on this last year the we had started work with trauma informed instruction there was a train the trainer model where we got our clinicians uh positioned to be trainers uh and our original plan before kovid before everything else was turnkeying that and so there are those pieces that are already developed and fairly in place and i i appreciate the board sport one of the things um that i don't want to get lost is that assuming we're back everybody back we'll follow the regular schedules so wednesdays will continue to be professional development because it's so important we have so much that we need to work with our teachers for this year to respect them as professionals make sure they get that pd and so that's one of the

198things i i greatly appreciate the board continuing to support as does paul tom i'd be remiss if i didn't mention the 20 000 grant from the foundation for west harbor public schools to really support this deep equity and anti-racist work and so we really we we a team and myself we attended a virtual um really powerful pd this week last week and this week and uh what what i was most impressed with was the student participation in the student voices and educators learning with students so it generates really good ideas for how we can better work with our students and partner with them journey okay mark and then lorna thank you um and they have some microphone issues so if i seem like i'm yelling i'm really not i'm just trying to really talk loudly

199but um i gotta i got a few comments and i've got um a few questions i was saddened at the beginning of this uh meeting um because i know in some of the issues that came out i know how hard rosina works and how ahead of the game we are with so much on the diversity um that people were calling it out and i know that we're ahead of the game by tenfold continuous improvement is our model and i know that we we will obviously follow that um i was just kind of perplexed because we're a leader you know i often said in a lot of meetings in the past you're either a leader or a follower or sometimes you need sometimes you have to follow but in that particular on our diversity um in

200equity with rosina at the head of it she does an unbelievable job and i hope you didn't take any of that personally i still think that we're still ahead of the game i know we're out of the game and there's a continuous improvement model that we've all got to move on so i just want to say that um they talked on the professional development if we go back to school i think professional development is what differentiates us from the rest of our cohorts you know that's why west hartford needs um our schools our systems our school systems and i think a lot of it has to do with professional development on wednesday so i i think that's something that if we go back to school full-time i'm glad to hear that we're going to continue

201that graduation and i want to just amanda approach this and mention something but as a as a senior dad i just want to tell you uh the graduation and the parades and everything that was planned it may not have been what every uh graduate expected but it's something they'll remember for the rest of their life and the planning that went into this from everybody on this um and in the principles and everything it was unbelievable it was something they will remember for life um you know i said this in my speech you know we're going to remember the class of 2020 and it's because of the way we did things different and we thought out of the box i just this is our first opportunity to talk about and i want to say thank you

202for that um the amount of planning that tom and your team did in the last three weeks and the document i actually had a meeting um with crown committee uh last night and they you sent out that 50 something page document truth be told i'm on vacation these up here and i didn't quite be able to read the whole thing but i did peruse it last night i read it today um unbelievable planning and i want to congratulate all of you i i know you really don't need the accolades but i'd be remiss if i didn't um because of the planning that you guys did in this last release it has to be said and thank you um my job our job is so much easier because of what you're doing and how you're doing

203we want to thank i want to thank you for that um so now questions kind of tom when we go back and i don't know if it's tom or a legal issue when we do go back i just you know there's other places on um civilian jobs and such there are old harmless agreements that when you come into school if potentially someone catches covid and they think that they catch it at school that hopefully they can't sue our school and or sue our administration in the board of ed and if there's something in uh you've got to do that the motion you've got time you got to start moving more you know you gotta but is there a whole harmless and i've got more questions but i'll wait till it has something that holds us

204harmless against any um uh if we go back to school photon i'll jump in and then andy can join in because we've been that's one of the other things as this is all going on you know this is this is a planning decision but there's also all the legal components that we had to follow going through this so individually there's a hold harmless unless gross negligence is proven um you'd have to you'd have to do something outside of the realm um of what would be typical you know before andy annuals answer the next part better here's the truth there are people that operate in fear and their plans don't say anything like their their plans are just clinical i can tell you about masks there's nobody saying the exact same things they're like you can't

205say that you might get sued okay i mean that's just where we are right now um because there's things that we have to do to keep people safe and there's going to be issues that arise that will lead to if there is a child with disabilities there's a question i had a long legal meeting with this today and gretchen continues to have meetings about this and we are mandated to provide an education to them and then that question also becomes but what if there's safety issues to others that are created and how do we balance that so there are infinite legal issues i was the meeting was with tom mooney today to all hartford area superintendents tom mooney's our board attorney um and that's probably the fourth meeting he's had with large groups in addition

