001okay see here it looks like i just caught the connection so it'll probably go live in a couple seconds here yeah it shows a countdown of 1.43 we're good don't forget to record too jamie yes ma'am cheryl really quick the cutest baby of the year award goes to your little granddaughter sorry cheryl's not mew but that's okay where'd he go oh yeah i was i was doing that matt sorry look sorry cutest ever happy baby so much fun that's awesome i think you're all set jamie i'm gonna go okay okay dan thank you have a good evening dan all right i'll call the meeting to order and ask everyone to rise for the pledge please i pledge allegiance to the flag of the united states of america and to the republic for which it stands
002one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice for all thank you everybody nice to see everyone uh milton is excused tonight he's at his daughter's soccer game bless his soul tonight um it's her last one so we wish her well and we're really glad he was able to join her um i have a little piece of celebration before we go into the bulk of our meeting on special occasions the board of education has the honor and the privilege of awarding what we call a cause for applause which is to recognize um service and work above and beyond that brings really great things and reflects well on our district and so tonight we are honoring annal vani um for the following four reinventing organizing and coordinating the great pumpkin walk this year known as the
003pumpkin drive-through 2020. the great pumpkin walk is a canadico tradition where students carve jack-o-lanterns and an organized family-friendly walk near the fairground on the ontario county pathway celebrates their creations proceeds benefit the ontario county pathways association due to this year's pandemic the walk could not occur in the traditional forum so ann and many helpers improvised and created a drive-through experience at the middle school which raised nearly 700 in donations to benefit the ontario county pathways so with gratitude we recognize this excellent example of community spirit and partnership thank you ann and all of your wonderful helpers for providing a really awesome experience for people yes here's our applause so i got to do the fun part jamie sorry you don't think my part's fun i'm sure it's even more fun oh it's thrilling buckle up
004and get ready here we go so um i just have a couple updates in fact but they may take a little time so i will share my screen if you don't mind i think it'll make it a bit easier i know you can't see each other when i do that and it's a bit problematic but can you give me a thumbs up if you can see my screen and it has kind of a heat map looking thing thank you so you may have heard us talk about this governor cuomo cluster action initiative uh and as you might guess sometimes initiatives change sometimes guidance changes and lo and behold uh things just changed so i want to talk with you a little bit about this and hopefully bring some clarity around what changed but uh for
005those of you that may not be familiar the governor and his team will designate if there's a hot spot of infections a breakout of infections a red zone where it's most confined all right and that's the most restricted zone the red zone then they'll likely set up a perimeter that they call an orange orange zone and that has another level of restrictions a little bit further away from the epicenter of where the breakout was and then the third would be a yellow zone uh which has a little less restrictions but still restrictions based on their proximity to the epicenter of the breakout and so it kind of looks like this in general here's an example of brooklyn a few weeks back and what that looked like but scrolling down we we learned more information all
006the time but this actually this slide that i've shared in our forums i've shared previously with all of you is no longer entirely accurate um and so essentially looking down here at schools what i want to point out is if we're designated red or orange were closed immediately however there's new information about that and i'll share that momentarily if we're designated yellow we can remain open but we have to randomly test 20 percent of our students and staff population each week it's the in-person population and there's a few issues with this number one obviously it doesn't account for the fully virtual population so the families and children who selected fully virtual or the staff who were fully virtual it wouldn't necessarily impact the other piece we've given feedback to the department of health around is
007places like our transportation department op center district office they're not reflected in the state's dashboard they're only the only things we can submit are school buildings where students are attached to and have a beds code well these other buildings don't have that and so it's negating it's neglecting that density of population and so um this is all part of the calculation we have to do to know what is 20 for us 20 is around middle of 600 but we would estimate to test approximately 700 weekly to account for kids who might be absent you know staff that might be absent to make sure we're getting that mid 600 each week now new information just came out that if you're designated orange or red you must close down for a bit of time in fact three
008days you can return in a red or orange zone if you test everybody on day five so we could conceivably if we were red or orange bring everybody back by day five if everybody has been tested and can show a negative test for any of you who've gone to get tested you know that the turnaround is not that quick wouldn't happen that fast um and i can't even i'll be a bit transparent and vulnerable here i can't even fathom how we could pull that off in two weeks let alone five days but it's something to keep in mind that's new guidance that just came out now we'd asked all along what does this what designates red orange yellow and we've had very little information on that but last week some information was released we are
009in ontario county a tier three group and essentially your designated yellow if your seven day rolling average positivity rate is above 3.5 percent okay right now in ontario county as of today our seven day rolling average positivity rate is exactly two percent so we're below the yellow it would have to be 4.5 to be orange and 5.5 to be red but if you look over where it's highlighted here geographic area zip code so what we believe and again we don't have total clarity on this we believe let's say there was a hot spot and a breakout in victor first let's just use that for example it's a different zip code than us and so would that zip code be determined red and then then you would go to the orange and then yellow would that
010yellow reach our zip code in our school perhaps in parts of farmington for example but these are things to pay close attention to additionally another question we have who is testing 700 people every week if we're yellow we've been around and around about that had many phone calls with ontario county department of health our county leaders um and even at the state level and what we believe to be true although there's different practices around the state is that really the department of health would work with the state the state would send resources whether it be contracts with people like perhaps emt and a variety of other people to help deliver these tests now i say that because some of the smaller more remote counties have worked with the department of health in the school nurses
