BCSD Board of Education meeting for February 3rd 2021

001okay this is an audio test for the february 3rd board of education meeting the open meeting will begin around 7 00 pm the board entered into executive session will be entering an executive session in about five minutes to discuss confidential employee matter and complete some 10-year candidate reviews again this is an audio test for the february 3rd 2021 board of education meeting the meeting will begin in roughly six minutes to have the board enter an executive session to discuss the confidential employee matter in a 10-year candidate review the board will enter into open meeting around seven o'clock p.m to resume with the rest of the agenda again this is just an audio test this is an audio test for the february 3rd 2021 regular board of education meeting the board will be entering into executive

002session shortly to discuss a confidential employee matter and to discuss some 10-year reviews the board will enter into open session around 7 00 pm [Laughter] fountain so uh so [Laughter] um so [Laughter] so [Laughter] uh so [Laughter] now um foreign [Laughter] so [Laughter] so [Laughter] now so [Laughter] now so um so [Laughter] um so [Laughter] so [Laughter] now so [Laughter] foreign so uh so [Laughter] uh so [Laughter] so [Laughter] foreign [Laughter] wow foreign so [Laughter] so um wow so foreign [Laughter] now so [Laughter] so [Laughter] foreign [Laughter] uh so [Laughter] so is wow so [Laughter] one so [Laughter] so um so [Laughter] now so [Laughter] so uh so [Laughter] now so [Laughter] so um [Laughter] wow to so [Laughter] so [Laughter] uh so [Laughter] foreign so man [Laughter] now [Laughter] now so [Laughter] so man

003so [Laughter] um [Laughter] now so foreign [Laughter] uh so me i think we have everybody with us um so if we can reconvene the meeting to open session the board has been in executive session since six o'clock to discuss a confidential employee matter and to complete 10-year candidate reviews we could all start with the pledge of allegiance i pledge allegiance to the flag of the united states of america and to the republic for which it stands one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice for all uh i'll do uh introductions if everybody just wants to wave um from the board we have meredith moriarty wendy sampson chris meyer christine beck jonathan fishbein willow bear and myself holly dellenbaum and from the administration tonight we have jodi monroe judy kehoe and dave hurst first up

004on the agenda is approval of minutes it is recommended that the board of education approve the minutes from the january 20th 2021 regular board meeting any discussion all in favor any opposed any abstentions that passes uh next up is our superintendence report sure thank you um jody you're muted thank you sorry um so i have a few things to bring up tonight uh the first thing i wanted to have mr hearst actually address um i know that was in the media we've seen a few articles about students uh in cheating uh particularly with online instruction and i know our math supervisor had sent a letter out to parents um alerting them so i just thought mr hearst would be able to address uh some of what maybe people are either reading in the paper or

005hearing on the news about about some of this so uh dave if you want to address that first sure thanks so um yes so bill claremont our math supervisor sent home um a letter that he crafted with his entire department um to all of the families um not grades 9 through 12 due to the fact that we're seeing um an increase in students using technologies to essentially do their math homework and tests or quizzes and you know this is not analogous to you know an elementary school when you pulled out your calculator to do your math problems right basically the one of the main app that a lot of students are using is called photo math and you can take an equation take a picture of it and it will show you step by step

006exactly how to solve the equation the problem is that the techniques that this program uses sometimes are not always in sync with the student's level of math so for instance we had students in algebra 1 doing work with parabolas that were sending um you know work in that involved calculus so while yes the answer was correct and complete it was sort of well above and beyond the scope of where that student was in her academic career so it's pretty easy to spot these things um because the solutions are either above um sort of a student's ability level or i should say their level of math content that they've gotten through or they're using techniques that have never been covered in our school right because there's obviously multiple ways to solve problems but you know there's

007some sort of very non-traditional approaches that sometimes would be used in these apps so it's fairly easy to spot when students are doing this or when six students have the same response either they use the app or they all work together um so you know the purpose of a letter was not not to accuse students of cheating or to sort of um look to punish students it really was more of an education for parents to just be aware that these things are out there that if you can encourage your students when they're struggling to reach out for help from their teachers as opposed to relying upon these apps um to do their homework and their tests and quizzes um because while you know it you know undetected yeah it might help your grade but eventually

008this is going to catch up with you that if you're not learning the fundamentals the foundations of these math courses um you know eventually this is going to catch up so it really was just meant to be sort of informative for parents that we are aware students are using these apps it's quite obvious actually and that um you know any proactive approach as parents can do at home to encourage students to seek help when needed as opposed to relying on these apps um you know for sure this is not an issue um you know isolated to bethlehem schools across the state across the country dealing with this very thing and in fact higher education is dealing with it as well you know colleges are really struggling as much as high schools with student in academic

009dishonesty so you know again it's not an isolated incident to us so we thought we would just sort of get out ahead of it try to inform parents of what's out there for students to use and just ask for help in ensuring that you know students are putting their best foot forward honestly and if they're struggling they should really be reaching out for help and not looking for sort of end arounds to get their work done thanks dave does anyone have any questions about that before i move on i've got a couple other topics in my report okay so next um the next thing that's been in the news a lot is high-risk sports mr keys is joining us in case there's some questions that i'm not able to answer um i just put a

010couple slides together uh for you because i think the board needs to just know what the criteria is to move forward with any high-risk sports at this time so brittany if you could go to the next slide so if you recall the governor i guess it was a couple weeks or not quite two weeks ago basically said that high risk sports could move forward um however it needed the local department of health's approval in order to do so so what the department of health did is they provided a guidance document to all the local school districts about what was going to be required in order for school districts to move forward safely with high-risk indoor sports and so the minimum requirements that they set forth um and i believe this was given to all the

011lo all the counties across the state and some of them have perhaps modified it but this is what albany county provided us and that is that um the board of ed um you know must approve the district school's participation in each of the specific high-risk sports uh which um i want to be clear that we're we're currently not approved for high-risk sports under these minimum requirements so this is letting everyone know what the requirements are um until we get there um each school superintendent or leader must oversee the creation of a sport specific plan which needs to be approved by the school's medical director which is dr gaffiri who um len and i lent shared the plan with me and we did share them with dr gaffiri and he did get back to us that

012he does approve the plans for each of the sports um with the caveat i just want to say that wrestling even though that's considered a high-risk sport we would not be offering wrestling we had decided that a while ago that we just didn't feel nor did dr gaffiri feel that that could be done in any safe manner at this time each parent or guardian has to sign an informed consent a student athlete does have to be medically cleared by our health care provider and we must agree to fully cooperate with any case investigations with the department of health and we must establish a confidential phone number or email address i would assume we would use um let's have both of those probably email is probably more practical for most people um to report any concerns