206to individual calls from meaning to andy is there anything i left out about that thanks tom not really mark one of the the benefits if you remember as a board we talked about last year and mark i know you were involved when you were on the policy committee is changing over to using shipman's policy book and really the benefits that that puts us in as far as compliance and making sure we're on solid footing and so we've been working this summer and will continue to work with shipman and goodwin with jess ritter and uh they've already established and sent out uh their uh pro preliminary copin 19 emergency policy packets that they're planning to put in place come the start of the school year for all of the districts that cover a lot of that

207legal changes that we've talked about uh whether it's health and safety whether it's mental health whether it's discipline it covers a lot of what rick and i are working on with the unions a lot of those underlying policies that we then don't have to go ahead and try and to worry about because they're taking care of that thank you okay thanks and then uh paul this may be your question if not um with the block scheduling you talked about automotive and green not being able to be offered um is that because people are interested in it is what's the premise behind that um i know what greek in the past have been and i think automotive has been and those i think the two examples you used to forgive me if there were more but

208i think those were the two um and i remember them being pretty pretty uh robust as far as people attending so i'm wondering how's the block scheduling affect that sure i apologize if that was unclear on my part um that's not actually a block scheduling constraint that's a remote at-home learning constraint so if so if i'm choosing not to come into school and i'm getting my instruction online obviously the you know the automotive shop i don't have the ability to teach that so that's what i was referencing during the in-person school we definitely have you know sufficient numbers for uh you know for courses uh same as we always would in any given year so so that was really just trying to highlight the remote learning is going to have some restrictions on the number

209of courses now i suppose it is possible and we have we're not this far down the rabbit hole yet as we begin to back out all of the student requests for the students um you know there may be an odd course here or there that doesn't have you know you know maybe it was running low and there was only one section of it and now it now it gets you know now now it's just that too low and we'd have to figure that out but that that was not what i meant when i said that so i apologize i was really talking about the remote learning okay i appreciate that um so i guess you know i guess there's a automotive guy that always then do his own automotive i always go online to figure

210out how to fix things i don't know if that's an option and i'm not even going to ask you to answer that but just as a comment um but then as a block launching i'm looking at it because all previously i always remember and what i bring to the table is that athletes always had a tough time with lunch and now that i see this block um scheduling that potentially can happen is that lunches are all pretty equal around noon which is always great for athletes because there are people eating at 9 45 i believe and it wasn't always a great thing and a lot of teachers wouldn't let some of the athletes eat in class um and i understand that that block um scheduling is an option is that something well i guess if

211we could meld that say we go back to school normal and we don't have to do block and this is a year from now is there any way that we can meld that uh lunch schedule into a more advantageous uh for lunch at least for those kids it's one thing that stuck out for me i don't know why um where lunch was just a normal lunchtime um let me jump in and my my audio lagged as you were talking so i may have missed some of your questions so i apologize if repeat if this doesn't answer it um in the plan the lunch that you see that's uh so the way that lunch is going to work in general in this block schedule uh we have four four instructional periods that are you know roughly

21280 or so minutes uh at the middle or the high school depending on daily advisory or not we're going to append the 30 minute period to the third period and we will have some lunch waves only because we will have some rooms in the building where it's not appropriate for the kids to eat in that room and so we would move uh those kids potentially down to a calf we also may have some you know whether it's an outdoor space or i think you know andy mentioned some potential even just for a movement break for some of our kids um like our science classrooms are the big ones that we would we would do everything to not have kids eat in those rooms uh just just out of fear of any you know chemicals or

213anything like that from labs kind of contaminating so um so there will be uh different lunch waves uh i could have a lunch before third period i could have a lunch after third period or i could have a lunch within third period uh to where my my third period class would split uh the nice thing about an 80 plus minute class is it does afford sufficient time where that split doesn't really feel like a dramatic interruption it feels almost more like an intermission um so that that's our plan for lunches under the block and i apologize for the second half to your question that my audio yeah paul i can jump in so mark i think one of the key things like so amanda when you were speaking and talking about the block eloquently my

214bet is you enjoyed teaching in the block and like teaching the black one of the key elements about block scheduling is there are true believers that love it and there are people that hate it and i'm an agnostic and that's really the truth and if you were going to make a decision as a district to move towards block scheduling and have a discussion it's a discussion it's thought out it's before the board i didn't want people thinking hey this is tom's way to sneak in block scheduling by doing it this year this is about covid this is about this plan if down the road at some point the board wants to talk about that that's your purview um it's just i didn't want some people thinking that this is some secret plan of mine um

