School Board Meeting, June 3, 2021

001thank you mr frederickson good evening ladies and gentlemen it's june 3rd 2021 this is a council rock school board meeting for the month of june i guess good evening everyone out there let's rise for the pledge of allegiance please pledge allegiance to flag the united states of america to the republic for which it stands one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice madame secretary roll call when you slept together thank you man mark bilac here ed tate here dr thor president denise brooks here marian mckee here joe hidalgo here kristen marcel here ed solomon here well good evening this is uh interesting to see people in the audience thank you all for coming out tonight hope you brought umbrellas it's uh pouring out there uh dr frazier good evening uh superintendent report please good

002evening mr solomon uh good evening to the board community and it is really nice really nice to see folks in the audience thanks for thanks for being here this evening as everyone knows this school year is quickly quickly winding down our last school day of the year will be one week from tomorrow next friday june 11 that will be an early dismissal day for all grades and the day before very pleased uh that we are able to hold both of our high school graduation ceremonies both this year will be held at the stadium walt snyder stadium on thursday june 10th the council rock high school north ceremony will begin at 3 p.m and the cr south ceremony will begin on thursday at 7 pm so really happy that we're able to do that and our

003seniors by the way had a grand old time down at disney last week so things are things are going really well as we end this year for our graduating class also as we wind down this year i do want to recognize this year broadly recognize this year's team cr staff retirees we have a total of 61 retirees this year across our three groups those three groups being support staff teaching staff and our administrative staff collectively these 61 individuals have 1442 years of cr experience and of course cr wisdom that's really incredible 1442 collective years what can't be measured of course is uh the impact that they've had the impact that they've had on students on our community uh so we're very grateful for them very indebted to them uh we will miss all of them

004and uh hope certainly that cr uh will always always be their second home so to all of this year's retirees again we say thank you and we say congratulations and tonight we also offer our congratulations and our thank you to madam secretary kapoor rice that she's uh totally uh taping away there the minutes uh kapua is uh retiring as board secretary and kapua say it's been a real pleasure a genuine pleasure to work with you so uh certainly thank you wish you nothing but the best and uh on behalf of this board the cabinet uh mr cox uh thank you and nothing but the best of wishes well could i say a few words please i appreciate the opportunity to serve the board and i commend all of you the staff and the administration and

005the board for their commitment and the devotion to council rock and the community thank you very much that's very nice and that's for you and last uh for my report this evening certainly not least uh since our last meeting law enforcement week was held law enforcement week was uh the week of may 11th and uh we have four absolutely outstanding police departments uh cannot thank all of the officers their leadership enough uh we count on them on a very regular basis uh in fact we counted on them this morning uh over at holland middle school for an incident that we had they are there for us literally any and every single time that we make the call so i want to publicly acknowledge our four chiefs new tom burrow chief sabbath new town township chief

006hearn northampton township chief of comp and upper makefield chief schmidt and of course would be remiss if i didn't mention her two high school resource officers at north we have officer renee hurst and at south new this year we have officer john love so uh just really grateful for all that they do they are like i said there for us all of the time and uh appreciate them keeping all of us safe so uh mr solomon i believe that ends my report thank you and i can offer my compliments to the men and ladies in blue out there that do the job every day um they're a huge resource for our kids and keep our communities safe which uh i can i can attest to uh mr cox good evening good to meet you slurs

007report please sir mr salomon happy to the board held executive sessions on may 27th on collective bargaining and earlier this evening on a personnel matter and that's the only report i have for now mr salomon pending any uh questions that might arise tonight on the legal side plan to keep you busy sir all right we'll move to uh public comment mr frederickson i have a list that looks like about 13 people good evening thank you for coming i'll just read the disclaimer real quick for the for you folks public comment is an opportunity for members of the public to address the school board we would ask that you limit your comments to no longer than three minutes please consider the fact that there may be some young children in the audience who are watching this

008broadcast live on cr tv when speaking it is our goal to maintain a respectful environment so that the members of our community have an equal opportunity to address the board without interruption while the board welcomes your ideas and will consider them in deliberating an issue we may not respond to your comments or questions first up i have a sabrina cruz from rich bro good evening man it was set up for me sorry hello again thank you for having me i was here last time it's nice to see everybody it's nice to be here in person so thank you for that i'm sabrina i have two kids in richboro elementary um i just want to give a quick shout out to dr jordan from our school she has been completely amazing her and my daughter's two

009teachers have been very compassionate especially with my older daughter who's been struggling with anxiety breathing issues especially today they really helped us out they were awesome and i just want to give them some love publicly last night i listened in on the central box school board meeting and i was really shocked by the data presented by dr damskur i literally had no idea that our coven numbers were so low i looked into it today and we currently only have 14 bucks residents with covet in a population of 630 000 people it's amazing and we only have one student in the whole county currently in medical quarantine only one so i'm still asking the question why are we masking the other 105 000 students a lot of kids like mine are in buildings without air conditioning

010next week is supposed to be super hot and dr fraser i know we've been emailing a lot talking about the heat and you've been great my school principal has been great um and i know we did talk about early dismissal but i feel like right now the best decision would be to just unmask the children okay because now we're going to lose out on instructional in-person time especially at the end of the year um so if central bucks can do it i think we can too they're the largest suburban school district in the state of pennsylvania and there's no reason why we cannot make it happen as well so please vote tonight to make mass optional now all you have to do is just send an email tonight let everyone know that they're in charge

011of what the kids wear on their faces let's give the parents back the power to choose what's best for their kids this school year has been a real challenge for everyone let's end it on a positive note and vote for optional mass right now thank you for your time and for your dedication to our kids thank you very much [Applause] uh next up i have mr vanessa smith good evening hi i'm vanessa smith i'm from langhorne i'm coming to you tonight to ask for one storiness pandemic for cr to be leaders not followers finally lead and put our kids first cb with over 18 000 students has been able to do what cr can't or won't all year let's stand for our kids first and mask and make mask optional tomorrow there is no logical

012logistics that should hold this up a school-wide email is all you need i know there are parents who would be happy to sign the medical exemption form if that helps we have now seen the emails from dr fauci these are his words masks are really for infected people to prevent them from spreading infection to people who are not in too sorry spreading infection to people who are not infected rather than protecting uninfected people from acquiring infection the typical mass you buy at the drugstore is not really effective in keeping the virus out which is small enough to pass through the material it might however provide some slight benefit in keeping out gross droplets if someone coughs or sneezes i do not recommend that you wear a mask our children do not need to continue this