011have delivered those tests but i have reiterated and assured our department of health here in ontario county that our nurses would not have capacity to do that they just they simply do not have time in their day to test that many and so we're working with them to try to sort that out but it's a lot to still consider but again that's really the yellow orange red designation a lot of information still needs to come forward i've asked for our county leaders uh if we could have a zoom meeting to really kind of go through this and plan for this in a proactive manner because right now if it were to be designated i have to be honest i don't think we'd have the capacity to start doing this the the structures they're not in
012place there's just too much unknown i know our county manager brian young asked if we could wait a day or two they're trying to get some more answers from the state government and um certainly yes we need answers time is of the essence and as quick as we can get to this the better off we'll be um and so we're still looking at that that's one piece the other piece is this change in new york travel guidance that came out over the weekend and so i don't know that many of us slept after seeing this because of the impact that it has but this is pretty ambiguous and in fact i i was able to communicate with mary beer from ontario county brian young a variety of area superintendents and actually we got connected with
013some state representatives today because i had a lot of questions about this and they did respond and gave us an answer that is a little bit perplexing but let me let me explain about where this really um is impacting us right now and i'll just be frank is is with club and travel sports so we have a number of club and sports that are traveling to places like pennsylvania or new jersey or matter of fact maryland and so if they went to maryland in their less than 24 hours previously you know there was nothing that needed to be done they were less than 24 hours and uh the contiguous states there was nothing that needed to be done there are contiguous states there's no restrictions that obviously leaves people feeling pretty uneasy but right now
014the new rules are and brian feel free to chime in if i mess any of this up because i'll be honest with you this is i'm still trying to wrap my head around it but if someone leaves a state and goes to a state that's um restricted not one of the contiguous states upon return they have to quarantine and on day four they have to take a cova test they can only return with a negative covet test brian you just unmuted yourself is it less than 24 too is that what you're gonna chime in there no it's just the other part is you know if let's say they go to maryland uh oh you're doing less than 24 you're saying right now yeah yeah sorry yep there are so many pieces to this uh if
015they go for more than 24 hours and this one's peculiar they actually have to test take a cover test three three days before coming to new york then quarantine and take another test on day four being back in new york but my question is for example going to maryland for um a sport tournament and you're there for 48 hours do you test the day before you leave go there for 48 hours come back quarantine test on day four and then have to wait three or four days for your negative result before you can come back michelle's living this life too i see her nodding her head vigorously the contiguous states oh now i've lost my train of thought the contiguous states there is no restriction essentially for contiguous states but there's language that says travel
016has to be for essential business only and that was the sticking point that i really wanted to get an answer from the state government on today because it's that's really you know contrary to one another essential business only versus a sport tournament and i really pressed this hard with the state they actually responded and said do you have a recommendation i offered what i thought was a logical recommendation and he just responded and said we're not restricting them from traveling to contiguous states for you in travel sports so that's where we are right now it is a little bit mind-boggling our local department of health doesn't feel comfortable with it some of our staff and families in the community they're not comfortable with it but that's kind of where we are um jen i see
017your hand up so i if we go back up in this document where you talked about the test three days before departure um one of the things that i don't understand and maybe no one in this meeting understands yet is i don't know i don't know whether you have to have a test three days before you go or within three days before you go there's in that i don't i don't know if there's flexibility in that three i think or whether it has to be exactly three before you go we believe it's within three days that's what i thought so this is another thing that brian young is trying to find more information more clarity uh but again i've asked to meet with about this i think we need to be pretty consistent and uniform
018but you know i would assume we'll have a meeting the next couple days to try to gain clarity because every weekend we have people traveling to other states with club and travel sports and the last thing i want to do is be responsible for regulating club and travel sports i don't want any part of that but there does need to be consistency i think michelle i was i was just gonna ask the question that you may have started to answer is how many how many club and travel sports groups are we aware of are in existence that may be playing a little fast and loose with the rules and how what's our responsibility when we know about them so when we know about them we investigate each speech case vern calls he does some investigations
019we're asking everybody to fill out the travel form and explain what had occurred we've asked them where they've stayed how long were they there you know we we investigate we become aware of them in fact i'll be honest most of our parents students and staff they're honest people they they're calling us and saying this is what we're this is what we're looking to do you know help us understand what we can and can't do but it's hard because you know i feel like sometimes we're giving advice we're not entirely sure about the advice because we're getting different advice or different information which makes it challenging but you know there are a lot of teams going and i'll also say that a lot of people are not being loose with the rules uh they're trying to
020to do it right but again i think that passed through that was one of the things i said with the state representative is i really feel like that 24-hour pass-through rule was i'm driving and i need to stop at a hotel for a night or i have a layover at the airport it's not to go to a wedding or you know or you know some larger gathering event but still i'm there less than 24 hours so i'm safe maybe it's just my interpretation but that just doesn't seem to make sense i think i saw julianne's hand so i'm wondering how this new this new system seems to supersede the list like that travel advisory list because this is basically now all states except the conti contiguous states and i'm wondering how that connects to our