013so those are the minimum requirements in order to move forward uh with any high-risk sports brittany can you go to the next slide please and so this is um where we're not currently um able to the seven-day rolling avid average in the county has to be below four percent i think as of today albany county was at a 5.3 or 5.4 something along those lines um and if at any time the positivity goes above 4 activities must go back to just the training and conditioning which is currently allowed the hospital capacity must be above 15 percent which it currently is in albany county and the rate of hospital admissions must not be unacceptable in the absence of any emerging epidemiology epidemiology data or anything that's identified by either albany county new york state or the

014cdc if something happens i'm guessing this was included because of perhaps maybe the variants that are being recognized that in those two instances uh the last two that the new york state department of health or albany county could ask us to uh restrict these activities uh the next slide please so this is the obviously the challenge um because you saw uh rensselaer county is moving ahead uh schenectady county just met the metrics and i believe saratoga county is probably soon to follow um and so what the suburban council has done is they've met to develop a schedule where leagues would begin um you know kind of with staggered times knowing that albany county is probably going to be the last county to be able to participate looking at starting games a little bit later with

015the expectation that teams could play non-league games in that seasons cannot begin for any individual school district until all components of the guidance is met so i think i saw schenectady county is planning to begin around february 13th or somewhere along those lines and keep in mind the sports season is relatively short to begin with it's february 1st through march 13th because fall 2 starts i believe march 8th um so whenever schools can participate it might be very limited but it would be something um i think is that the last slide brittany yeah so so essentially um what our plan would be is to obviously follow the metrics um if the new york state department of health in albany county has deemed four percent or below in those other requirements um to be able to

016offer it would be basketball um and um sorry why am i blanking on cheer competitive yeah competitive cheer basketball and what's the other one ice hockey how can i forget ice hockey um so those are dean the high-risk sport but also this guidance document also applies to the fall to high risk sports and i believe this will continue on to the spring high risk sports so any high risk sports for the rest of the year and now at any time the department of health could change this but this is the current guidance that they provided schools for any high-risk sports through the end of the school year so right now the plan is we are we have been collecting information from student athletes who wish to participate because there is the medical clearance that's required

017there's the parental consent that's required um and then moving forward we would be just doing having those teams do some conditioning in the gyms and whatever they can do with the guidance that's currently allowed under the no contact requirements and then when we meet the metrics we would come back to the board with the appointments for the coaches which would be getting those particular sports for again whatever the length of the season may be um you know we really don't know but that's kind of where we are and in this process so i figured mr keys is here if you have specific questions or if you have questions for me about the high-risk sports the other thing i wanted to mention i know there's been questions about fall too and there are some high-risk sports

018in fall too that would need to still follow these same criteria um and we would look to we are planning to offer fall to um competition i know that mr keys has been speaking with the other athletic directors for schedules um we have agreements for turf for soccer uh for the fall to sports season so we have places to practice so we're we're prepared to move forward with that um again you know just like everything with covet i think it's um any day these things could change but that's uh where we are with sports so i just want to pause if anyone does have questions about the actual plan or what the county has provided so um i see chris all right a few questions first of all thanks for coming um in terms of

019this winter season is there a date by which if we don't meet the metric we're just going to say we're not going to do it or do we have we thought about that yet uh i mean len and i have talked about it i mean you have to have seven is it seven practices len six six you have to have six official practices before you can compete so i mean and also the suburban council does have do you want to just explain the schedule that the suburban council kind of put together because there is kind of a staggered approach knowing albany county was probably going to be the late the latest group to be able to come on board yeah absolutely um as jody mentioned rensselaer county we have three league members uh troy columbia

020aval park they started today uh saratoga actually is below the threshold they actually started today saratoga county schools as well and i know uh schenectady with niskayuna and schenectady high school one is starting friday i believe that's nisky and then schenectady like jody said it's going to be the 13th so right there you have staggered pieces the the fortunate part is within the suburban council albany county has the majority of members there are six league members that are albany county school districts um what schools are going to do in those three other counties that are able to move forward ahead of us is they're going to play a combination of non-league contests as jody mentioned as well as they will play within their counties once we get below the threshold and today we dropped another

021two tenths so we're at 5-1 today as we kind of creep down towards the 4-0 what we would do in in albany county is our first four or five game blocks which are basically um everyone in the league is going to be playing on mondays wednesdays fridays albany county schools will be really focused on playing each other for those first handful of games for a multitude of reasons one to keep it within that smaller pod as the department of health you know recommended and two also from just a competitive standpoint we'll all be in the same boat rather than playing schools that by that point may have four five six games uh you know 15 practices already so from a safety conditioning piece as well as starting off in a really tight pod um that's

022how that would work from a scheduled standpoint um we're hopeful that by hopefully second week of february if if things continue to fall um we'd knock out our six mandatory practices and then be able to start so what's the time frame again for for that season for winter february 1st was the go-ahead to march 13th right so it's pretty short it's relatively short anyhow so so if if we get to like let's say it doesn't drop to under four for another let's say two weeks what chris was saying would we continue with the season if we're halfway through february i think we would try to do even if i mean if the kids were able to get in you know four or five games since four or five games it's something for them to look

023forward to we are still doing we're gonna we wanted to start at least letting the kids um get into the gym you know shoot baskets do some drills that are allowed under the current doh guidance in cdc where it's non-contact you know they have their own spaces they're socially distanced um in doing those activities so but they can't really they can't practice until you meet the metrics to be able to actually start your season so you can't count that time is your mandatory practices for the season it's just conditioning so you know yeah it could be you know four five six games um you know who knows and then what's ball two season and then spring how is how are those dates working when what's the date is it march eighth for fall two till

024uh march seventh until april 25th is fall two which would be our boys and girls volleyball football boys and girls soccer field hockey and then april 26th only baseball starts because they have a minimum state requirement of 10 practices due to you know safe conditioning of arm health uh and everyone else would then start on um may 1st and that would be boys and girls lacrosse that would be our girls and boys outdoor track and field boys tennis softball so they're baseball they're all short in seasons yeah go through the end of june that would go to june 25th okay just click just follow up um so in terms of there's high risk and this moderate is risk and low risk so you know for the next season we're looking we still have to wait

025on football and volleyball we're still the metrics aren't there yet but in terms of field hockey and soccer they're to go those are right and we are looking to i know that we've spoken about this we are looking to is you know hopefully we see conditions improving we are looking for um to bring some modified activities on for kids because the middle school kids really have had nothing so looking at that for maybe some fall too depending you know that all depends on what other schools offer as well because you have to have other schools to compete against but we'd like to be able to offer some varsity some jv and some modified as you know like i said conditions improve so we can get kids um some activities to look forward to what are