013facade please look at what dr damsker has said the district has went against everything he had said even though it came out that he has been right all along last night at seabee's board meeting he said masks should be optional and should sorry mask being optional should be standard at all bucks county schools he is seeing three cases of cova today in bucks county three again i ask why are we doing this to our kids i am asking that cr take the lead instead of being second to cb once again and take mask off these kids tomorrow and closing them letting to share that you are instilling fear into our children fear if mask isn't on properly who's going to yell them and make them feel stupid fear that they can't tell anyone that they

014can't breathe fear that they may be standing too close to their friends fear that they get to if they get too close to their teachers fear to sneeze or cough in class my family just went through colds i had to keep my first and third grader home for a week because i had a cough my fifth grader got it and i took her to the doctor because she had post nasal drip and a sore throat he thought she had strep i kept her home from school i sent her back and because she was so afraid to cough in class because she was afraid to be sent home she choked on post nasal drip and coughed and got sent home anyways she missed the school-wide bingo that mr mcclay did at their school and she was

015really upset my kids shouldn't fear coughing in class they shouldn't fear that their mass might fall down off their nose and they're gonna get yelled at and they have seen kids get yelled at for that very reason so i'm asking you to be leaders thank you next i have a nadine curlis good evening our daughter was registered for kindergarten last year my husband and i ended up pulling her due to asinine mask mandate for our children she's once again registered now for first grade in this school district and our hope and desire is that no matter what the mandate is for pennsylvania that our children will be able to learn make friends and be a kid breathing and living freely unhindered and unrestrained one of the greatest parts of being an american citizen is the

016guaranteed rights freedoms liberties that we have of which are the inalienable rights of life liberty and the pursuit of happiness these are the rights that we have as adults and are given to you and maintain our precious children if we are being completely honest and are going to truly listen to science then our children should have been unmasked a long time ago children are proven to be low risk of contracting the virus why are we still being forced to cover their faces this is child abuse the psychological effects are shown to be extremely detrimental especially when it comes to the process of learning and development i was recently with a friend who has a child who is so sore and tender from wearing their mask all day every day that you can't even touch the

017sides of their head or behind their ears these masks are literally hurting our children physically and mentally counteraction make masks optional effective immediately we as parents will not be intimidated or fear-mongered into doing this to our children let our children come to school unhindered i would also like the assurance that the coveted vaccine will not be pushed on my child i've heard of other districts elsewhere in the country administering them and if the child was present it was considered implied consent health decisions are not the districts or schools decision it is the responsibility of the parents or guardians another concern i have is in regard to critical race theory to my understanding it will not be taught at council rock and i hope it stays that way it teaches hate division and not unity it

018is severely flawed and skewed only for a work agenda please keep it out of our school to continue it also like to be assured that gender theory will stay out of the classroom that in no way is the school's responsibility and entirely inappropriate for our youth again this is something that parents and guardians should handle and address conversations on this putt on this topic should be between their parents and never a teacher as a parent i should have full confidence that my child is safe and taken care of at school i want to know where council rock stands i want straightforward and honest answers we trust you to protect our kids to guide our kids and to also leave our kids out of political agendas thank you thank you next up i have jennifer gessner

019good evening hi everyone um thank you for having me speak tonight um the reason why i'm here um is that i have five kids in the district they had two attend south one attends holland middle school to attend hillcrest and um and so i agree with everyone ahead of me and regarding the mask optional my youngest is in second grade and every day it's a fight for him to go to school he has allergies the coughing the sneezing everything about it but he's always complaining how he's feeling claustrophobic i don't have the energy to fight with him anymore and he's going to be an esy so mask optional would be the best situation for him and for all the students in the district that are experiencing something similar um but what i'm mostly here tonight

020for is for to advocate for students who are never spoken about and it's those students that are chronically with chronic medical conditions um my oldest i had missed a lot of school when she was at holland and when i asked about homebound instruction i was told it was inappropriate so now she's in high school and she had the i gave her the option to what do you want to do do you want to go in do you want to have the experience of virtual mom virtual has been a blessing for me this is something that i've always needed so i'm asking you to be innovative and find ways to help students that are chronically ill that can learn in the here and now instead of homebound instruction is not appropriate they need to have three

021consecutive weeks out of the building um in order to qualify and the moment they step in the building they lose the opportunity for academic support in the home these children that are chronically ill need socialization they need emotional support and the more that they're out of school and playing catch up all the time it increases their anxiety and other issues so i know it's been a tough year for the teachers in regarding virtual learning i'm not asking that option to be available 24 7. i'm just asking for it to be used as a supplement for these students that don't qualify for homebound instruction and need to learn in the here and now so dr frazier i would like to have a meeting with you to talk about this further because it's i need it and

022i'm not it's not just for my family but it's also for other families in this district that are suffering is just like my kid okay all right thank you so much thank you jen next up is joanne mclurney hi thank you so much for having me i've been watching you guys on tv for months so this is a real treat we're available for autographs yeah i know 10 30 if you want and thank you so much really for all thanks for coming all the hours that you guys have put in i know you probably didn't expect a year like this when you ran for school board and um you guys have really really done a lot and when i think about where we were in september and where we're at now i'm i'm really grateful

023i mean my kids started out school on a computer and now they're going every day and it's so fabulous um so thank you very much for all your efforts there um with that said i do think we can do better and like my predecessors here i'm going to talk about masks um as i think all of you know the you know central bucks voted to make masks optional and um a lot of what resonated and what sabrina mentioned too were the numbers that dr dansker talked about um the incidence is really low and he actually recommends a mass optional policy at this point um so you know when i think about that and i think about where we're at i feel like that's the right road for us to do and i'd like to ask

024you to vote to make masks optional immediately um you already did vote to make them optional in the fall and i'm so grateful and i was so happy to hear that um but i'm not sure that that really covers everything from my understanding there are summer school and there's also extra classes that are being offered to some kids that may have fallen behind and i'm not sure we're really covering those if we're going to have the kids wear masks you know until the fall and there is you know the last week of school and with our health director advocating for masks optional i think that all kids should be able to have masks optional for that last week of school the attestation is inspired and they should be optional immediately if that is truly impossible