215to get block scheduling and it's really about this is what will work best in this situation i uh i completely understand that and that's not my point i guess it's just that i guess i don't know why it stuck out so much because i just remember you know i what i bring to the table as a dad uh to have kids in the system is that um lunch was always a big issue back in the day because and i i guess i bring in athletes or athletes to the table is that it was difficult for them to eat and be able to perform after school and this all that other thing teachers wouldn't let them meet in class but when i saw that it was 12 o'clock so i'm just saying that maybe potentially going

216forward not that i'm a block uh avid or not i'm not i'm agnostic as well it's just that maybe we can learn some lessons from that that's all i guess i'm saying so um but i'll move on and then paul you mentioned the 90 to 120 minutes for the online do the online um uh uh if we don't go back to school we do the online the 90 to 120 minutes i've kind of do the math on my head is that is it going to be more robust that one we saw earlier this spring um uh and is it going to be more advanced uh is it going to be the continuous improvement model if we have to go online um because you talked about 9120 i just want to know where we fit in

217there sure so that 90 to 120 that you're that you're quoting that was the elementary minute and then uh at the high school uh i believe it's upwards it's it's four hours because it's because those are four classes a day for about an hour a day uh it definitely is what we're calling our online 2.0 plan and you know and to all the all the student voices that we heard um you know this this a lot everything that we kept and everything that we're shifting uh you know came out of a lot of input from those student voices about what worked for them uh and what would be best and we are actually uh field testing our online plan if you will right now during the summer school uh especially at the elementary level that

21890 to 120 and it's it's shorter it's 90 you know if i'm a k our first grader you know we're not gonna we're not gonna ask our kindergartners to sit in front of a computer and try to attend you know attend for two or three hours at a time so that's that's where they have these shorter instructional blocks but they are direct instructional blocks they are they are you know when we went into the spring and we were doing our uh school closure plantings and we were looking at the italy model and we were looking uh at other places to where covet 19 was was apparently you know it appeared to us on the news just devastating the community and the streets were empty that was really what we expected we expected uh just uh

219you know 20 30 40 percent of our teaching staff being being unable to teach at all and we we learned from that that hey we can have more synchronous time our students are going to be available our um our community is seemingly able to um be able to especially with our younger folks attend to them and make sure that they're available online at specified hours during the day that that seem to be the community feedback so we're looking for those those periods to be direct instructional periods um and then on and then in addition to that we'll have enrichment and other activities because we're also not trying to replicate a six-hour day online with a fifth grader we figure uh two hours of screen time and then another hour of uh you know work that

220they can do independently yeah understood thank you paul um i guess the um the last question i have is tom you talked about the money millions of dollars and how we are how do we wrap our arms around that and i know these are emergency circumstances um but as a fiscal guy i've got to ask about that and you know from my past that i'm always uh not i'm not apprehensive about putting money in the classroom and and i i'm not shy of doing that but i just can you just walk us through you know what kind of millions of dollars are we going to be looking at past our what we passed our budget more delineation yeah it's a it's a fair question and like i have to tell the parents i don't know

221until i know how many teachers i have to hire that's really what the cost is i mean it could be right now um my guess is three to five million dollars um and that could go up and i hate to say it i mean listen i'm failing at my job i'm not working within the budget but i can't no i don't i mean i'm not saying that like hey okay no i mean i just don't know how i can and provide a school system that's um that people expect i mean this is there has to be outside support coming to communities everywhere because i know people that are trying to maintain inside their budget that won't get the support from from west hartford from their citizens i mean one of the biggest things i've had

222in letters to me have been people saying who do you need me to advocate with who do i need to call how's the board are they gonna and i'm like no the board understands this completely and you know i've i've tried to keep you updated every week and more than that weekly with updates about this spending i can't get around i can't create an online school and have it be meaningful there are places that are going to say your online school is we'll turn the computer around we can barely hear people on this sometimes turn the computer on click it on and watch that class with no interaction with the teacher with never getting called on and not being apart that's not gonna listen i'm not critiquing i guess inherently i am that's not what