026the plans if a if um one of the team members uh gets coveted yeah is positive how is that going to be handled and addressed so if if um there's a member of the team who is covered positive um knowing what albany county has done with classes the entire team would be quarantined for the probably the 10-day period and if we have been competing against any other teams they go right now they go back a 48-hour period so if we had competed against another team my guess is that team would also fall under quarantine whether it be in our county or another county thank you and you know i think that one thing the albany county department of health has said is that they're saying that we can go ahead um with these sports at

027the four percent which they use the cdc guidance for but i think people do need to understand there there are risks involved it's called high risk for a reason uh because of the contact because it's indoor even you know the outdoor sports are called high risk and so i think that that's why they're requiring the medical clearance there's some coveted uh questions related to that the parental consent there's covid questions related to that so um you know i i don't think we want to say it's totally safe i think you know right now nothing is uh but if state the state department of health and the local county department of health is saying that's their guidance uh to move forward with these sports i think it also uh those metrics they provided could be helpful

028in other activities we want to consider for students as we move forward as well any other questions related to sports why len is with us oh yes sort of i would just say that like these things like we're at a point now where like we need these and other activities for kids like you know in the beginning in the fall i think we were at a different place where you know i was talking about emotional well-being and physical safety and we were i was prioritizing them we're at a point now with these students where the emotional piece is now affecting their physical health and well-being you know and we see this in these kids and so i i think it would be great for the sports to have more clubs to have more activities anything

029that we can do in a safe reasonable way you know i'm not saying rip off the masks and you know go back to normal but to find ways that we can make this uh more interactive and more um i don't know just to help kids with their their mental well-being because many of them are not in the best place right now do we have one last do we have plans for um like transportation and like all the logistical pieces if we're able to go ahead yeah we've um been in touch with transportation and i think we know transportation um you know we've we have a driver shortage there's no question about that so i know that in we're not the only district who has that issue so we just have to be flexible with when

030uh buses are available when they can depart um trying to be cognizant of that and you know again every district is dealing with that challenge so i think um the athletic directors have been uh working together to try and minimize those issues okay and spectators would be no limitators no spectators um except for um i think every school would like to do respect like parents for senior night so one one event but we do have the ability to live stream which is what we've been doing for many of our events already so people would still be able to watch um from home well i mean i know our i know our the numbers in the county are heading in the right direction i would just say maybe a message to all the athletes that are

031keeping their fingers crossed that not to attend any super bowl parties this weekend yeah right i know and there's been questions you know february break um you know you we could see some spikes upward and that's not that's certainly not going to be helpful to get to that four percent and just to echo that just that you know there are students that doing sports outside of school and to if if we want in-school sports to happen we need to maintain that same level of safety and health prevention at those practices that you would at a school practice because you know that we don't want disease covey being spread there and shut down a school season right i had a quick question and i think it'll show how dumb i am about sports so i even

032hesitate to ask but but with the way the winter set season and the fall to season are going to overlap are there athletes that would typically play both and now are going to have to choose what we're going to do is uh and i've already started to have these conversations with the coaches you know for the overlap and what we will do is work it out athletes would be able to participate in both practices if they chose to um what the wonderful piece is since sports are also considered winter all their practices are covered already so if you are let's say a bowler and now you want to go try out for you know basketball those practices would would cover and it's the same thing once you're going from say basketball into a fall to

033say soccer so that piece is is already covered but coaches know throughout the year um in all of my coaches meetings we meet regularly my coaching staff even though we're not in a full up and running mode patience and flexibility has been discussed all year so whatever we can do to work together to make it you know the maximum amount of participation for the kids and as as normal as possible is what everyone's really working to do right and then jody i think we would just have to think about how we message to families about sports when we still can't have more than x amount of students in a room and we still can't open chorus and you know there's a lot of it that just it doesn't it's not intuitive um so i have

034to think about how to reconcile that in some way when we're messaging right to families and we are looking at um based on some of this recent guidance uh we are looking to extend some of those opportunities that we have not been so for example uh in high school they are doing some uh choir in the auditorium we have i met with um jason dashu and dave norman and came up with a plan that we believe meets the guidelines and we're trying that out and then hopefully extend it to the middle school we're also looking to um tonight on the agenda or the musical appointments to look at those and then also looking at the secondary level allowing kids to stay after school for some academic help and if some clubs want to meet after

035school so we are looking to bring some of those activities to kids i think that will help and i think some of this guidance that we did receive is perhaps helpful in help to make help us make some of those decisions that have been somewhat of a struggle just wanted to ask one last thing um so there's there's no championship games though for anything right all those things have been canceled sectionals and states yeah yeah yeah so any other questions related to sports so you have one more topic okay all right thanks len for joining us you're welcome thank you alan bye-bye um and then the last part of my superintendent's report um i know that in the fall we had a request for from some members of the community for the hall of fame

036committee to consider removing megyn kelly from the hall of fame and um the hall of fame committee met um and they met a couple times they reviewed the requests that were submitted they reviewed the information that was submitted um they then reached out to um megyn kelly specifically to ask her and follow up on some of the concerns that were raised and megyn kelly did respond to the hall of fame committee with her responses as to things that you know people were indicating she said uh that she was racist things such as that and the committee met um followed up again and met on jan in january and they reviewed all of the information they shared their thoughts about it they ended up agreeing to not remove her from the hall of fame committee and

037while they indicated they may not agree with everything she says um they felt that um it's also not um it would be problematic to silence someone for having differing opinions so they voted and there was a unanimous vote to keep her in the hall of fame so that is my end of my superintendence report for this evening so holly do you mind if i say something about that no go ahead i was just about to ask if anyone wanted to um yeah i mean i do so jody i appreciate the work that the committee did and reviewing um the situation i did look again last week at the the policy that that committee abides by and i mean i'm not entirely sure that there's any role for the board in fact i'm pretty sure there

038is no role for the board in terms of reviewing their decision um and i'm always hesitant to sort of like butt our way into administrative processes and i've actually been fairly critical of other board members um at times for wanting to kind of micromanage administrative decisions but this one feels different to me i mean we heard from a number of parents and a number of students about how uncomfortable the wall of fame makes them feel um and i know at one point there was a student petition with a lot of signatures to have her removed and just students sharing their stories over the summer about how disrespected they they felt and how devalued they felt just it it doesn't you know i understand kind of where the committee came out i i suppose i don't

039know whether they're students on that committee i don't know whether they talked to any of the students but i guess i'm just sort of wondering what do we do now what what is dave domell what do you sort of think about how we respond to the fact that we have students in that building that have a visceral and honest response to her being on the wall of fame and it's not a political response it's you know she's said some very hurtful things about race and we have a anti-racist policy in the district that we worked hard to to implement and roll out and it just feels like it flies at the face of the work that we've done there so i guess i just wanted to open a dialogue about it i don't know what