025and if we absolutely cannot do that i have another ask i would like to ask you to consider adopting a mask optional policy for all music and dramatic performances effective immediately um immediately because there's performances happening this weekend we allow our athletes to take their masks off we don't allow our performers to take their masks off i don't know if you've ever been to a performance at council rock they are absolutely fabulous and i'm going to tell you that these kids are exerting themselves just as much as an athlete is if we're going to let athletes take their masks off i think the performers should be able to take their masks off as well they should be given the same consideration thanks again for your time and thanks again for all of your hard work

026and the many hours you've put in please our kids and make masks optional immediately thank you bob hickey's up next good evening last month i stood in this pretty much exact same position along with numerous others advocating for the board made the wearing of mass optional tonight i'm asking the board to enact that same exact position to many things have occurred since last month as i've mentioned that you're all aware of so i won't bother to go into the details um however the science and the data no longer suggests that mass should be mandatory we support every teacher and every individual parent who wishes to have themselves or their children ask personal choice it's up to them we've spoken about it before however those who choose not to wear a mask or to not have

027their child wear a mask should not be required to do so since now it has been pretty much everyone has all those in authority the masks are no longer required and the thing is it's not really so much important whether there's five days of school left or 108 days of school left it's important that the moment that the wearing of the mask is no longer justified that's the moment that it should end and that moment is nailed so please vote tonight to end the required wearing a mask and please wear wearing masks thanks thank you next up i have jonathan siemens good evening sir how are you how are you wonderful let me start by thanking andy block for his tremendous service and dedication to the students and families of council rock his absence from

028the two board meetings since his election law should tell this entire community everything they need to know about andy block allow me to share a few quotes from our medical overlord anthony fauci about the efficacy of mass relative to preventing airborne illnesses including covet 19. the typical masculine the drug store is not really effective in keeping out virus which is small enough to pass through material i do not recommend that you wear a mask a mask is more appropriate for someone who is infected than for people trying to protect against infection there's no reason to be walking around with a mask there are many people in this community and all across the country who have questioned the efficacy of mass from the beginning of the lockdowns but we were told by the likes of andy

029block denise brooks and robert fraser to essentially sit down and do as we were told they all knew better than the rest of us because they listened to fouchy to have such unquestioning people lacking completely in intellectual curiosity leading our community is going those of us who actually question the need for mass and lockdowns were treated as know-nothing troglodytes not worthy of even being a part of the discussion this board needs to start writing the wrong tonight if central bucks can do it and they did it last night then council rock can surely follow suit tonight it does not matter if there are only six more days of schoolnet mass need to be optional for the remainder of the year the damage the superintendent and the majority of this board have done to our children

030is incalculable and one more minute requiring our kids to wear mass in school is one minute too long finally a word about the recent correspondence from our superintendent we should not have been surprised after the board members supporting him either lost or did not run that he sent us a message urging the following we indeed are one community we are the council rock community and i'm asking and hoping that we're strong and that we stay strong together as one community this comes from perhaps the person most responsible for driving a wedge to the people of this community the superintendent had even more to say on may 28th the third paragraph included this gem i also want to take a moment to refer back to a message i sent to our students nearly a year ago

031what i wrote at that time continues to hold every bit history today and then he goes on to quote himself he then finishes with i have grown particularly concerned for our jewish friends in the community throughout my tenure in council rock as i have learned more and more about our local history of anti-semitism i urge you to join us in openly rejecting all forms of anti-semitism as well as all forms of anti-asian and other hate motivated behaviors how self-serving and narcissistic do you have to be to quote yourself as you begin to share with the school community you purport to lead that you think that community is full of anti-semitic anti-aging just when we all thought he could not go any lower as a leader we're going to dug a little deeper mr stevens virtual

032mr seaman thank you in person meetings with parents he might have some idea what this community thinks of his alleged leadership next up i have a forgive me joseph is abyssal how bad did i hit that was it right good job good evening sir so um something about myself i am educated in statistics i did statistical analysis i'm now a software engineer doing a lot of data science and i could bore you with all kind of uh regression analysis and all this stuff about masks efficacy of masks okay but i'm not going to do that i think there's plenty of people that will bring those things up i'm going to talk about my middle daughter who has down syndrome that goes to council rock okay so she's been taught to wear a mask she does

033it because she's told every day in the winter time she came back with her nose and face chapped from this from the sweat and the steam that is in her mouth she can't wear her hearing aids because her ears are too small and the and the we tried every single kind of mask and the school said no it's not going to work we can't so she's she's without her equipment her iep is not being followed because the only thing we really wanted for her was peer modeling and she doesn't get to see you know hardly any kids the mass thing um makes it hard for her to communicate um because she is taught to move her lips and enunciate um she can't she can't read other people's lips without her hearing aids this has been

034a real problem for us so um i really think and and my my daughter she she does it with a smile on her face and she's amazing all the all the things she goes through and i i've been you know involved in a lot of things related to um people with disabilities and people with um you know sensory disorders and i just imagine having a kid with severe sensory disorder like autism and trying to put a mask on them and send them to school it's like that's that's the worst abuse to the weakest weakest people in our society so i know that there was some some um talk about not not um honoring some of the waivers and um i i just think there there's you know back to the statistic thing there is no

035evidence that says that masks are effective for this type of virus there is there is if you go to the cdc website and click all the links that recommend you wear masks deep in the link it says that their the efficacy is unknown over and over and over again i think that we're parents we know what's best for our kids we have to weigh the options and make decisions for our kids so i would like to propose that we um make the masks optional thank you thank you sir [Applause] can't read the last name but it looks like it's jennifer from newtown good evening jennifer from new and medical town that cannot be disputed at this point death rate and is case trade is at its lowest point nationally and in the state of pennsylvania

036this trial and error experiment over the last 15 months now has clear results psychological ma'am can you speak into the microphone only for the folks at home they're not hearing the public speak thank you allow the mass to be removed from the faces of our children it in school for is first time in 15 months as the discussion vaccines whether or not we as parents decide to administer an unproven substance to our children with no effective safety in a delivery studies that has never before been given to humans that provides no benefit only risk to our children this should be 100 apparent decision i'm a critical care nurse my husband is physician with 30 years we can assure you that we are more educated on this topic than any politician that is making decisions for