223west hartford public school is about and i honestly believe this is another year if there's ever going to be a year that differentiates us and people see the difference this is something that's going to be a difference of what west hartford provided at citizenry during this time yeah no question as um listen i know we have to spend more money and and and i know we have to do the right thing so uh don't take the wrong message from that no i i think we should buy a lot of scratch tickets or something mark that's what i'm left with my family and i'll share this because i've got uh teachers uh and union members that work in long island or outside of boston and i can tell you what we have done is not even

224comparable to what they've done we i've had discussions up here we have a lot of family up here um in new hampshire and they we talk about it all the time i talked about it today what we've done here in west hartford it's not even close to what they've done in long island areas around us boston boston metro area so we are ahead of the game tenfold and you know obviously i said it earlier fall is our continuous improvement model i just want to commend everyone on this call for all the hard work they've done and i want to thank you um i appreciate it and i was sat in a lot of those classes that my kids were in and i was taken [Music] thank you uh lorna and then jason hi yes good

225evening uh thank you very much for the pharaoh reported presentation i i say that with great appreciation as a board member i'm certainly being four of the proposals moving forward uh yes we do know that the definite plan is not known until we get guidance from our governor and um the commission of the department of education however thank you as a parent i also thank you very much for uh the thorough information i do have a few questions though and um a comment uh one i have in regards recognizing having to arrange things differently in the classrooms the six foot distance between desks and accommodations made elsewhere in terms of uh the staff lounge i know different schools staff lounges rather intimate space uh accommodations will be made to support areas for the staff to

226be able to get recharged and relax thanks lorna that's actually a really good question and it's something as we're working with each of the principals to create uh the plans for their building each building's a little bit different and so we are identifying additional lounge areas in many cases at the elementary level if you think about it if we're bringing uh some of the special teachers into the classroom that frees up other classroom space and other other areas that's available at one of the elementary schools we're going to be using one of the art rooms as some additional office space for teachers and areas like that in some of the elementary schools we're looking at library space being allocated for different teacher work rooms to be able to spread people out but also have a

227place that they can go to when the the music teacher may be in their classroom instructing thank you understand from the central program that it was restricted just to students in district as opposed to years before where students elsewhere were able to participate moving into the upcoming academic school year for open choice is that something that is going to still be entertained or our restrictions going to be there as well go ahead rosina yeah yeah so open short when we talk about our open choice students they are our west harbor public school students they'll open so summer school is open to them as well as whatever they choose they don't lose their seat if they choose to learn remotely so they still have the opportunity to register and participate i think we do have students

228from the oval choice program in our summer school program if it's just anyone who's not a west harbor public school student we couldn't extend that opportunity to this this year does that answer your question lorna wonderful thank you it doesn't have to be transparent i was hoping and assuming to hear that answer to segway into this piece in terms of transportation i do believe it's correct that provides transportation for those students um wanting will those accommodations still be in play because i i recall from years prior there was a time where secondary students transportation was not provided to them and they had to wait for public transport to the bus and fortunately um accommodations were made for them will that still carry forward into the upcoming school year as as far as we know lorna

229that is still in place we'll continue to work with crack as we do with all of our transportation providers to make sure that that students do have a safe and stable way to get to school wonderful thank you and third question recognizing how different proposals have been put forth in school full-time distance learning and then a hybrid in terms of the whether it's the hybrid or a distance learning um and i i guess this this crash question i believe this question is is for you what um supports may be in place for recognizing many outlets for students to be able to confide in either a teacher or a counselor if there is something distressing for them at home and i know that we have the mobile app where students and parents or teachers can respond

230if to alert of a concern they may have in someone else is there a way for a student to be able to confidently reach out for supports and help because let's say their concerns are with the persons that are within their home over them 24 7. is there some way for them to be able to reach out for help and support uh in a more confidential way sure thank you lorna for the question so we learned a lot during the spring distance learning experience that we had and so we had a number of students who actually sought out that individualized support during that time and those referrals happened in many different ways sometimes teachers were able to pick up on a student's need for that and did an actual referral to a school clinician or

231a school counselor but all of our clinicians and counselors were checking in with students in addition to their teachers so they had one-on-one opportunities to talk to them check in with them see how they were doing and see if they needed anything else parents could also put in referrals and some of our adult support staff were meeting with students while they were meeting in classes and would make referrals you know like they've noticed that someone has been late or they haven't been prepared or they've seen a change in behavior which resulted in a referral so there were many ways that that support happened but it still happened i can tell you that a number of um follow-up documentation pieces that came to me in my office so i i know that we were able to