021health form that people are filling out every day and because i think it it references that list if i remember correctly and do we need to look at that and what kind of answers are we going to get based on what's happening on the weekends that's a great question so what we're asking anybody who travels to a restricted state which is on that list to fill out the new york travel form and when they fill it out they'll get a response back that says if they're they need to quarantine based on what they put in there or they can come right back to work and we ask them to take a screenshot of that and share it with burn and they're building or their direct supervisor so if that doh form is saying they're they're
022free to come back to work that is what we follow um yeah that's a great question though and that would be for is the same true for for kids it's the same for kids and what i should have followed up to fill out that travel form you can't even fill it out for a contiguous state because they're not listed even though it says essential only they're not listed as an option when you go to fill out that form brian am i missing anything here no that's what i was just going to mention is the fact that you can't even they can't even fill it out if it's a contiguous state because it's not one of the options in the drop down i thought i saw john's hand go up it just you're going back to
023that yellow if we get to that point do two parts do parents need to consent to a student being tested and can adults say no i don't want to be tested the answer to both those questions are yes we believe so we actually started working on a consent form i actually reached out to the department of health and i was going to do the test with a couple primary school students that consented to it just to show them it's not the deep one it's a shallow and it's not that scary and then send it with the consent form but we've been advised that that really is a consent form that should come from the department of public health and not us um and right we we can't require someone to take a medical test the
024government governor could it could come from his office but right now we don't believe we have the authority to do that nor nor would we want to to be honest with you yeah i just would just weigh in where we're approaching thanksgiving and the holiday season where we know people have a break and really first of all contiguous states doesn't necessarily mean all contiguous states right at this moment they haven't addressed pennsylvania or vermont and number two um you know i've i've been flooded the last like day and over the weekend with questions from staff members who were going to drive to states and have the ability to quarantine in some cases in some cases they they really shouldn't be doing that um so this is i'm hoping there'll be more clarification coming out from
025the governor's office about some of these weird nuances about this but it is really shook everybody up because there it really there is no list anymore as of you know as of wednesday the list is gone right it's every it's every state but the three that are currently on the okay list so weird yeah it was in effect wednesday i should have shared that sorry brian go ahead i was just going to mention um we've had a couple communications too that have indicated which the contiguous states are um the actually the only one that we've seen not in that group is ohio ohio is a state that even though we connect with in one of our communications they did list pennsylvania and vermont but not ohio for example so oh jen is is it clear
026that the department of health will pay for these tests or is it a district responsibility no we believe that it's not going to be a district responsibility we believe it's going to be a state or federal government we believe i believe it's a federal government-funded thing but i could be mistaken in that but the fiscal um onus is not supposed to be on the school michelle may don't know differently for private industry yeah i think for for the on the private side it depends on where you go to get your test if you go to the state sponsored sites like mcc and you sign up on through the 800 number or online then that's supposed to not be charged to you but your health insurance carrier or if you go to a u of r
027lab or a cvs lab you might be charged directly so it's real it's just a mess and for us the the tests you know if we were to go to a yellow zone those tests that we would have to do they've indicated to us the department of health would provide those tests for us and they would be the rapid tests as jamie said the shallow ones right um and i would just want one more point of clarity on this topic unless there's other questions you may hear people say well that guy did there was guidance that said you couldn't travel for sports you're right there is guidance that says you can't travel for sports if it's a school sport it does not it specifically says school sports not club and travel um in the the
028gentleman from the state said we are well aware of the issue and concern with travel and club sports they are allowed to travel to the contiguous states that was essentially the response i entered they're going to have the prior health teachers that are now administrators put the test out you want to see me pass out don't you well you and brian right you're both you're both health-certified so maybe you guys should do it i mean i just muted myself [Laughter] okay i have one other piece that could generate some discussion so i apologize to the folks that are here to present i'm keeping you um i want to share my screen again and i want to talk a bit about the data collected from the survey and then i'm kind of i'll show you the
029survey i'll talk through it then i'll stop sharing so we can see each other and have some dialogue if you don't mind okay thumbs up if you can see all right thank you so uh we had over 2000 people respond and you can see the breakdown here so for example the academy we had 261 parents 96 instructional staff 179 students and 39 non-instructional and so you can kind of see which buildings they came from where it gets a little confusing and hopefully you can see my cursor down here you see um this is somebody has who either works in or has a child in both the primary and elementary school and so it's kind of a different area and so or has middle and academy elementary middle elementary and academy or all three so forth
030and so on so um we have 31 parents that answer to have a child in all three buildings so god bless them um but anyway here's who filled it out over two thousand um i'll go through some of the easier uh you know p says this learning choice it really talks about you know what what is your child or what are you teaching in right now so this was only for instructional staff parents or students so of the people who filled it out 64 almost worthy in person hybrid folks um and then you had the hybrid only that's a little confusing um probably should be down here with this group so you're talking more boy we'll have to look at that data piece that data set virtual was about 14 of the people who filled