037our children we would greatly appreciate that you would keep our parental rights in the forefront of your minds as you decide how to handle vaccinations for the upcoming fall and i sincerely think dr thorward and mrs in particular comments that they made two weeks ago and dr fraser lastly i would like to address your comments that you made in the email priority prior to memorial day weekend your vision of equity which is not my favorite word including our community's apparent anti-semitism and hate motivated actions toward asians among us i'd like you to share evidence of this behavior that warrants this reaction toward our district please tell me and more examples other than one incident committed by impulsive ill-mannered teenagers with a mirror in the bathroom of one of our schools we have raised four children

038in this community and i believe i've experienced enough in this community to know this area perhaps you could address the individuals before you accuse an entire community of exhibiting hate motivated behaviors my husband came here as an adult immigrant after being raised lebanon we have diversity in our home we have raised our children to be tolerant of others to have a passion to embrace other cultures and to have a strong moral compass that is [Music] kindness and tolerance i would appreciate if you focus on the key objectives of primary education and now i have natasha from newtown good evening it's disgusting it really is i don't know what it's protecting but it's not protecting anybody a lot has come out in the last few weeks and as a recent yesterday we now know that your

039typical mass is in effect typical mass you buy in a drugstore is not really effective in keeping out viruses which is small enough to pass through material this of course has been known since the beginning particle sizes have been discussed over and over we also know that dr damskur never recommended mass advantage in schools as they are ineffective distracting and cause unnecessary touching off the face we also know that yesterday dr damsker spoke about the non-existent cases in our school community that there is no justification at all to continue wearing masks furthermore at the last board meeting there was a mention of jail time if schools lived in mass abandoned and yet somehow many others and i am still waiting for math supporters to produce something more than science tells us so lastly we have

040heard excuse centers used on why something cannot be done and why something takes weeks or months it's been well over a year well that's a lie it takes one email one line to state masturbation then each family can take one personal responsibility and decide if they will choose to send their child to school with or without a mask or keep them virtual for the last week of school if king wolf can place a statewide shot down with one day notice in december i'm sure the whole administration can figure out how to return kids to school on the short notice as well howdy del pizzo good evening thank you for letting me see who i am here again asking for the same thing that i was here for a couple weeks ago i want to thank

041you for your decision about next school year very grateful for that good morning but i would like to discuss that last night central bucks school district stood up and did the right thing for the children of their district i would like to ask you tonight to do the same thing yes i know school's almost over but there are events that are very important in the lives of these children end of year events and wearing a mask while doing these events will be not much fun for these kids the main reason i'm here is my granddaughter is going to be in a play she's going to be in uh newsies opens up on friday we'll be all weekend long and um it's at holland middle school i'm here to ask you to tell the principal that

042she does not have to wear a mask while performing that play now dr damsker dr damster stated that band and choir students can have masks optional so i'm assuming since band and choir students can be optional i'm assuming that that would also be theater and performing students they're putting out a lot of energy and wearing a mask is just how long and how they can breathe and sing and dance and perform i know you can do this the central buck school board did it and we are the understanding that because the attestation phase is over you were in a position to see her children i'm already i've already watched her sing on a hot 80 degree day for the spring concert with her face covered as of monday this past monday there are only three

043students of a hundred and five thousand with covid and one of them is at home learning not even in a classroom i don't understand why the council rocks requirements are harsher than the state's requirements many of us are here we're not wearing masks but the children have to go to school wearing masks still i know it's almost the end of the year but as i said these events are important in these kids lives and i hope you can do the right thing following dr damster's require recommendations and allow these children to sing and dance and do whatever it is that they have at the end of the school year that is important to them provide memories for them for their entire life please allow them to do these different events that are in their lives

044only once for every grade that they're in allow them to do it without a mask as our as dr damster has suggested that that is what we can do that's what he suggests and i hope that you will go by his recommendations i thank you for your time thank you thank you man next up i have a kevin gamble campbell from upper makefield good evening first off i'd like to thank all the board members who are here tonight for their dedication and those that are not and have served the board well for many years i'm here tonight to change the topic a little bit although i do agree with everyone else that spoke tonight about removing mass in my son will be graduating next week and uh we have one more to go so that's

045uh i'd like to see her start her freshman year high school all that stuff but i'm here the proposed tax increase it wasn't too long ago that mr reinhardt sat in the room across the hall concerned about raising taxes at the time and at that time they increased the tax rate 2.5 2.2 we're now looking at another potential tax increase and if my numbers are right that puts council rock in the highest category of raising taxes across the uh fox county that's something we've got to stop doing our debt ratio is although significantly better than mr reinhardt was in position i'm sorry we're in a better position today but we still have capital funding projects that we not have the money for we're going to the taxpayers yet again even though we've come out of

046a pandemic we've gotten cut we've gotten credits from the government we're not getting any breaks from our local school and as much as mr fraser mr fraser and doug's team are working to reduce costs we're still building capital projects that we can't afford we just can't keep doing it i challenge doug his team and the entire board to take one project in the next project and challenge this entire team and bring in outsiders reduce it by 5 million and see what we can build there is a way to keep building the infrastructure to our home that we can't keep doing it at the price it's going to be today and yes we did get a break because we didn't do two bids for two bids at a time and costs are going through the roof

047i'm in the business i'm well aware of what costs will be but we can't substantiate some of these buildings we are going to be in financial rooms we have assets this building is an asset it has served this community well it will always be remembered for maybe it's time to put it up for sale maybe the house track is time to get rid of it there are things that we consider assets that it is time to consistently look at getting away from and using money in a better way i was not pleased the way the vote the seoul rhinestone project came along it did not go the way i thought it was going to go and we had special meetings and we changed that and i spoke up against it i'll say it again we

048did not have a full budget and we voted that through all the numbers delayed that project and we should have made that vote after the numbers on the special meeting thank you for your time thank you sir i don't comment evening is it andreas sure absolutely good evening i'm here to say that i want math to be optional and i think that this is very it's been very bad in schools i go to gym i get i get sweaty and then my mask it's so hard to breathe and i have to walk all the way around the school building because i have to follow the line since school implements and i go to period three and i'm it's really hard to believe i want to take off my mask but my teacher doesn't let me