040what you guys think is is the right response as administrators in that building i guess is the question i i happen to agree with with what willow said um and more perhaps more to the point when reading um what the committee uh discussion consisted of one item i noted was um it was not sending a good message by removing her and my question is well what's the message that's being sent by keeping her and megyn kelly's response to the committee was i found uh more than disappointing she said and i quote free speech is under assault divergent viewpoints are being disallowed this has nothing to do with free speech it has nothing to do with divergent viewpoints it has to do with do we honor someone who puts um posts and other words into the

041marketplace of ideas that are hurtful to our students and what's the point of having a um this hall of fame it's to acknowledge people that we want our students to look up to while megyn kelly may have done some good things like standing up to roger ailes um it's no different than shockley who forget his first name but he invented the transistor he was also a nazi sympathizer and he was ostracized from the scientific community now i'm not saying we ostracize megyn kelly i'm saying we don't glorify her by keeping her on the wall of fame i don't know i agree with what willow said the board does not have a uh anything to say about this that's the way it's set up um and as board member as a board member you know i

042can respect that that's the way it is and and we have nothing to say about it but as far as this idea that she raised in her defense that this had to do with free speech she can say whatever she wants to say no matter how nice or vile it is it's her she she can say and i will defend her right to say anything she wants to say but i cannot defend the ability of or i cannot defend keeping her on the hall of fame when it is when it is designed for people to look up to for our students to look up to because this is not someone i would want my child to look up to the only thing i would say to that jonathan and willow is that the the committee

043reached out to her they asked her specific questions and there were seven people similar to like our board set up and they had in-depth discussion and they're probably closer to the information than we are we have what was said in the public obviously but we don't have every detail of everything that they they spoke to her about but there it is somewhat political i'm not talking about some of her statements but there are kids who do like her and i'm not saying i don't i discredit anybody who doesn't like her or they feel offended but there's the other spectrum there are people who have different views or think differently of her so how do you weigh that all i'm going to say is i feel comfortable with who's on the teacher committee or the committee

044who reviewed it with their decision isn't the school a place that's supposed to be safe for all children and if we have children coming to us and others in the administration saying that they feel devalued uh by this isn't this something that should have a should be looked at a little differently um i i understand that there are different viewpoints i mean country is very divided on all kinds of different viewpoints but still if schools are going to be a safe refuge for our children while they learn i think that we have an obligation to to make sure that images of people and honoring people who devalue our students are not allowed well you feel that way about other members on the the wall of fame that shouldn't be up there i mean are we

045now do we go through every single one of them to see you know whether there is there there is one other that i have an objection to because i know what this individual did and unfortunately i don't have the proof because if i did i would take them before the uh the group that would deal with such uh behavior uh i don't have the proof but i have enough um i have enough to convince me so i really i haven't raised it in the same way that megyn kelly's been raised and i won't because there's no proof here there's plenty and you know the committee made their decision and we're going to have to live by it but i think the community should know that you know there are board members who feel that school

046should be a safe place for a student and that this creates a problem i just want to say a few things too because like i've been thinking about this since you know this all started months ago and it's it's weighed a lot on me and you know i agree with jonathan willow and looking at the um the committee and the way it's set up if the board really doesn't you know have a vote or a say in this is the committee made their recommendation and we we go with it uh but in in looking at it and i thought about this a ton and i i have to be honest with you the one person i'm really the most disappointed and is myself you know i listen to jonathan and i listen to willow and

047you know and they're great advocates you know and i i would put it this way i was thinking of the best way to put it and it's just that it's it's not that i've said horrible things about race it's just horrible that i haven't said anything about race you know and you know i think that i like many other people have lived this life where you know i think if i just if i'm just nice i'm just a nice person you know there'll be change and you know my niceness has affected 0.0 percent of racial change and equity in in america and disappointed in myself and because i'm vocal on other issues you know i stand up for other things you know why why why not this you know and i just i i almost

048feel i need to apologize just because you know i i am an elected official you know and i should say uh speak up and and i haven't before and that's just not acceptable it's something that i know that i need to work on and improve the one other thing that i wanted to say because there is a social studies teacher in me so i i was looking at all the arguments and you know one of the things that we keep hearing in america today is this idea this this fear of you know socialism and changing the the the the structure of the family and all the just ruining of the american culture when we bring up these these groups and these topics and as a history teacher i want people to realize this this is

049not a new idea that's been brought up when change is requested you know i did some research on these things you know and there was a group of people that were they were called socialist anarchists and a threat to ruin the world they were women women's suffrage movement okay so this isn't a new argument you know martin luther king jr you know j edgar hoover spent years searching or searching for him as for communist contacts so we keep hearing this argument and it's just an argument as a social studies teacher i i struggle with greatly because any time a group comes up and asks for equality or freedom we hear it again immigrants if you're an irish immigrant you know you were told you were you you're coming here was going to ruin american culture

050lgbtq ruining american culture um women entering the workplace is going to upset the family culture so it's just it's just this frustration that i have you know when i read these arguments as a social studies teacher it's like well we've been we've been playing the same tune for for centuries now you know a new group comes up and wants the quality of their socialism you know or ooh they're a danger to the the cultural value and it's just it's something as a teacher and it just gets me because it's not a new argument at all jody do you have any um thoughts in response to i mean willow's um comment our question about you know from the administration perspective um on this well i think that to be fair sorry that's us too i didn't

051mean to put it on you jody that's that's all of us that's i was just opening it up for like what are we gonna do next well i think that we we are though you know to we are moving forward with this you know the board established the anti-racism policy um we've been doing a lot with diversity in uh within our curriculum which actually i'll speak to tonight in the state of the schools um i think you've seen some of the work that the buildings have been doing um you know it's part of our goals for this year not only for um you know updating our curriculum but also um doing staff development professional development in these areas and i think that's the that's the bigger picture piece right that um it's not just about

052megyn kelly in how people feel about her it's this whole issue of race and diversity and equity that we've been talking about now for a couple of years and i think we've been making a lot of headway in this and i think um the high school in particular with the english and social studies department who's really taken the lead on this and done a lot um i think we're in our work with um harriet in the parent workshops that we're offering student workshops so i think that it's really part of a bigger picture that is being addressed not just at the high school but really across the district and so i think that we just continue to move forward in making headway in in this particular area is the way we address those issues meredith

053or wendy did you have any thoughts yes actually i did do you want to go first meredith that's okay um i don't see why we can't draft a statement as a board that we may disagree with the committee's decision and just leave it at that i mean i don't i want the chance to go on record as saying that i believe it is hurtful to students who are walking under that and i'm gonna as a mom and as a an english teacher there's an english teacher in me here um we don't need to overturn committee's decision because that it was their job we gave that to them to do but we don't have to agree with it and that's all i'm gonna say meredith um thank you to willow and jonathan especially for um voicing