031it out um we had both virtual and hybrid at 6.4 percent and then virtual only 2.3 so some of this is staff but anyway it was a good cross section i think is the point for this piece interesting piece here was the tech changes i asked a question since we've made some upgrades to our technology is it working for you and 50 agreed that it was uh almost 30 were neutral on that and so they didn't really feel like it was working or not working so in essence that could be as high as 80 or or not um and but 20 percent disagreed with that statement that technology was working for them so because of this mixed results we are going to be generating another survey specific to technology to try to get a root
032at what it what are the issues here so our pdc dtc and dan bowman and some folks are in the process of starting to dig into that a bit another question i feel safe so almost 75 percent of the folks said i feel safe based on what the district is doing safety measures almost 20 18.8 percent were neutral on it so they either felt safe or didn't feel safe and then if you look at the people who disagreed it was under seven percent disagreed that i feel safe and so um i really feel like as a district we've taken safety the most conservative possible approach to safety we've really dotted our eyes and crossed our t's and thank you to folks like jen and vern and brian and our custodial staff and our nursing staff
033and i know i'm forgetting people but we've had some people really doing some pretty heroic work around safety but we we have to recognize that we still have some folks that aren't feeling safe and so um what can we do to communicate a little more and i will say early on there's a way that people can submit to the state if they feel like reopening guidance isn't being followed and then that information goes to me and we had several of those initially and they were all worded very similarly and what it told us it was all coming from one building is we needed to do more to educate our staff about what safety measures were doing and we actually did that brian helped guide this conversation vern and the principal met with the different units
034talked them through what you know what we're doing and since then knock on wood those those submittals have gone away so i think part of it is we need to do more education of our staff what we're doing safety wise and give them avenues to share in a safe manner what their concerns might be some people may not feel safe coming forward um we asked about pd needs for technology and you can see it's it's really divided pretty equally some people and this is staff students and parents you know we have a good number of people that want more pd on schoology brave square infinite campus seesaw and i ready and so working with our tech integrators in that department to offer pd for everyone not just staff students and parents um here's another piece
035that's really telling for us i believe that mental health support is sufficient 48 agree 37 are neutral i'm i would assume but i'm it's dangerous to assume i don't want to assume is that perhaps this 37 percent they've personally not had a need in their mind for mental health support i don't know that to be sure but almost 15 disagree that the mental health support is sufficient and it caused a lot of us to reflect why is that we have a dynamite team for mental health here we really do skilled people and i remember back in the spring every forum every communication mental health was focused and we gave a phone number and a point person and we talked about it often we really haven't done that enough this year much at all and so
036that's that's a change we're going to implement uh to see if that number improves but we do have a dynamite team it's just making people aware of how to access it and who to access for what uh is where we're going to put some of our emphasis and then down here i believe academic expectations are 68 said just right 21 said too high and 11 said too low and so um i guess i'm not terribly surprised by that i think we need to dig into that a little more and find out of the virtual students how do they feel of the hybrid in-person students how do they feel i will say that we looked at some of our data early on how kids are doing right now we have a lot more failing than what
037we typically would that's not unusual it's not unusual or it's not specific to canadaigua i think a lot of schools are feeling that right now because learning remotely is hard and all of our kids are doing at least to some level on some days and so what can we do to help we really need to dig into this data some more and see is it only at certain grade levels is it only certain classes is only certain buildings to figure out what does this mean so we can provide more support more access for students so they can be successful and then the last one is building and district communications by and large people felt like communications was just right some felt a little too much or some felt not frequent enough but the number was
038very very small and that's that's a hard one we we struggle that all the time are we crushing people with information how do we back off on the information now i purposely skipped probably the one glaring piece of information here in the survey i said if for semester two we returned and we required everyone to wear a mask and used a barrier a plexiglas barrier on their desks but we would have to be less than six feet distance would you be comfortable would you be interested in learning more about that this was only a temperature check this entire survey this is not a decision making survey this is a temperature check that tells us what we need to further investigate and you can see it with a split almost right down the middle 57 to
03943 you know very divided 57 would agree with that uh 43 disagreed with that now in my mind for for you know just to be clear with everybody i felt like we needed to be more around that 70 agreement in order for us to change our direction we needed a super super majority of people to feel that way and we don't have that so based on this data my feeling is this whole concept of mask and barrier is not something we should explore but what else can we do to build access for students who are struggling so that they can be provided support they need to find success and i know as a leadership team we started talking about different concepts and different ideas and i've challenged them to come up with a concept based
040on an idea that i had and we're going to talk about that this week but i don't want to kind of get too far ahead of ourselves with that but i'm going to stop sharing and i'm just going to say that the whole notion of masks and a barrier i don't believe we should explore any longer i don't think it's a time i think also part of the issue is notice recognizing the time the survey went out it went out at a time that our numbers are starting to climb again and people are a little bit more concerned probably than they were in july or august so we are working on a way to build in more days and support for students who are struggling and struggling doesn't necessarily mean that they have to be
041failing they could be a student who usually gets high 90s but are mid 80s now because they don't have that direct and explicit instruction but providing them kind of a structured support where they can do work under the guidance of a certified teacher or knowledgeable staff is really kind of a hint at what we're working on but anyway i'll stop talking and maybe take any discussion or questions that any of you may have michelle got you cheryl um boy i have a lot of questions tonight so first i'm really glad that you're going to um re-survey a little bit on the technology questions i will share from some constructive criticism i i found um some of that a little bit of confusion because how would a lot of our parents know what changes we made