232connect wonderful thank you i'm sorry i didn't mean to cut you off with what you were saying with the volume so it's up so i hope i'm not interrupting you now did you finish i'm all set thank you sir thank you uh in my last comment and thomas it's piggybacking or i guess directing to you but piggybacking off of something um you shared which i greatly appreciate actually everyone has made reference to this moving forward in regard to the race and equity piece and how we're all charged to respond to that in an appropriate and devoted way and um tom you you said quota we're all in before we can get to equity we have to get in in terms of getting back to school and i agree with that and i also want to

233stretch the level of charge and being in uh to not just only those students in school not only the staff in school not only the teachers the administration but our community at large i really i charge all of us as a community to to be in and wanting to really respond to the needs of our our students our our community and our world at large in terms of being more equitable and so i think the learning that takes place with that certainly exceeds beyond the walls of a classroom or beyond the screen of a computer and it really is uh it's something that behooves all of us to be invested in that so i just want to put the onus of that responsibility on us on a larger level in terms of being more responsive

234and being more equitable so again thank you so much again for all of the work you've done uh look forward to the steps moving ahead thank you jason and then amanda hello um can you hear me yes okay um this is my first florida bed meeting and uh you might think that this is uh intense that this is my second key opening so we've already discussed yukon's opening last month so uh but i i very excited to see this this level of detail and this level of commitment because when people are concerned about safety they should understand that the virus loves inequality the virus loves discriminatory environments that's where the virus thrives and uh and so i think you know just to echo what other folks are saying i think you know getting getting back

235into the school is a demonstration of how how we can survive this uh together and um so i just want to i feel everyone's thanks and i i have two two things i was going to ask that they've sort of been been addressed but i'll i'll ask them in a slightly different way um just an echo from my colleague mark who was talking about a continuous improvement model and i fully you know agree and would love to hear about the how self-evaluation in the district is is challenged by the new conditions of the opening and if this kind of self-evaluation can address some of the concerns that the parents have raised especially on the note of the equity audit if that if that is is a part of existing self-evaluations and and then how is

236that how is that impeded or rethought i'm gonna let rosina talk about specifically and this is one of those things that um just about an equity audit specifically merzini and i have had this discussion repeatedly of um what's the goal um when are we doing it how are we doing it who's doing it so it's not it's not it's definitely not a no it's we want to do it right it's kind of this this piece that ties in here i think you hit on something really jason that i don't want to speak for everybody else in this committee but the self-reflection of what does this mean for us um i'm more committed to you know like what you said about the virus where it attacks because i i think there's a lot of kids in

237this town i'm not worried about if we're in virtual learning um there's a lot of people that's going to work but we've got to give voice to the voiceless during this process and i think that kind of self-reflection of who we are as a community and you know we talked about this before that it's not just us we we've got to make sure we're engaging and rosina's work is so important um because where do we fit you know i brought up our per pupil expenditure for a reason because we only talk about the budget time but it is something we've got to think about as a community what do we value and how much do we value it and how do we advocate for it because i've spent time reflection have i fought enough you

238know what i mean i i i you know this is a deeply personal this is my this is my life's work and i get you know i'm the institution in a lot of ways in that i've been here 25 years and i'm in charge of it i know the failings of this district better than anybody else does and i'm responsible for them and um that comes with the territory so i hope that that self-reflection from each of us drives our equity work and it's not just a self-reflection as a district but self-deflection self-reflection of what am i doing and how can i do it better and who am i reaching rosie do you want to talk more specifically about the audit or anything else you want to add no i think you've said it really

239well just that we have closely followed other districts in their audits and a lot of times we've been disappointed we've been a part of other people's audits and studies too and i've shared that with edi members on some examples of that we've just been disappointed with their outcomes because it's been low-hanging fruit for things we've already done and we really want if we're going to do this we want to go deeper and we don't want to disappoint the public in the community oh that's all that came out of it well you know we were trying to be responsive and thoughtful so along the way we are instilling some other measures where we are self-reflective and we are taking a candid look at ourselves and we are looking at our areas where there are inequities and

240calling them and naming them and trying to do something to change so it's not like well we'll just wait till something comes along it's like well we can do something internally yeah thank you um i i had a second question that really co attracts closely with uh with lorna's uh question and it's really about uh social emotional learning and and the follow-through for mental health um so after individuals uh are identified as as seeking help aggression you spoke to this for the online portion but i'm wondering if there you can discuss ways that um that you put you you're thinking about how how students can uh can be uh how what happens after uh individuals that flag and then um and then what kinds of ways uh do you do we include their peers in