054a lot of my opinions um i think it is something that we should think about whether or not this entire hall of fame is bringing any value at this point to um to the school district i don't know um it's taken up a tremendous amount of administrative time um and i i just don't right now i'm not seeing the value in it what is it what is it teaching our our students um that some some people who went to the same school as them accomplished things um i think that can be done in in different ways um and i just i don't want anyone in our school to feel uncomfortable by something that we have put up in our school and and if it's not bringing value and it is hurting children i i don't

055see the point of it at this point and just circle back just on what you said meredith you know i don't agree with it being up i i just feel that the committee we let them make the decision and they did the investigative work and they came to that conclusion but i do agree with you i'm not in favor of a hall of fame i think that people contribute to society in many many ways and to highlight certain individuals um for the different ways that they contribute doesn't necessarily add any value and like you said it it created a lot of angst and you know of course i want every student to feel safe at the high school nobody should have to walk by her picture and feel uncomfortable and it shouldn't also be something

056that's going to cause problems between students who may or may not agree with that opinion so if it's just causing turbulence then that's really the question for the board or the administrators is do we want to continue this practice and i would i feel that we probably shouldn't but that's another point about that you know i've noticed the middle school is doing like a monthly um i forget what they call it hero or something like that where they talk about four different um people who've contributed and kids vote on them and that is a way for kids to learn about um historical or contemporary figures that maybe they didn't have an opportunity to learn about before and a way that we're getting uh more diverse important figures into the discussion so maybe that's something that

057we could be doing at the high school instead of just recognizing people who went to our school who also did interesting things why why not um talk about a more diverse group of people and just bring that knowledge to our students and have a hall of fame not necessarily linked to our school but people who have done interesting things that you may not have heard about or learned about and a way to educate our students about um people who have contributed in ways that aren't necessarily that they hadn't learned about before i'm just throwing that idea out there meredith i'm glad you brought that up i think it has been a successful um program at the middle school and i think one of the things that um has been successful about it is that it

058has included a lot of student voices with respect to both selecting the individuals that they're voting on each month and actually doing the voting on them um and then i'm having information up about them in the uh in the hallways um you know i i would like to thank the committee for their efforts in meeting additional times to take a look at this issue and making the effort to reach out to her and review her responses you know i do want to respect the process even though i agree with i think what um pretty much everybody said which is that they don't have to don't necessarily um enjoy her membership in the uh in the hall of fame um but with that said and what meredith and christine were were referring to i'm wondering jody

059whether uh you can i'm not sure if it would be with dave domell if you have a conversation um and about the value of the hall of fame um in general at this point um whether it's something that we should have whether we need to have it um and then be able to you know report back to the board on the outcome of that conversation i think that would be valuable sure i'm happy to do that the other suggestion too i wanted to throw out there i know we have our homecoming game and we usually do hall of fame inductees but another thing that we could look at is celebrating students that are are doing different types of work that contribute at the time they're in high school and celebrating them while they're in high

060school you know somebody who goes above and beyond and the students know so maybe that's something that we turn our focus on is our own you know the students that are currently there and the work that they're doing because we have a lot of intelligent bright uh students who volunteer and put a lot of good in the world so what a good time to celebrate them as well sure yeah i can i can circle back around with the high school administration and in the committee themselves to talk about that didn't we have a young lady who had a an experiment fly on the shuttle at one point a while back or was a candidate for a flight yeah brianna baldwin right right so somebody like that who goes above and beyond would be you know

061an ideal candidate anybody have anything else on this that they want to add that does conclude the superintendent before it's a little lengthy tonight that sorry be a record for a superintendent's report i think it is yeah uh next on our agenda is our board report um and um i think it will be significantly shorter um i did want to uh congratulate um amy roose and the cast of life after um i watched the uh the film of the show and i can only imagine that it must have taken amy and her team a lot of time to put that together and i just wanted to congratulate everyone involved with that i also wanted to say thank you to everybody who was involved with putting together the parent meetings um that were held in the

062past couple weeks i'm not going to try to list everybody because i know i will forget someone but you know i listened into both of the meetings and i thought they provided a lot of valuable information for the parents and i've heard um from uh people in the community that they felt like they had a lot of questions answered and we're really happy to have the chance to kind of check in and hear what was happening and be able to make their voices heard at this mid-year point does anybody have anything else that they would like to share i also got to see the uh to see life after amy did a great job the students were really excellent it was a it was a lot of fun um a little of it went by

063uh quickly and i periodically would miss something so i ended up watching it twice and it was just enjoyable the second time yeah i love the creative thinking about picking a show that could be done in that format and be just as good as if we were watching it in the theater so i i know that those kids were so excited to be able to do something um so i really appreciated that we thought outside the box and we got a front row seat which you know and ticket price was right too how do you have to get dressed [Music] um and i don't think we had any um have had any committee meetings since our last meeting but i just want to double check in case i'm missing something okay anybody have anything else

064then i will turn to the next item on our agenda which is our presentation this evening our state of the schools report okay thank you i think brittany's going to pull up the presentation and we're going to tag team on this okay so the state of schools 2021 um you can go to the next slide so um it's hard to believe that um it's been over a year it's been almost a year since we started hearing about kovid so this year's state of the schools is somewhat of a condensed version it doesn't include uh much of the strategic plan since we put that on pause um it does uh the school climate survey typically would be included so we had to uh make some changes there and we will be serving surveying middle and high

065school students though this month that we met today and we're going to be doing that after the february break to get some feedback from students on academic support and mental health support next slide please so this past year um it's been interesting we've been dealing with covid enrollment we do have our annual goals and action plans that i'll talk about and part of tonight will be to highlight our budget planning which judy kehoe will be presenting more in the following the next meeting actually where we get our budget process underway so our reopening plan um i think you all recall and we spent months um putting this together including all of these components and um i think you all are well aware that it's met has changed many times since we released this back in

066august as part of our reopening plan health and safety have been our real top priority we talked a lot about these last summer when we had our parent meetings and as we've gone through this school year so i wanted to talk a little bit about our cases that we've had this is a look at where reported covid cases have been both students and staff you can see have tested positive the information has been from case investigations and contact tracing does indicate that most infections are taking place outside of school we get asked this question a lot and do we know if there's been any transmission in schools and while we um have no indication that there's been transmission of covet in schools i think we also need to be cognizant that um we are large

067buildings we are large places where there's a lot of people so to say with 100 certainty that there's been no transmission i think um would probably not be accurate but we do believe that our schools are safe everyone is wearing masks we're six feet apart we're following all the social distancing protocols and uh you know even though it seems um like we do a lot of reporting which we do overall this is a relatively small number of positive cases since september 8th our first case was reported actually on september 27th and you can see the large spikes similar to what we've experienced in the community happened around thanksgiving in the december break and hopefully we're on the um you know positive trend of that downward spiral that we've seen for the last week or week