049because you can't take off your mess and even then most kids are tired of the gym and then they have to walk all the way around school to get to their classes i um never see my friends faces in school very little unless i'm in the same lunch period as them and for the last week of school i would like to see my friends thank you what school you go to what gradient are your grades [Laughter] nobody heard you because you weren't near the mic so it's okay let's get a's what do you think here's your challenge see me next year right there you go congratulations thank you for doing that [Applause] oh it's our pleasure thanks for coming your turn go all right well thank you folks for coming out public comment was great

050as always uh it means a lot to this board i know me particular we do get a lot of emails believe me we read them um i don't like the type i rather call you on the phone leave a number i'll be happy to call you uh the board reads them all we we talk about it amongst ourselves uh and most if we can we do respond so thank you your your input is important to our thinking so that goes without being said uh let's move the agenda g h um dr thorward would you mind sure i moved to approve the minutes of the meeting of the board of school directors held on may 6 2021 and may 20th 2021. second second mr bilic any discussion any comments any objections recorded as uh unanimous consent

051madam secretary please we'll move right into uh section 3a dr fraser are you going to yeah well i'll kick it off and dr elliot is uh going to get into the details so we uh 3a is a 21-22 school year k-6 elementary model as our elementary parents know we had a registration process which had a deadline of midnight yesterday so we have been actively working on and with these numbers for the past couple of work days and processing and analyzing those the bottom line here is that we really saw very very minimal registration numbers for the cyber option that we've been planning to make available as a board when we talked about this previously we kind of set 15 not as a hard target but as a target number as you're going to see here

052we only have one grade level out of the seven that hit that 15 number only one other grade level is in double digits the the others are all seven i believe and below so our recommendation this evening is going to be uh that we not run the cyber model uh in elementary as we start the 21 22 school year simply because of those numbers it's hard on the night when we're passing the budget and raising taxes it's hard to justify it from a taxpayer standpoint and so dr elliott will go through the details of this and some of the uh some of the implications and the rationales for our recommendations but in a nutshell to kick this off that is where we're at as our administrative team dr elliott great thank you dr frazier good

053evening members of the board and the community as a quick recap at our april board meeting the board approved our 2021-2022 learning models in grades 7 through 12 we were moving forward with all students in school five days a week in person with no live streaming and no cyber option at the time in april when this was approved we were going to be offering two models at the elementary level a traditional model five days a week in person and a district cyber model which would have district-wide cyber classrooms at the elementary level where the students would be five days a week virtual there would be no live streaming except in some cases in some supplemental support services that we would need to provide and we were looking for a transition point at some time in

054the year when um families would have had the opportunity to choose if they so choose to have their children vaccinated um however we were not going to be requiring students to be vaccinated so after the enrollment form that went out to all of our elementary parents um prior to memorial day that closed on june 1st we now have these enrollment numbers that you see in front of you on this table and as uh dr frazier shared you can see from these data that our number of students that are in or enrolled in the district cyber program is very small the total there is 57 and that number is about one percent of the total number of our currently enrolled and newly registered elementary students so as dr frazier said the numbers there do not seem

055to support a district cyber program and we do have as we had indicated in our discussions with two classes that are close to that kind of target date that we had talked about at on board meetings prior so our recommendation as was shared with you already is that we would eliminate the district cyber program option at the elementary level and run only the traditional five days a week in person model for the coming year to share some of the data that we've looked at and analyzed to help us reach this recommendation this evening i begin with this table that looks at our section numbers and also our number of classroom teachers so the chart in front of you is comparing the numbers that we currently have for the 21 22 school year with the current

056numbers of 2021 as they are right now so the traditional model here also includes all of the students who had selected the district cyber option so they're all in that section number together so you can see there we have a total number of sections for 223 sections for next year and that equates to 209 teachers the reason is because our kindergarten is a half day program so our kindergarten teachers typically teach two sessions of kindergarten compared to the 2021 2020 2021 school year our current numbers our current number of total sections is 228 and our current number of um total classroom teachers is 215. it gives you a sense of reference of where our our numbers are at this point this next chart that you see here given our look at our target our target

057number that we had when we discussed the district cyber program of about 15 we looked at what would our sections look like if we were to run two cyber classrooms so if you remember from the first chart grade four and grade six were the two grade levels that were close to that target of 15. the other grade levels were well below that so if we were to run two cyber classrooms as shown in this table so the third column in you'll see that those are added in the um traditional numbers in the first column after the grade level shows what the sections would be and the number of classroom teachers would be if we were to take the students enrolled in cyber in kindergarten first second third and fifth grades and put them back into

058the traditional model but keep the fourth and sixth graders who enrolled in cyber in a cyber program that shows you there what those sections would be as well as what the total teachers would be and then the third column after the grade levels is the total of the traditional and cyber together and then finally just a comparison to our 2020 2021 current sections and um classroom teachers for the grade levels so this shows us again that you'll see um there is some variance in the numbers of sections when you when you would compare this to the traditional of all kids in traditional versus having two cyber classrooms and the reason for that variance is because when we look at our class size guidelines for each of our grade levels based on where those students particularly

059in the two grade levels that have a cyber classroom in this particular example where those students would go to school those numbers of class or sections would adjust based on the class size guidelines so um the variance is just because of our class size guidelines based on these data we then looked at what is our rationale for eliminating our district elementary cyber program and the information on this slide kind of highlights the rationale that we as an administration discussed and worked through in thinking about this decision and this recommendation so first of all the number of students that enrolled in our cyber in five of the seven grade levels were significantly below the target of 15 not even hitting double digits and that for that reason we cannot justify running a district cyber program k

060through 6. running a traditional model only is going to eliminate transition points for our students during the school year and help create consistency with classroom community and who their classroom teacher is additionally running a traditional model only will keep all currently enrolled students and those students who registered by june 1st in their home schools so that they will remain with their home school community if we were to run cyber classrooms in just two grade levels grade four and grade six we would end up splitting some siblings among the two program models so of the 16 grade four students who have selected the district cyber model they have six siblings in other grades who might return to traditional so having one sibling attending cyber and the others would be returning to traditional and uh the 13