042to technology necessarily so um so just so i think we need to be conscientious of how we ask those questions so we can figure out how to slice and dice that data and we may be able to do this with the mental health question but i'd be interested to know where are those are there pockets of different populations where those seem to be higher so for example can we look at that data and say teachers who are doing hybrid in the primary elementary school what does that look like versus parents of virtual learners i mean i think we could we have beautiful ways to slice and dice data and lin you know lindsey tracy or tracy lindsey we'll reverse it today um i'm sure it can crunch numbers in lots of different ways but i
043i i'm not sure that i those questions led up to that kind of slicing and dicing yeah thank you for that and tracy actually created analytics where we can look at it every single way that you just mentioned in probably tens and 20s and 30 different ways beyond that and so it's been very helpful to kind of focus on where these concerns are coming from or are they brought across the across everybody all stakeholders um but yes this and i maybe i should have been more clear with it but you know really the survey was was only to take the temperature you know it was not looking for kind of in the weeds information we just needed some direction where our time is of the essence give us some general overall feelings and then we
044can kind of dig in and make our next decisions but yes feedback is very well taken cheryl my concern is with our staff and the mental health i know that we have mental health things put in place for kids and for parents if they need to address it with their children but oftentimes i know staff does not see our own instructional staff as support if they need it for mental health and i know that it that these times are really wearing on them the longer it goes the more difficult even though they know what they're doing it seems to be more difficult as things move along so i'm just concerned about that that's a great point i know brian occasionally send out the eap um contact information but yeah you're spot on is something we
045need to pay more attention to and i think also you know we've shared that we need to have grace at this time and i really think we need to have grace with our staff because they're under a ton of pressure as our administrators too it's not just it's everyone is under so much pressure so anything that we can do to help them um i support great jen just just a comment uh from the schneider house from over the weekend i will say that i think some of the technology hiccups and challenges are not born of the district i was amazed at the number of times over the weekend on a random sunday afternoon that schoology itself froze and i know it wasn't just our district but many because i heard from friends in other districts
046it would freeze for two or three minutes and start up again and i can see the frustration building in in my youngest kid over that it's not huge amounts of time but but i understand how that can be a challenge to a kid that's still trying to figure out how to do this virtual stuff the other thing that that i would like to bring up for the district to explore is how we're managing homework assignments over the course of the week and you know that i am not a fan of an idea of some sort of homework policy that i think we have to leave it to our professionals to decide what homework is appropriate they are they are the professionals in the room virtual or not but it it has um surprised me a
047bit about the the homework that gets assigned on a friday afternoon and is due on a sunday um and some of this may just be the last minute procrastination schneider kids um but um sunday nights in our house are pretty busy and and i find that interesting because it's not keyed on the next week's work um something to think about thank you any other questions or comments i i think you have the sense we want to help jamie i i maybe i'm just speaking for myself i have no idea how to um and so if you have some pretty specific suggestions for us we're happy to hear them um it's hard because one of the ways i think we feel like we connect and maybe try to lift spirits which i think should be one
048of the primary charges of a board of education is to support people is by being in schools and so you know not being able to do that i think at least again speaking for myself i feel a little disconnected sometimes and so if there are specific things that you have in mind that are roles we can play we would really love to so i don't need them now but if you think of things moving forward please let us know thank you i do have some ideas and i would love to chat with you and have a second to do that that would be helpful great any yeah julianne sorry um so i will admit that it was a week and i missed the survey so the parent part of me didn't see that um i'm
049sure my kids would give me a hard time i'm wondering if we asked or if we have a sense of if we continue with the models we have right now into the second semester do we have a sense of how many people would want to switch models or how many people would be comfortable or intend to stay with the model they're in or did we not go there yet given that we were still collecting other types of data we didn't go there yet um because you know i was really more curious about this whole concept of the mask and the divider um yeah i'm envious of the schools they're back full time five days a week i just am and i want that so badly for our students and our staff and our community but
050we're much larger than a lot of those schools and or we have other restrictions we don't have multiple elementary schools or cafeterias or or staff to pull that off as i look at our folks from the primary elementary school they're on the zoom right now and they know because they've worked so hard trying to pull it off too um but yeah it's it's we didn't ask that i wanted to get a sense of this first uh i think i was actually having a conversation with emily and heidi i think last week and um she projects there'll be a lot of students wanting to come back to the hybrid in person right emily is that what you were saying to me last week yeah i think we've had since we've had a lot of families who
051really have been asking to switch back to the in-person model that's why i kind of had that prediction and also because i think a lot of the youngest learners are really struggling um to you know make the remote days work but now that we have you know some of the infection rates increasing i'm kind of i'm doubting my prediction a little bit so i really don't know emily's on the record and saying it'll increase it down so time will tell and that also means i mean keep this in mind that means if we have a big shift one way or another we may have to change teaching assignments and that would be a teacher change for a student now i said this back in august that's a possibility and everybody heard me say it but