068and a half we did begin on-site covet testing we began preparing for this in december um if you recall the governor at the time was designating areas of zones cluster zones orange and yellow so there's currently no zones they've kind of gone away but we did get tests to as a result of that and so we're beginning to test our staff as well as our students and our student testing will begin next week the next slide so we did start our staff testing and we had a less than one percent positive we've had many questions about staff getting vaccines as well recently and while we can't mandate vaccinations of our staff we do currently have more than 50 percent who have had one or more or one or both shots at this point or have

069secured appointments so we're fortunate as to our location and the availability of vaccinations that our staff are able to get so the goal of our reopening plan and testing and mitigation efforts are to keep our schools open and to maximize our in-person instruction so we've had our k-6 students in daily aside from a few times 7 12 are on the a b hybrid schedule and we have been able to maintain daily instructions for our skills intensive skills be rise in our enl students so one of the things uh when we talk about the hybrid model um it's not quite that it's not that um it's a little bit tough to figure out so we have a little video to highlight what does the hybrid model of instruction look like so um brittany if you could

070play that there's no sound this is your chance what's the word see this is not this is a non-phonetic word this is why it's killing me a little bit so i see three hands that forehand oh cameron you're back in the oh uh-huh you have your chance mute it up bro beat it up test what's that say right dylan tamara right camera go ahead and take it chase need your cam need your microphone please cameron this is your chance what's the word amber tambor so um that's what a classroom in the hybrid model looks like um and you'll see um all of our 612 teachers using that model of instruction for our students however uh we do not have that model we did not believe that that was an effective way for our k5 students

071to learn so we did create the k5 virtual learning academy and k5 families have the ability to choose the vla as an option on a quarterly basis and we do manage enrollment between the vla and the elementary classrooms so that gets a little tricky when people are transitioning but the vla has been a highly effective model and we've had some great feedback from families um who have been enrolled in that model for much of the year this year thinking about our enrollment we are tracking this this is a big part of our planning from year to year and you can see that based on the capital district region planning commission we are still expecting to see slight declines um out through the year 26. and again you can see this not for k 5 6

0728 and 9 12. again if you look at the bottom totals you can see the projections uh right now for the year about 4 200 um going down to a little over 4 000 in the out years of 2025. so to just provide an update on students who are participating currently in our in-person learning and this is as of january 26th you can see at the k-5 level uh we're still similar to where we were at the beginning of the year um anywhere from um you know 88 percent uh down to about in our six through eight grade levels uh we're right around between 76 and through 82 percent um as of again january 26 and our 9 through 12 is currently where we've seen the biggest dip um so in grades uh at the

073start of the year we were closer to 85 to 90 percent and if you look currently we've had a lot of students excuse me transition to virtual only to grades 11 and 12 in the 50th percent so um we've been talking about this and one of the things we're going to be asking families to do if you recall at the beginning of the year we asked people to commit to the hybrid model the a b model or virtual model and during the holidays um things got a little crazy and we had a lot of covid cases and a lot of quarantining so we had many families and students who went to just virtual particularly in the middle and high school many of the middle school students have returned we still have a lot of high

074school students who are remaining virtual quite honestly because they don't want to have to quarantine because we've had many students and staff who have had to quarantine three and four times so what we are planning to do is um beginning after the february break we are asking families in particular in the high school in middle school if you're going to be virtual you need to remain virtual until the um fourth quarter because we also have many students and many families who have asked for their children to come in daily and it with this kind of um drop in our numbers for the hybrid model it only makes sense to allow students who want to be there daily to come in if we have the capacity to do so so we'll be communicating that out in

075the coming week and asking people to commit because at the high school particularly we are seeing many students who show up certain days and you know if the weather is not good they want to stay in their pjs and they don't come to school and that's really not fair to the students who want to be there every day um and we've also had a lot of questions about um how can we get more students in the building and i just want to go back to this diagram which we showed as part of our reopening plan and currently the guidance is that students have to be six feet apart in classrooms and so when we talk about can't we just bring all the students back uh the reason we can't is we we just don't have

076the physical space with the social distancing requirements um of six feet um if those social distancing requirements lessen uh where we could go to four or five feet we could absolutely get all of our students back but with six feet social distancing in the size of our classrooms in our secondary schools we just don't have the capacity to do that at this time so the other piece that we spent a lot of time on is how do we respond to covid cases and we work directly with albany county department of health either they contact us or often families will contact us our school nurses and we then work with albany county to identify any students and staff who were potentially exposed at school to covid this then results in the process of identifying contacts that

077we then have to provide to albany county department of health in quarantine notifications to any families or staff members who have to quarantine as a result of that exposure from there we have to report any case details to the school community which are pretty much our daily notifications and then we also have to report that to the new york state dashboard and i think one thing that is important that people don't always understand is that the department of health is the eighth lead agency when it comes to contact tracing and quarantining school districts don't get to decide who is able who has to quarantine we have to take the lead of the albany county department of health and this flow chart just um you know i'm not going to go over this specifically but you

078can see that there are a lot of people involved in positive covid cases that have to be reported and this flow chart really gives you an idea of the number of people who potentially have to be either contacted or involved in that process so our strategic plan um we put that on pause if you recall uh we used the metrics from 19 and 20. however um it's a because of covid there were a lot of things that we felt just made sense to um put on pause so um we did see some progress when we first put that in place in just in year one 43 of our metrics we met and we helped establish the baseline data it does help us identify areas of focus and we set our annual goals to meet in

079areas of academics character community and wellness and we did modify some of our metrics from the beginning of the plan however because of covid uh 61 of our year 2 metrics couldn't be measured and 92 percent of them were impacted in some way by covin which is why we felt it was important to kind of put that on pause and once we're passed covid we will do a reset of our strategic plan last year we were rated the number one school districts in the capital region and out of 430 upstate districts we were ranked number six again in academics um and this is from the buffalo business first we've remained number six for the last several years so related to our goals this year we are still continuing some of them although we did modify

080them so we are continuing our program reviews we are assessing our learning gaps we are integrating materials on diversity within our curriculum and providing training developing a comprehensive curriculum that addresses gender identity relationships consent and sexual harassment and integrating technology which has just become a huge component of our instruction because of covin the lab school is doing a program review this year this is a program that is an elective program and there's an application period currently that's open through friday anyone who wants to learn more about the lab school should visit the high school website and applications are being set accepted for students in grades 8 through 11 currently also we just announced that we are offering the seal of bi-literacy this is available to current seniors and it will also be available in years