241kind of healthy practices um it sounds like there's there's a uh a lot that you've already done and i think you know just just hearing uh you know i guess partially as a newcomer um uh to to understanding your guys existing policies uh but then to uh just to understand what what that would look like in in this context thank you jason so uh that's a big question and i'd like to be able to take a lot of time to answer that question i'm not sure that we have all that tonight there are we have about 40 clinicians in the district and they are supervised by a clinical supervisor and that is in addition to our school counselors that we have throughout the secondary schools and so we have an awful lot of people on

242the ground who are looking to support staff and support parents in a collective effort to support students and so we do have um an at-risk policy and procedure uh that is reviewed and identified by that body of clinicians uh periodically and then we review all of the policies and procedures um as you know every year you know as we start a new year throughout that year over the last few years we've uh we've really added some robust pieces in terms of concerns about students who are at risk to self but also at risk to others and so we've really expanded our work there and so our clinicians and counselors are um are good at following up our me are very very good always looking to be better but always very good at making sure that

243they're identifying the right factors for students so that they can tailor their um their referrals out even from within the school district so we collaborate and coordinate with our community providers as well as more intensive therapeutic settings to make sure that students get what they need in it on an individualized basis and so we do reach out to our community we have a very strong partnership with the bridge and they also provide supports within our buildings along with pd for our teachers they sit in on our clinical teams and provide that community input as well so we're always open to learning new things and we're always open to partnering with new community members but we have a very strong clinical team i hope that answers your question in the short term yes thank you that's

244well spent thank you um amanda thank you and i appreciate everyone's stamina i know you haven't slept since march i'm gonna i know that the perfect one of the purposes of tonight's meeting was to clarify that the charge that you were given from the governor and the commissioner of education was to come up just like every other district to come up with the three plans and that we will and we were hearing about those plans tonight and that we're awaiting information about which one of those plans were allowed to go forth with so keeping that in mind there's a couple of things that i just wanted to ask you to clarify for people listening who are anxious to hear an update on these things you don't need to update us on them now but i'm

245asking you know when they will know um if what's the status of before and after care for people who are trying to do some planning and i know that's in the plan but i didn't hear it come up as clearly tonight when the community can hear about sports and i know that is somewhat outside of our control with the ciac but you know when they can get an update on that um andy if you wouldn't mind there's some information in the report that i found very reassuring about the process of signing off on different plans for the buildings that might just reassure some people um if you wouldn't mind just clarifying that small piece for us and then just to articulate clearly for people with regard to theresa um and the process that you followed

246through going through the last month or two you know what that relationship has been like just so that people can hear it it's it was hard to hear at all at once um but those are the things that we've we've heard a lot about um if there's a way to just highlight those pieces i can i can start quickly and hopefully highlight some of the the answers um as far as theresa uh teresa's been fantastic and and rick and i both uh worked very closely with uh with teresa and and the other whea leadership um not only on various committees but teresa and i have actually met uh at various schools with bob palmer sometimes just the two of us we've walked through classrooms we've we've really tried to to give her an understanding and

247i think she's really valued having that understanding that picture in her head about what a classroom can look like at a middle school level and will look like at an elementary level and what um how we're going to format that and how we're going to structure that i think she's then able to to better answer questions that come up to her from from the various teachers um as you mentioned as far as the sign-offs go as we're working with the the buildings and these plans uh you know these are things that that we will be reviewing with the various committees these are things that um you know clearly our executive team will be looking at um with the with the uh with the principles and making sure that the plans take into consideration all the

248different all the different requirements all the different charges and it's also um you know as we're going forward we're also involving as we mentioned shipment on the outside to make sure that from a legal standpoint uh when we're working with the different unions that we're we're making sure we're on solid ground with all of that i don't know if that answers those questions you had i think the question would about thank you for the union question about the hvac system i know in the piece about how you're working with the outside firm consultant yeah one of the recommendations with um one of the recommendations from the department of public health is to examine uh to examine hvac systems and to look at uh existing systems not with the idea and they actually put this up

249front in their guidance if anyone is fascinated is interested it's a five page uh guidance on air conditioning systems it's all available online and i think we list we link it into the into the report if you're looking for some light reading um but they actually talk about in their guidance is that the goal is not for schools to go out and invest in costly upgrades or to add on to existing systems rather it's for schools to get an understanding of their current mechanical systems and what they're capable of to be able to adjust the function to maximize the fresh air intake and to maximize the ventilation and so in in looking at all of our and all of our buildings we're going to go ahead and employ uh the hvac engineering firms we've worked