061students in grade 6 also have six siblings in other grades who might return to a traditional setting it is also important to think about when you talk about a cyber program there's a difference between a cyber program and a cyber classroom having just two cyber classrooms really does not equate to a cyber program and the kinds of resources and time that we can devote to a good cyber program additionally having only two cyber classrooms really reduces the opportunities to foster relationships and community for the students in the cyber program uh if there would be more students it would there would be more opportunity for those cyber students to build community and connect with each other and help to build that relationship that they would normally have um otherwise but in with just two classrooms it

062makes it more difficult to do that we also considered some other factors when uh making this recommendation we looked at um if we were to offer the two cyber classrooms um for the start of the school year until a transition period there would be a cost to hiring a teacher for that period of time and the cost that you see there in the first point is what would be the estimated cost for a single cyber classroom teacher assuming the duration of time for the cyber program or the cyber classroom is about two months anticipating a transition period where students will have the opportunity to be vaccinated if the family chooses to have their children vaccinated and then return to the traditional setting so if we were to do two cyber classrooms one and four and

063grade four and grade six you can just multiply that number by two and see it would be at about um you know forty four thousand five hundred dollars if our currently enrolled cyber students um opted to attend cyber charter school instead of remaining with us in council rock the estimated total cost of the cyber charter tuition would be 1.2 million dollars um 46 of that total is um special education so if you remember from previous conversations the per pupil allocation for a cyber charter student who is a special education student is significantly higher than a general education student so general education students about fourteen thousand dollars and change a special education students about forty three thousand dollars um additionally the cyber enrollment numbers as i i said previously just to reiterate doesn't really constitute a

064cyber program rather it's just cyber classrooms and finally if we would run a cyber program we would recommend fully stopping cyber at the transition point whenever that point will be because the enrollment numbers and the percentage of students likely to return to the traditional model does not justify maintaining the cyber program after the transition point so just to reiterate our administrative recommendation is eliminating the district's cyber option at the elementary level and running the the traditional five days a week in person model only um and with that dr frazier if there's any other comments for you to add or questions or comments from the board not at all for me mr solomon any questions from the board uh mr tate please thank you um dr elliott on the prior slide the final point says that

065it is likely that there it is um the percentage the numbers and percentage of students likely to return to traditional does not justify maintaining the cyber program that's based on our forecast of what will what is likely to happen at the transition point thank you for that question mr tate as part of our enrollment form for those who selected the cyber option we asked them a second question we asked them to share with us the likelihood that they would return to the traditional model at the transition point whenever that point would happen and based on the data in that survey now that question was only asked of those who selected cyber so it was a small number of students that um it represents and of that number of students which was about 57 if you

066remember the count about um six to eight of them said that they would be extremely unlikely to return to traditional the rest of the students said that the majority said they would be extremely likely or somewhat likely to return and then there were a few that said neither likely nor unlikely to return good thank you that i understand i understood it correctly then that that makes sense thank you you're welcome thank you mr tate anybody else nope i have a couple questions you i would just ask if there was any other options that you guys considered besides what you you know changing the number of classes was there any element of having maybe one class that would be perhaps the dual learning the you know where we put the computers in the classroom so we

067did discuss that briefly as an administrative team and when you look at the you know the challenges of live streaming that presents not only for the really for the students with having to you know pay attention with having to be at home and in school and navigate the classroom community we just did not feel that that was in the best interest of our students for their um academic and their social emotional success okay well thank you because i just will say that i you know live streaming thank you for that is not a very popular word and it's not ideal but it's something a tool that we have developed and i think we should keep it close because we don't know what the future holds so i'll keep saying hey i like i um there

068were some pluses to live streaming and maybe even from uh snow days and that type of thing we're going to keep that close in the in your tool chest i would say you know yeah i think when we talk about snow days inclement weather days we're able to uh to still run virtual days not live streaming per se because no one's in the schools on those days but as you know we applied to pde and got approved for the flexible instructional days now those actually won't be in effect this coming year just like they weren't this year and that's because we had that flex the expanded flexibility through the 520.1 form and process and that again is going to be in place this coming year uh so it's not so much a live streaming thing

069as it is just a pure virtual day and uh yes we will have that uh to the extent needed this coming year and presumably not to the extent needed thereafter but up to five uh flexible instructional days a year starting in 22-23 and just one quick last question what do we do with the uh with the equipment that we invested in is that still going to be left close by or removed yeah mr frederickson you want to handle that one the equipment will be left in the classroom since we don't know what's going to happen next year um that's it that's our plan thank you that was actually going to be my question as well but um dr elliott i reached out to the other night in the middle of a softball game i got

070a text from a parent who didn't get the link thank you for jumping on that right away um you made one happy parent quickly um i know i don't know if mrs marcel can hear real well she's away on business but her and i were a big proponent of this um early on during the pandemic we talked about it at length i think we even used the word academy at one point um i don't know if i'm unhappy or not um i think i'm happy to know that kids are going back to school um and i i'm not so sure of where i stand on this i guess i'm happy i got to be happy because kids are going back to school um are we sure that we hit and we got enough response from

071our parents that we're not missing anything to deliver this type of recommendation um it's it's encouraging from my standpoint um but i can see a flood of emails showing up i didn't didn't do it something got missed uh and if we make any changes you know we did change for the mass in the fall that had no change and then there's another part to the question did we see a lot of charter people come back i asked you that a couple uh meetings ago so let's go through both of those and doc elliott if you don't mind taking that first piece i believe we had um and i don't know the exact name i'm not going to hold you to it um you're comfortable we had we had approximately 130 yes non-respondents out of 5

072000 out of about 5028 uh total um link sent communications we had about 130 uh parents now 130 represent students so 130 students for whom we did not get an enrollment form link completed so you know we had numerous communications with all of our families included uh several times that we resent links we uh informed both guardian one and guardian two to be looking out for the link that it was that it came or that it was coming uh and we also had at the building level our building secretaries those families that did not complete the link we had them do a personal call to try to get them to complete the link so we did a lot of work to get that taken care of so really it was only 130 uh that we

073did not actually get a completed form for and it sounds like the a decent percentage of the ones opting for this are family based it sounds like there's multiple siblings attached to those numbers yes there's a good most of the most of the um cyber students are in families with multiple siblings uh that selected it there are some that are singles but for the most part there are quite a few with siblings in other grades okay yeah and i'll say from a just a process standpoint those reminders if anything i was worried the parents were going to charge back at us for badgering them and hounding them we uh we knew who the folks were in the system who had not responded and goodness emails texts uh automated phone calls um i'm not sure how