081to come this recognizes high school graduates who have attained a high level of proficiency in listening speaking reading and writing in one or more languages one of the areas that i know is a concern is learning gaps we've had that question a lot from parents during our parent meetings and this kind of highlights all of the work that we've done and continue to do to make sure that students are still achieving and what areas do we need to focus on using things such as the i ready data um the reflex math program in elementary we've talked a lot about prioritizing our curriculum knowing that there was going to be time lost not only since last march but this this year as well um in making sure that we're focusing on the priority standards and making

082sure that we're staying on top of students using progress monitoring and making sure our grading is reflective of what the outcomes are we want the students to learn this just highlights um some of the diversity work we've done within our curriculum we had a board presentation on this earlier in the fall uh andy baker and nick petruccione were here to talk about some of the different things we've done within the curriculum you can see we've added a lot of diversity within our literature for ela social studies and science um as well as the secondary level where we're looking at different titles we're looking at different resources that we can bring in to really present more diverse perspectives within our curriculum in instructional technology ray nardelli um talked about this a little bit in his last

083presentation about um all of the instructional apps that teachers are using the professional development and as you saw uh from that earlier video on the hybrid model there is a lot of technology that teachers had to quickly uh learn and um be able to implement and now it's it's something you see every day in all of our classrooms we do have tech coaches the board had added those a couple of years ago and they have been a huge those individuals have really helped us to move forward with our technology integration teachers are using seesaw google classroom for instruction you can see the interactions between the elementary middle school and high school tracking they're keeping track of how often they're being used for consulting and we've done a lot of technology both during the summer as

084well as during the school year to help teachers be able to use technology effectively within their classrooms our next goal of character we've had 78 of our elementary teachers take part in cultural proficiency trainers and this year we've had 53 high school students be recipients of be the change awards also we've done uh professional development um you've heard a little bit about this in our prior presentations for staff on equity and cultural responsiveness as well as professional developments to our staff related to sexual harassment and gender identity in relationships [Music] in cultural proficiency we've had special area teachers that in three through five teachers during uh conference day take part in that training our social studies in the la departments are working with um our consultant harriet grossmanner on curriculum changes and for students we're

085doing some of the same working with them on how to identify implicit bias there's open dialogue between high school students and our recent alumni who were vocal in the spring about some of their own experiences and also monthly celebrations in education related to cultural [Music] proficiency this uh is an image of um some of what's been happening in our schools and we have um a little video clip is i think it's by anaya do you see that yeah can you play that brittany today marks the first day of black history month which recognizes the people the culture and the important events of the african diaspora black history month was founded by african-american historian and author carter g woodson and has been recognized nationally since 1976. this february please join bchs in our celebration of black

086history culture and innovations here are a few things we're excited to share with you wonderful guest speakers soul food in the cafeteria movies celebrating black joy during lunch inspiring artwork from gorilla art club an amazing spotify playlist featuring black artists made by alana a unity day at the end of the month when we will wear orange to celebrate kindness acceptance and inclusion and lastly an outstanding black history month google sites where you can find all of the aforementioned information and more now why do we celebrate black history month i will leave you with this poem black history month by nikki giovanni if black history month is not viable then wind does not carry the seeds and drop them on fertile ground rain does not dampen the land and encourage the seeds to root sun does

087not warm the earth and kiss the seedlings and tell them plain you're as good as anybody else you've got a place here too and that was nya santalis who um did that announcement on monday to kick off black history month at the high school so i thought that was worth sharing and related to sexual harassment um our goal is i think we've said this will not be tolerated we know we have a lot of work to do in the areas and these are just a few examples of how we are working uh to educate students and staff at every level and again uh kristin connor and fred powers had shared more in information on this in a prior board presentation also one of our goals related to community strengthening family school and community partnerships we

088have adapted as needed to assist families and students no matter where learning takes place our food service and transportation team have played a huge role in this effort you can see this is an image of our food service who are providing meals and students are having those at home our backpack program which has continued to be a huge success in an image of our caring and sharing program uh over the holidays where we raised over twelve thousand dollars in gift cards and food donations to give to our our families in the community and wellness this year i've had 15 q a session for parents and staff to help address their questions and our guidance department if you haven't checked it out has created a virtual calming space for students and staff and there are 18

089national parks if you'd like to go explore those also we've been implementing the k-8 social emotional learning curriculum uh to provide increased mental health supports providing staff with resources and staff development we've implemented a tiered system of supports to help monitor attendance and we are still continuing to focus on green initiatives in regards to some of the social emotional concerns i know we've talked about this a lot you can see this highlights at all the levels some of the things that we've been doing working with the coordinated care teams at the elementary schools and the zones of regulations if you have elementary students you've probably heard about those i'm in the middle school the counselors are doing curriculum pushing into the classrooms and again the coordinated care teams there are providing direct support to individuals

090and families as well as at the high school where we're also focusing on lessons in 9th and 10th grade excel classes the counseling center have created monthly newsletters to address current mental health concerns which also are provided to staff to help support students who may be struggling and the calming space which i which i just mentioned and doesn't this look great this time of year our gardens um so they are still we are still continuing with our green efforts i know that mark warford is still pushing them and hopefully soon we'll see the gardens getting planted for the coming year something to look forward to [Music] the capital project uh we are finishing this up um and you can see um we've done a lot of work and hopefully some of these spaces which have

091been underused at this point will start getting some more use uh there were 111 projects district-wide um this was approved back in 2016. it seems like that was so long ago um and the high school auditorium has just been completed and that was the cornerstone of the project we have a short video to highlight some of the images [Music] so [Music] so [Music] [Applause] so [Music] do [Music] so with our capital project um you know we had decided several years ago that smaller more regular projects uh make sense and so since the spring last spring we have been working with our architects to identify what potentially we might be considering for our next capital project which you will hear more about so in the next steps we would be identifying what are the major projects

092in the board of education would determine those priority projects with the review of the facilities plan and we would need to then set timeline for uh considerations of construction and community readiness so more to come on on that and finally uh the budget which i know judy kehoe is is very much looking forward to uh for her next presentation uh so the state aid outlook um is a com is uh made up of a lot of things and we've heard a little bit about um what the state is considering although there's a lot of unknowns at this time it does look that state aid would be significantly lower in 2021 22 due to some reductions in building aid and transportation aid and there's some shuffling of different different aids from federal to state which we

093will talk more about as we get into the budget project in 2020 21 eight payments will be made in full which is good news because we had heard that where there would be a reduction of up to 20 percent so it looks like that will not happen so the current budget uh for this year is just over 103 million dollars the property tax levy is 68 million and we had planned to use the use of fund balance of about three million dollars so um this slide is pretty self-explanatory balancing the budget our expenses have to equal our revenue and that is our goal every year when we develop the budget you can see this is a summary of our budget expenses our largest expenses are obviously in our staffing with our instructional staff and our