052it's different to say it back in august and for it to happen in january february so that's something that we know would not make people happy but it may have to happen does that mean jamie that you would that the kids will get reshuffled so you might switch you might switch entire teachers it could it could mean that yes depends on it depends on the change of uh selection but it could mean that i think what you would see more than anything john is someone who might have been a virtual teacher come back to an in-person teacher and pick up some students from some other classes and some of the virtual kids i think it could mean that um or i'm a virtual student now i have a a different virtual teacher and that i
053think those are the two things we might see more of the time would tell any other questions or comments or concerns to share okay anything else from you jamie that's plenty thank you that was really fun i appreciate it i don't see i don't think carlin is with us tonight so we'll move past that we have minutes up for approval astromotions please michelle and a second gen questions or comments all in favor a post that carries unanimously deb and matt genie good evening everyone uh tonight's presentation is one that was requested by the board of education is one of the topics i'd like to learn a little bit more about so as you can see we are joined by members of the pes administrative team who are here to talk to us about our student
054placement process now in a given year this is a pretty intensive process with a lot of steps and lots of data but as you can imagine that was turned upside down this year and the team did an incredible job to try to make it something that could support you know what is normally a typical process that they feel very confident about but lu in lieu of not having the same data or the same time frames or even the same information um the team really had to do some adjustment to you know make it a process that could help support um getting students where they need to be for for the current school year so i'm going to turn things over to our team of course as you know them as brian lindsey emily and heidi
055so mr farr i believe one of them would love to be able to share their screen i don't know if anyone in particular is volunteering for that opportunity you should be able to now if you don't want to i can share mine your call i'm happy to share mine i have it up here can you see my pes highlight screen okay yes thank you great all set to start genie yes please okay so um hi everyone good evening i'm gonna i'm gonna start us off and i'll just do a little intro we're gonna try to keep this to under 10 minutes so brian start your timer you good okay so we're gonna highlight the student placement process and um we're it's something that we're very proud of because i feel like with um you know
0561500 students and um you know sometimes almost 13 sections of each grade level it can be a very complex process and i think that it would be easier if we would only take into into consideration certain factors but we really have made a really great effort to try to consider everything and anything that we can to make sure that students are placed in the best classroom each year so we're going to talk just a little bit about that and go on to the next slide here so um what we'll highlight tonight is um just a little bit about our data and the processes that we actually use to place our students and we have to start this off by talking about tracy lindsey or lindsey tracy however you want to say but he has really
057worked with us the last few years to make this such an efficient process and if if anybody ever wants to see a day of it it is it's it's like clockwork now with the exception of having a pandemic thrown in the mix um but it's really it's really pretty amazing what he can do with all the components that we want to take into consideration for placement we have a master spreadsheet that allows us to check how many kids are we've placed in each class how what their reading levels are you know the boy to girl ratio if they're going on to another class with a student from the class the year before it's really um it's pretty amazing what we're able to do in in one spreadsheet so we have to throw some kudos to
058him but i i wanted to just note the people who are part of the process and we have an administrator or both administrators from each building a counselor a social worker school psychologist our ist teacher usually we have you know a special ed either teacher or administrator and then we also have special area teachers as well so we try to make sure that we have somebody from every group who can really help us give perspective um on the students to you know to kind of enlighten the rest of the group if there's something that we should know about you know where the best place is i'm going to turn this over to i think heidi next and she's going to talk a little bit more about it hi everyone so we have three different pieces
059of of data that we really look at um the first being from parents and so in a typical year what we ask parents to do is to just submit um an email or something written just around anything that they'd like to share with us in the placement process this year because you know we felt parents were pretty overwhelmed with everything going on in the spring we decided to do a google form so it was a little more structured uh we had a really great response to that this spring so i think that's actually something we may continue on with using next year it was really helpful to us at another point you can take a look at that link to the parent letter that we do send out but that information we use throughout the
060placement process we can put it into a spreadsheet so each student that had a parent provide input as we place that student we really take a look at the feedback they're giving us the next um is really coming from the teacher and again i'd love to just give a shout out to um tracy lindsey because what he does is he sends a spreadsheet to each teacher and they fill in kind of this spreadsheet and then he puts all of this into a get acquainted card is what we call them and if you want to click on that just to show them what a got acquainted card looks like so this ends up being on a half a sheet of paper for us and this is the physical thing that we actually place the students with
061and it's kind of a summary of a lot of the teacher input that we have it also pulls in some information from our student data spreadsheets that tracy also um does throughout the year and so that was that last piece if you want to go back to that presentation think some um that student data we do have benchmark sheets but some of that does get put on the get acquainted cards and then the rest of that is in a spreadsheet so we use all of this information to really um make sure that we have a nice uh balanced classroom for each of our teachers and lindsay's going to talk a little bit more about that but i did want to just share with you that this year you know it definitely was not our typical
062year for placement that student data the benchmarking sheets we didn't have a lot of spring data from our students the last data we had was january so it really did make it a little more difficult to balance our classes and we had to look more at last names we've never had to look at that before so it certainly wasn't your typical year and this year we did have to rely on that parent feedback and teacher input um and not as much as that of the student data because we just didn't know necessarily what happened over that closure for some of our kiddos so friends okay so and i think um one piece that you didn't see on that get acquainted card that was added uh we asked teachers to tell us what level of participation