250with them in the past they have a good understanding of how we work and how our systems are set up and in in as we're developing these these programs and developing these plans for each building we're able to work with the engineer to make sure that we're able to to balance the idea of running running systems for three hours before or two hours before school starts to maximize the pressure intake and how do we balance uh how do we balance filtering there's there's there's guidance in there about the proper levels of filters uh you know there's everyone has been talking about the the merv 13 filter the maxim the minimum efficiency reporting value was mirv that everyone talks about and you know the merv 13 filter it has a certain certain criteria for filtrating certain

251things in most of our schools are operating at um at about a 10 currently with the filtration one of the recommendations and that this group will also be looking at uh that we're bringing on is how do we balance some of the the higher filter needs that we're going to have how do we change them out more efficiently where can we balance uh increasing filters to merv 13 or or thereabouts and then not decrease the airflow rates and so that's where we're talking with the companies with the experts that can deal with the with the balancing it's a little more it's a little more complex than than an average home in some of the buildings and remember also that you know we have um you know seven elementary schools and one middle school that doesn't

252have a school-wide fresh air system uh they have air conditioning in various locations they have fresh air intake systems in various locations but it is not a school-wide and so how do we then balance the the ventilation needs there how do we make sure if we have known areas that might need interventions that were able to do that one of the things we're looking at on the the second floor of duffy which we know is a is a problem spot when it becomes hot especially the south side classrooms we we think we're going to be able to move some of those rooms in cohort areas down away from that second side to the south side of the second floor and then bring in some portable air conditioning units when needed for some of the other

253classrooms uh we think we're going to have enough capacity in the electrical grid to go ahead and do that on a limited basis in various sites and so those are all things that are going into into that planning that bob and mike longo and all of our engineers will be working on with us thank you so much andy we know you're very thorough and i think it's just nice for the community to hear pieces of that i appreciate that we're becoming very good at hvac um andy uh before we go on to any other questions i think amanda had also asked about the ciac and before and after school programs yeah i'm the i'll share what news we have at this point the guidance that we have in the way we're operating is that before

254and after care programs will be as they've normally been we're reaching out and we'll continue to work with with we ymca the other providers at morley and so forth who who do this and it's with the understanding that they're going to have to operate under the same guidelines that we do as far as requiring masks as far as spacing there may be some different limitations on where they may have access to in the mornings or in the afternoons based on our cleaning needs and based on their site but we know it's important to parents that we do everything possible to provide that before school and after school care and we are going to do everything possible to do that we are still waiting to hear from ciac as far as their rulings with fall sports

255they i know that there is a meeting thursday uh there with the athletic directors that hopefully will have some additional guidance on uh we're told that their decision date uh is the first week in august for for fall sports um i don't frankly see i s i can see and tom may jump in on some of this and i'm sure you have your own in your own views as parents and and i do as well um i can see certain sports i i have difficulty seeing all of them based on based on models and groups on contact i'm a big fan of cross country space out and just run forest run i think we're good i can i can see i can see some other i can even see soccer in a limited sense because

256i know the leagues have opened up and softball and baseball i think are fine i have a hard time envisioning football and i say that as a a frustrated notre dame graduate who was looking forward to yet another year of disappointment watching notre dame get close but not across the line as tom as tom knows over the years so that's where i think we're at with sports we're fortunate enough that jason siegel has a strong voice and danzatun's also on the board of controls um so we do have um strong discussions and that is an area there are areas that i will wade into areas that won't wade into the governor's render undeceased or what is caesar's with the governor um i'm a former football coach and i understand the sport and i love the

257sport um there's certainly some concerns there so we'll see what comes out next week or if next week or the week next week or at least a couple of weeks down the road hopefully we are going ahead and scheduling like we've done in the past uh uh physicals for students who might need them and so forth we're still going ahead under the assumption that that if athletes will need that we're going to go ahead and provide it but we're we're not sure what it's going to look like yet and i should point out you know a lot of our coaches are doing conditioning work with kids now distanced out on the field i don't know if you've been by hall connor's seen it it's great to see the kids out there and getting some exercise