094employee benefits and then other areas such as student transportation debt service and general support and our revenues have to equal that so you can see our two main sources of revenue our state aid and local property taxes and this just gives you a highlight of the budget history our 10-year average budget increase is 1.61 and our tax library history over the last 10 years the average budget increase has been 2.1 percent so our budget development timeline will begin at our next meeting where judy kehoe will give a more detailed overview of the budget in our budget planning we'll also have our technology budget and transportation budget overview at that time as well on march 3rd we'll do our operations in maintenance in our athletics presentation on march 17th we'll present our instructional program and special

095education program and with the goal um by april 14th of adopting the budget uh they're still a little bit unknown about uh the budget vote and how that will all work this year if you remember last year was a little bit crazy uh but we'll um we'll keep everyone posted as we learn more about that and just one other thing to mention we do have several um of our reti leadership positions retiring this year cindy jurawicz our transportation director just retired and we have hired karim johnson uh greg nolte will be retiring also um in june and we have two elementary principals retiring this year so there's some changes in our leadership team that we are planning for as well and on that note i'll close that's an overview of the state of the schools

096in this um i would say unprecedented year so if anyone has any questions i'll be happy to answer them jody go ahead go ahead i speaking of unprecedented i was wondering what our um cost was on ppe cleaning supplies and associated cobit measures and where that was on the bar graph yeah we just put those together um not long ago i don't recall the amount for the ppe because we had to total at ppe and the staffing judy do you recall what that amount was am preparing that information that we will include in the budget overview um i was just we're gathering those totals we have them and we'll present out and obviously all the costs associated with testing would go i assume would go into that category as well correct although the testing just

097um the actual tests that we have were provided to us we didn't have to pay for those jonathan did you have a question um yeah do we have any idea um about the with regard to the budget vote if people are going to have to um use petitions again or not and where that is i mean i know last year we had an ex a uh quite a bit of a turnout for obvious reasons which means that petitions would have to carry a lot more signatures than they have for the past quite number of years right the signature piece is up i know if that's what's required we haven't heard anything the only thing we've heard related to the budget vote is that albany county has told us they do not have the voting machines

098to provide to us um so we're working on an alternative plan for that but we haven't heard anything about the petitions if signatures are going to be required i would expect we would be hearing i'm hoping relatively soon about that process because we've already had people asking about it i find it odd that albany county doesn't have the machines to give us given the fact we use what one two machines to actually process i mean what are they doing with them um they said that they can't give them to us because of the timing of the other elections although i know that boces has been working on this because other counties are providing those machines to their school district so um yeah i don't really have a good answer except what we've been told thank

099you yep does anybody else have any questions yeah just well sort of like you it's not directly related but you did bring up like the quarantine piece in your state of the schools and just the the fact that you know counties different counties are doing it differently and the way that albany county is doing it in i understand there is the issue of safety but it's just the number of people that have to quarantine for each case is taking such a toll on all the schools and you know we have people that are now in their fourth quarantine i don't know if i've ever heard of a fifth yet but there's at least people in their fourth quarantine and is the county looking at what other counties are doing you know saratoga or warren in

100terms of or even out like in rochester i know they're doing it differently is there a potential for reviewing that so you know if you are like if you're right next to the kid you're eating lunch with them yeah we should look at the quarantine but if you're 30 feet in the other side of the room do you really need to quarantine so i'll jodi you can respond but i've been on calls with every county and the state department of health and albany county is doing it the way that the state department of health has indicated it should be done um so for whatever that's worth oh and i believe you it's just there's you know you hear stories from every other county and there's different things being done in different schools and it's just

101it affects us so much because you know we've had situations now where one one person has taken out 140 and so it just it doesn't it makes school very difficult to maintain uh being open if we've got to keep doing that yeah and it's true chris i mean every county does seem to following different protocols and i know that we've had a lot of discussions at the albany county schools about the quarantining because it has forced us to have to shut down and go remote simply because of staffing and um you know those numbers i shared with high school students staying virtual that percentage dropped since the beginning of the year that is mostly a result of kids not wanting to have to quarantine because we've had many kids quarantining three four times um at

102this point and and they're frustrated by it staff are frustrated by it so i do believe that that is what's causing many of our high school students to not want to return to in-person learning and doh isn't even following up with some of the kids i mean if we're quarantining kids from a class just because somebody came down with covid doh isn't even following up with them so just it's such a tremendous impact on learning when there's no no studies that are showing that they're getting it while they're in school and it doesn't make sense i understand what willow is saying is we're following it the way that you know it was it was meant to to be laid out but all these other districts are doing it and is the rate higher in these

103these areas you know saratoga warren is it higher than where we are what we're doing yeah i i'm hope i'm hoping that um you know if the rates continue to drop and there's less community spread that um that's an area that will be reconsidered because i do think it is um hurting um our ability to have kids keep kids in person i should say yep any other questions yes i have a question about um the money we expend on ppe and a lot of other covid related expenses is that not reimbursable by the feds through the cares act we should be getting that money back so that's not something we have to worry about expect expenditures into the future because it's all going to be like it's reimbursed right well um not maybe not tell

104me how it's supposed to be judy do you want to talk about the cares funny and also the fema fema is the main thing we've submitted the fema application for the expenses that they would allow we haven't heard anything on the application i will let you know as soon as we have some money in hand or some kind of a determination on that but to date nothing so we're going to include that in the information that we present to the board what we've spent what we expect to have reimbursed and then what areas we've saved on because at the end of the day we want to make sure that we're able to live within the budget that was adopted so we'll give you that overview at the next presentation anybody else have any questions thank

105you jody sure sharing all that with us i particularly liked the video of the uh construction update and got getting a chance to see the uh the auditorium in particular it looks great i can't wait to actually see it yes we're excited to hopefully use it soon uh next on the agenda is our recognition of public comment and we actually did not have any um comments submitted uh in advance of the meeting this evening uh next um item six action items uh a finance action items it is recommended that the board of education approve the following finance action item one film any opposed any abstentions that passes b professional personnel action items it is recommended that the board of education approve the following professional personnel action items one through eight so moved second any discussion

106all in favor any opposed any abstentions that carries c support personnel action items it is recommended that the board of education approve the following support staff action items 1 through 10. second any discussion all in favor any opposed any abstentions that passes d other action items it is recommended that the board of action the board of education approved the following action items one and two so moved second okay any discussion all in favor aye aye any opposed any abstentions that passes item seven future meetings and events um on monday february 22nd at six o'clock we have a policy committee meeting um on wednesday february 24th um that is our next regularly scheduled board meeting um it's a um i think a week later than it normally would be because of the february break um that's

107at seven o'clock anticipating an executive session starting at six um and then the meeting following that is on wednesday march 3rd at 7 anticipating executive session starting at 6. uh seeing no need to go back into executive session can i have a motion to adjourn the meeting show moved second any discussion no all in favor any opposed meeting adjourned have a good night everybody good night thank you