063students had in their remote learning so we said is it little to none is it some is it consistent because we didn't want to put um you know all students in a class who had not participated in remote learning uh to the best of their ability we were really trying to balance out those numbers as well um but when we come together as a team there are just so many things that we try to think about and really dig in really knowing the students but also knowing the needs that they have and what classroom would be best uh you know i was a middle school teacher and so when i came to the elementary school this was a whole new world i just had never i had no idea that this level of conversation we
064talk about every single child that we place and so when we say to you if you you know if you'd like to come down and see this it's an amazing process to be part of i truly love placement we are looking at the number of students that we have in enrollment how many sections we have per grade level what we think our class sizes need to be we try to balance out our boy girl ratio we do take a look at triplets and twins and find out where their parents would like them placed um we do talk specifically about faculty and staff children and you know if they have some certain um needs that we're going to to meet because they're you know in our building and in our district we do place you know
065our special ed students um we actually have those lists before we go into placement because all of our special ed teachers work together to determine where those students may be best and how their learning needs might be grouped together as they move forward to the next grade level uh you know we're talking about our ells students with here um hearing impairments you know deb mcp will give us any kind of important information we need to know there um you know students with 504 plans we have an ais provider that comes and kind of helps us put students receiving the same services or interventions into similar cohorts um we play we work with lynn colleets to do our math enrichment and you know of course on those parent forms we have and teacher forms we have
066some separate from or please place with so when we're digging into to all of these you can see that it is a pretty massive undertaking when you're placing 1500 students and if we go forward one more you know i think that uh if you come down to placement you just see that there are so many pieces that we have to bring to the table or the large classroom with us this year i know that the elementary did it in the link gym because we really just needed to be able to space out six feet apart and um i think the primary did it in did you guys do the cafeteria yeah the cafeteria we also had to have windows yes windows and doors um but you know you can just see here that we bring
067in lots of supplies we put everything up on chart paper we print all of the get acquainted cards and we tape them up with um you know restickable glue because we move them many times as we think about is this a good placement oh can't be with this student okay we got to move to this chart so we kind of go back and forth many times to make sure that we really have what we think is going to be the most successful placement for this student and every student and then i think brian is taking over the last slide yeah so just to summarize you know emily mentioned at the very beginning all of the different people that are involved in the process you know our social workers our counselors our instructional support teachers the
068administrative team and so everybody that's there just has a very clear role once we start this process because we need it to run efficiently and effectively so everyone is given a role i think one of my favorite roles here is the mediator or the discussion facilitator because you could get hung up on one talking about one specific student and where they should be placed you can spend 20 to 30 minutes on that and and you really have to keep it moving so you get to all students and you spend equal amount of time on on all kids you know a lot of hands make light work especially when people know what their job is when they walk into the uh this process you know the number one thing i think we need to stress here
069is the fact that it's an organized process and you're looking at emily lindsey and heidi are really the ones that make this an organized process i'm just along for the ride it is amazing when when this team does come together though it is absolutely amazing how organized and efficient they are and so that really summarizes the whole presentation and and you know what we do as far as the the placement process but we'd be happy to take any questions that the board has and i just for the record i want you to know we did this in 10 minutes and 45 seconds so not bad nice job will you unshare your screen so i can see everybody to calm them please thank you that was great beth okay um i it's just a comment i
070just have to say the proof is in the pudding and i had two kids who couldn't have been more different than night and day they all went through primary elementary and i say with great pride to anyone who asked me i never asked for a specific student or a specific teacher and we never had a dud year 10 years not a dud every single year the kid was completely matched with the teacher and like i said the kids were my two kids are as different as night and day so thank you thank you thank you it's it's truly an amazing process any other questions or comments is is this process typical do most school districts invest so heavily in doing this sort of work so you know in some of my previous experiences and emily
071you've had quite a few and so have you heidi but a lot of times um you know some of these neighborhood schools that have 200 children or you know even up to 500 kids in the school you sometimes have one instructional support teacher maybe or a reading teacher that kind of does the placement for the entire building and it is kind of a disservice i think to those kids because there isn't as much thought put into it but when you do have like emily said you've just got so many kids you have all of this information let's take it into consideration when replacing these kids it's the right thing to do you know so i don't think that there's many other schools that do this now great i think people could feel really about having
072their voice really heard in the whole process too i think that's awesome i cut into late but i don't know and the way tracy organizes the dat the data for us is just incredible i did placement in victor which is also a big district and there wasn't the data that was collected so it was much more cumbersome so this really makes it even an even more efficient process so you can see so many more data points to make it a better placement when i when i first came to canada west sue kells busted out some of the old tally charts well i don't think they were old she might have used them the year before and you know it was like okay we're adding one to carson one to o'reilly and then you know we