258because that's you know whether it's organized or not getting kids outside and doing things is really important and so i'm thankful to our coaches for doing that great i have a couple of questions i just wanted to see if any other board members have any questions before i ask my two go deb all right and recognizing the time um my first question is um is it your expectation that the state will supply some sort of a metric soon that will help determine um which plan we use to start the year and then if something happens during the year yeah yeah i i appreciate the question deb i certainly hope so i mean that's been dr matthew carter has basically said a five percent um a five percent positive rate is very concerning the cdc says

259a five percent positive rate is the number where you're you're in difficult situation connecticut has been below one percent today it was point seven percent as far as the percentage of tests taken that are positive um so we're still in good shape there is that the metric they're going to use since dr carter the state epidemiologist keeps talking about it i think it very well may be um but i don't have a specific insight into that and there's a couple different metrics that have come up frankly we're putting in what these current cdc guidance is about quarantining but if you talk to different health departments you will get different answers about that um there needs to be um some specifics about that and deb i don't know if this is going to be your last

260question i want to jump in but we get asked about testing all the time and why aren't we testing all of our kids and staff and why are we testing our kids and staff weekly when they come back i will say i agree i would love to i think that's where we should be as a society and i am hopeful based on some of the doctors and epidemiologists i've talked to and andy's talked to that at some point we will have a test a cheap spit test of some sort that is turn around quick and we can do that but to give people perspective since um this started in west hartford there has been 8807 total tests given that's from the beginning until july 15th 807 total tests for one day for west hartford public

261schools we'd need over 11 000 tests for one day and then to do it next week and i know people think well they're free and go to cvs we can't really send eleven thousand people to cbs for a free test um wholesale you're talking i don't know andy i mean he and i have heard a hundred dollars a test um that's a million dollars a week so that part isn't feasible right now it's another layer um that i that frankly i would love for parents to take their kids for a test within 14 days of the start of school i'd love for teachers to do that for 14 days before the start school i can't mandate it um but it's part of how we work together i don't know if that was going to be

262your question but since it was not but thank you for addressing it uh my final question is um you mentioned that once the plan is ready on thursday uh or shortly thereafter the schools will be pushing the plan out two parents available in a variety of languages i think you said um so i just wanted to kind of circle back to that and remind the public that they'll be getting this information from your school it'll also be on the west hartford public schools website whps.org so the question is will there be some sort of a feedback loop or a way for families to reach out and ask questions and get those questions answered and or express concerns and what is the best way for for people to do that we think the best way for

263that right now is honestly with their principles at this point and if it becomes so so voluminous i'm not trying to kill our principals especially since i've been the one they've all come to for the past couple months but i think that that's the best avenue i think as we get questions we keep adding to a frequently asked questions page so in the report there's a frequently asked questions and one of the important thing about the report is that it's a live document and those will continue to be added as we get those questions in all the time and on the website will be a frequently asked questions page where you click on that question you'll get the answer and it can link to the place and report where it appears or to that school

264so the feedback loop is honestly we'd ask people to reach out and talk to the principal at this point and again if it needs to be i'd love to say send it to this website and send it to this email box but a general email box that 20 people are responsible for nobody's really responsible for so um that's right now we're hoping that it'll go through our principles next week and that's the plan perfect thank you any other questions before we move on okay so thank you thank you everybody and uh if you're still with us thank you for sticking with us moving on uh have we covered staff reports and board discussions yes okay good um there are no routine matters um under item eight information and reports board members communications and reports reports

265from other boards and organizations does anyone have any um anything to report under this item okay no other information and discussions moving to item nine future business announcement of future meeting dates so our next two meetings at this point are scheduled for tuesday september 8th and tuesday september 22nd both at 7 pm the agenda indicates that these will be virtual meetings however um we would like to have these meetings in person if we are back in school in person so um location is to be determined and we will provide the public with ample notice wherever the meeting is held whether it's virtual or a town hall or one of our schools or outside in a tent we will make sure there's a way for the public to um to view the meeting just like you

266are tonight so tuesday september 8th and tuesday which is our first day of school now and tuesday september 22nd are there any requests for future agenda items great um comments from visitors are there visitors members of the public who would like to make comments if so we are back to the three minutes per individual and 21 minutes per subject matter all right i'll take that as uh no comments we do not have executive sessions so i will take a motion to adjourn anyone so i mean um thank you everybody thanks for all of your hard work for your diligence for your interest and i know we'll all be in touch um meeting is adjourned at 10 56. everyone have a great night you