074many times over we came in uh tuesday morning oh i think we had roughly 500 non-respondents uh deadline was that night at midnight so through the work that day the outreach phone calls personally from the school automated text et cetera we got that from 500 ish down to uh 130. so uh yeah we do feel pretty good about the response rate and um you know certainly there were ample ample uh opportunities for folks to uh to be fully aware of this and to the cyber question uh at this point we um have uh 22 of our charter school students who left us this past year uh committed to return now i have not had a chance to get that number updated uh so that was as of the last look um but 22 is that

075number uh relative to students coming back to us which we are thrilled about sure absolutely and we hope that number grows yeah mr bilitch please 20 just to follow up on that 22 out of how many 70 some i don't remember the exact number mr pollock but it's okay so there's still a lot of work to do there i i is this gonna so what's the process here is it gonna come back to us for another discussion this is on his board discussion are we going to hear about this again and then do we give the administration some direction or is this just ending here what's what's happening at this point so let me put a caveat on this i would say at this point based upon our realities today this ends here unless you

076know board discussion is such that it doesn't end here but if the board is willing to informally here go with our with our administrative recommendation then then this is how we're going to going to proceed forward the only caveat to it is um that senate bill 664 is out there that's passed the senate has made its way out of house education committee sounds like it will probably be passed and what that would do at least in the bill's current form is allow students uh families if they would so choose to uh retain to self-retain uh next year so that they would repeat the grade level that they were in or are in this current year plus um this are special education services by ida idea law or range from age 3 to 21. so any

07721 year olds think about our achieve program would typically age out with that senate bill we have those uh students not aging out and returning to us so we really don't know what the impact of that is or what the impact of that could be we do in terms of our 21 year olds but like literally all 10 500 of our students would have the opportunity to repeat a grade level if they uh if they so desired and the timeline that's in that bill the deadline if you will was july 15th so that's the wild card and so that's the the caveat that i put on it that could possibly force us to revisit this issue um i doubt that it will but um as long as the board is as comfortable with proceeding as

078recommended this evening that is the only piece that i could foresee possibly causing us to revisit the issue uh over the course of the summer okay so i'll just give you my thoughts i'd like to revisit this because it's it's good information it's new information and um i think it deserves uh additional conversation at least i'm concerned about that's a lot of other kids that are still in our cyber charter school and maybe we just haven't uh i you know i don't know what the term has marketed it well or uh so it's perhaps we could pull more people into our own cyber program i also worry about the transitions right so kids that are um in the cyber program or remote program and needing to feel that com comfort about um transitioning back into

079class full time um so i'd like to have another discussion i wouldn't like it to end here but that's just me it makes sense you look confused then no it makes sense to me and my i was going to ask dr frazier is how does that affect staffing models in the schools and staff in general what's needed when what time frame do you need to roll that out to the principles and that type of thing yeah one of the reasons and mrs taylor i might look to you in a moment just to talk a little more detail one of the reasons why we have the june 1st deadline in terms of new registrants is so that we know our fte count uh both for budgetary purposes as well as we uh were accustomed to uh

080notifying our teachers of their assignments for the following year so um you know certainly i think like anything in this pandemic there can be a little bit of wiggle room but that would be the piece that um would probably you know have the potential to trip us up mrs taylor can you dig into a little more detail with that right well we're um dependent upon the enrollment numbers and the sections in order to staff all of our elementary openings so right now we have posted all of our secondary positions all of our specialist positions so we've been trying to move ahead as much as we can awaiting the enrollment at the elementary level and awaiting to see what we're going to do with the cyber model so the decision on whether or not to run

081in person and the cyber academy or the decision to run a portion of the cyber academy will then impact how many sections we have at certain schools which will impede us from beginning to post and higher because for example under one model if all children returned it in the classroom there may be some shifts that have to be made based upon the sections in a model where we have the cyber program running and the in-person program running there are other shifts that would need to occur so for each particular model there is a different pathway for staffing so we we do need to know to a certain degree so that we can move forward with filling our grade level positions so what is what is your sense on a timeline for that i mean that

082this is tomorrow yeah i mean i understand you know what dr frazier is saying and that you also are expressing a desire to to think about this time is of the essence in in some regards because we do the earlier you post the more candidates you have the more plentiful also candidates as you know because we've talked about it so much this school year we have a great number of long-term subs with us who've done an excellent job they will be hired elsewhere if we don't move soon and make offers the longer we wait we do begin to lose candidates we will find candidates for elementary education but there is some risk to losing some as well yeah and so i think the bottom line mr solomon is that we want to make sure that

083the board is fully comfortable with this so there are some impacts um but but we certainly don't want the board to feel rushed no to this decision no and i understand mark's point but i i think chris to ms taylor's point to my question you know i'd like to set the table for the principals and then you know give them their marching orders of what they're looking for um but it is it is just appearing right now so right and as dr frazier referenced and it's important that our the teachers that are with us currently are anxious to know what grade level they'll be teaching next year in terms of preparation perhaps moving a classroom there's a great number of impact but again i respect your need to understand and digest the information mrs brooks

084please good evening thank you um you know when we first talked about um this cyber option there was discussion from our board about the feasibility of running it and and it was through that that we established minimums for the the class sizes because it's not economically feasible and so we are following through on the direction that we gave so i i'm actually surprised by the numbers given that the first survey that we did did give some indication that the numbers would be higher in fact we thought that we might be able to run sections in all grade levels i think it was like except for one and so now it's sort of flipped the other way because once you actually really have to commit um more time has passed to evaluate you know whatever the

085criteria is so for me i'm perfectly comfortable supporting the administrative recommendation um i for me i would i don't see the need to uh discuss this again unless something significant like senate bill 664 which is that's a substantive change that would impact the delivery of how uh the education could go next year that absolutely warrants a broader discussion on on changing our educational models but absent of that i'm i'm happy to support the recommendation to not have that program next year and begin the planning uh for what we need to do for the fall yeah at the forward um with mrs brooks i'm perfectly happy to let it die right here because it's not economical we we set some minimums and they weren't met so i i am completely fine with letting it go here