073started working with tracy lindsey to get these beautiful google sheets and they are life-changing because you know i think it was really tedious to try to keep track of all of that by hand great well if there's nothing else well thank you so much that was really informative and really fun to learn about and you're welcome obviously welcome to stay very welcome to go have a nice night thank you everybody thank you cool thanks matt thank you for for doing that we really i think that was great um let's see we have a consensus agenda and supplemental ask for emotions please i've got cheryl and jen questions or comments all in favor a pose that carries unanimously and policy beth will you report out please sure um so we have two more policies that we're
074bringing for a first read the first one is a policy that we reviewed last year comprehensive student attendance i'm sure none of you will be surprised to know we need to add a piece that includes the distance in remote learning so you'll see that paragraph in there and then the other policy is again about online distance and remote learning um and that's a brand new policy um i'm pleased to say that you know we do have a couple of like these kind of things that we need to add but we are now starting to go through the manual that we did a year and a half ago two years ago um and it's it's very um good for me to see that most of the policies are exactly what we need and we can just
075move forward and we don't have to continue to tweak them which is awesome okay thank you yep uh let's see i just did anyone else attend character that can report out since milt is not here nope oh jamie i did yeah it's so we have uh two new uh chair people this year for the committee uh caroline chapman and vern tenney are chairing the committee we have a lot of new membership from the different buildings as always we shared out kind of what's happening in each building to support our character initiative and we reviewed our charge what is our charge for the year um or permanently and it was just a great meeting to kind of reconvene we haven't met in quite some time because of the pandemic so it was nice to see our
076friends again and it was also nice to get an email from terry shipley after how much she enjoyed the meeting and so when she's happy about the meeting you know it probably went pretty well but uh just kind of talking about this year and how despite all of our circumstances we're trying to keep our character initiative at the forefront and the district's doing a great job of that great thank you um julen diversity equity and inclusion please yes so we had our first meeting last week there were about 35 people there uh of a group that's even larger than that all kudos to vern for really organizing and putting together an amazing meeting especially with that number of people over zoom and still really creating an opportunity to have a deep and meaningful conversation we
077went through sort of the norms of the committee vern's been great about sending out work to do in advance in terms of collecting resources i think most people on the committee are doing the 21 day racial equity challenge and participating in that and um did spend some time in breakout rooms to really get to know each other and to understand what brought different people to the conversation and even just in those initial conversations really broadening our understanding of the different the really different concerns around diversity equity and inclusion that different people are bringing to the table because all of us are seeing this sort of with our professional hats on but also through the lens of our own experience and it was really interesting to have that conversation um and then we didn't um a
078process of trying to understand why we were doing this work that in terms of we know what our end goal is but thinking about what are the reasons um and the purposes that bring us to this work this isn't easy work it involves difficult conversations we all know it's going to involve difficult conversations but really keeping at the forefront and understanding of why we're doing the work great thank you and jen copen19 please so um i would first like to say that i am really in the brian vern mike fan club if you had gotten the opportunity to spend as much as time as i have over the last several weeks working on this covert 19 challenge as i guess we can call it brian you would be impressed too the the level of tracking
079of all of the issues is just mind-boggling absolutely mind-boggling one of the things that i wanted to bring up to the board in a little bit of detail is some more information around why we're tracking certain numbers in spaces in the buildings and and i wanted to kind of give you um a quick understanding of why that's important and why that'll continue to be done you heard in the last meeting that we're tracking carbon dioxide because that essentially is a measure of the shared air in his face so we all exhale carbon dioxide the more that you have in a space the more chance possibly you may have coveted in the space so but beyond that though we're also tracking humidity so why is that because as humidity drops an opportunity for particulate really small
080things in the air to float around so in the summer when it's humid and somebody coughs and there's some covenant in that it's more likely to drop on your shoes because it's humid it gets caught in that literal air or literal water in the air in the winter we kind of have a twofold problem we are in enclosed spaces because it's cold and our humidity drops as we heat air that means that small particles including particles that could have coveted in them because that's under three microns and or 0.3 microns in size will float around right and if it's in that shared area it can really be shared so we have this spreadsheet google sheet that brian started and we keep adding to over time to take a look at what our humidity levels are
081what our carbon dioxide levels are and understand what those ratios really are over time so we can watch rooms and decide what spaces may be a concern that we can go in and do some interventions with how we manage the air how much filtration is in there outside air is pumped in what the coil looks like it gets pretty geeky pretty quickly but mike and i um both love this kind of stuff so there's continuous tweaking on this um the other thing that i think vern talked to the staff about today was the idea of keeping windows cracked as much as possible it is getting colder we all admit that but outside air is the best there is for keeping that air clean so where you can help the systems out and keep the window
082open and last but not least i don't think we would be where we are as a district without great behavior um when we talk about it on that team it's really evident that staff and the the kids are doing the right things in terms of behavior and that is more important than any engineering tweak we can make in a building so um bottom line though it is the trifecta of uh brian vernon mike and i just have the pleasure of uh sitting and and watching him work so well great thank you jamie anything else to wrap us up you're muted thank you you think i learned that by now um if jen you're in vern and brian and mike your your lecturers are beating me down my window is open i have a coat a
083sweater shirt tie all that stuff on freezing but that's one piece the other piece is nothing brings me more joy than seeing brian walking around with that carbon dioxide detector he loves it it's just i just want to share that great thank you well thanks for being with us tonight everybody if there's nothing else i'll ask for emotions to adjourn michelle and jen thank you very much everybody have a good rest of