086mark i'm trying to get you there are we helping you out any or i mean i think miss marcel would like to comment it was well i was gonna go to her next um it's just my opinion i just i don't like to get information and then you know have to move on we don't know what we've heard from you know what we're to hear from the community you had mentioned that maybe some people just didn't realize um what they needed to do i know there was uh just a few people in the scheme of things who didn't respond but i also think about those you know number of kids who were looking forward to it and you know so all this just for me i i need to process it and i don't think

087there's anything wrong with taking some time but i'm just one of nine so it is what it is mrs marcel you're on the line ma'am thank you mr salomon um you know i i definitely agree with many of the comments that have been said tonight um but you know obviously mr salomon and i spoke about the cyber academy months ago and you know i'm very supportive of it but i also realize that if there isn't a need for it um and that if this isn't something that we economically can do you know i understand that um but i guess i also agree with mr bilik that i just wouldn't mind giving parents a chance to react and reach out to the board and ask questions if they would like to i'm wondering if there's a

088way for us to just add this to a committee meeting that's coming up just so that we can just process information maybe that nothing changes but i just wouldn't mind having a week or two just give people an opportunity to reach out to the board okay thanks anybody else mr doggo please i'll just circle back to say uh you know good turnaround on the end the deadline you got the data back yesterday and got it to us before this meeting today with a solution and recommendation um you know it's not a bad recommendation at all i i can agree with that um a lot of questions unanswered about the small population of people who are looking forward to that option so getting their feedback is is uh is appropriate um not to say we can't

089start the the uh the process and be able to pivot because he said there's a senate bill and there may be other uh information or feedback or kickback from people we might have to you know come up with that third option so i'll just say uh i think i'm okay and agree with denise and dr thorward that we could possibly just start moving forward with the but the planning and see what it looks like it is a small population but at the same time be able to pivot and maybe there is something there for a small district uh live streaming somehow you know for that if if that ends up being a rub that we might be a fix okay thanks thank you sir anybody else on the board thank you i this is my

090cake thank you i appreciate seeing those numbers and i am surprised also that they have changed so much but i'm grateful for that um pleased to see that people are understanding that what we deliver in council rock is best delivered in the classroom with their with their teachers in person uh i agree with mr bilik i want to see every student who's in a cyber school return to council rock i don't know that while while i appreciated this idea for you mr salman mrs marcel i think it was a great idea it spoke to a definite need that we had i don't think that this necessarily translates to those parents who want their children in cyber school for the educational reasons that dr elliot referenced for numbers this small for sections this few this is

091not a cyber program and i think that that is a really vital difference and something that we in terms of the quality of council rock education want to really pause and think about what sort of a quality product could we offer based on these small numbers and the the probability that the parents would be returning their students after a few months so having said all that i i would be glad to support the recommendation of the administration thank you mr dave you have any comments um just simply i i i agree with the comments by ms mckeon and um i think we will be communicating to the school community the elementary schools um that this is where we are with the prospect of a cyber school and that gives parents one more chance to say

092wait wait i really wanted to take advantage of it um but i i don't think it seems feasible i think it's a wonderful idea but if we can't do it properly to ms mckee's point then we shouldn't do it anybody else yeah and i i i want to go with absolutely go with the administration's recommendation here you know through this pandemic we've learned to pivot and change course almost on the fly sometimes and the one thing we have learned is that you know we got in front of getting kids back and we to mrs taylor and her team's credit he was able to pull subs um and fill our classrooms with what we feel as quality educators um we need to get this done for for the next school year we need to get it

093done effectively so um the longer we wait we risk and i don't want to risk anymore um let's get it done i think you have direction dr fraser i believe so thank you much appreciated letter b we're going to go to 2021 2022 salary concessions i'm not sure who's doing this sir uh that was a board request for this to be a discussion item this evening yeah that was my request hello dr thorbert that was my request um or maybe it was mr hidalgo's request one of us but uh you know i mentioned that two board meetings now in a row we had a lot of extra money left from salary give backs and i wanted to give it back to the teachers [Music] and so here we are i'm going to ask one more

094time so that's that's why it's on on the the this is going to come back and haunt us as employers and i i just wanted it on the board one more time so there it is and if i met with silence then it's it's i've done all i can i have a question for council if i may sure mr mckay please i believe this conversation may be related to contracts is it appropriate for public discussion or should it be executive session it's a conversation that can occur in executive session it clearly relates to collective bargaining um that's not to say that the board is prohibited from discussing it publicly that's that's within the board's discretion as well as a lawyer i tend to think that there are a lot of good reasons for the board

095to try to reach a consensus in executive session so that it can do so privately but it's not required to do so so dr thorward can can insist on a public discussion if he wishes other board members can but it is something that the board can do in executive session let me put it to you this way we've got people waiting in the audience for things to come and we've stalled long enough i think on that can we move this to the end of the meeting for board business and if we have to go into executive session so be it sure exactly good thank you all right from there we're going to move the education committee uh mrs mccabe please thank you as there was no education committee meeting in may i'm going to move

096directly to the consent agenda items i move to approve consent agenda items b and c as contained in the attachments to this agenda second please second mr tate any board discussion any objection right hearing none i'm going to ask the secretary to record the motions passing with unanimous consent continue mrs mcgee thank you i moved that effective upon the start of summer student programs base covering shall be optional for all crsd k-12 students and staff have a second please second doctor forward have a second any discussion from the board yes i intend to make a motion to move the start date of that to tomorrow do you want it to be a second motion or do you want to amend this motion dr mr cox i think we've historically have through this year let this

097motion go and well there have been lots of motions from the floor this year uh my my suggestion it's just legit this is just a logistical suggestion my my suggestion would be to take this motion and then handle miss dr thorwitz perfectly fine there was a motion correct there was a second by dr thorward yeah i need further discussion from the borderlands does the board want legal advice on the issue of face coverings or is my email to the board satisfactory well since the your advice before became public i think it would be helpful to have the public hear your advice that you sent out when it wasn't today or yesterday today uh and it uh is the result of the director of uh the bucks county department of health putting uh the full authority

098of his office in public behind the proposition that face coverings can be optional in all situations in bucks county so once dr damsker is the director of public health of bucks county put the authority of his office behind that proposition it became a lawful proposition for this board and any other school board in bucks county to consider so the difference between this board's vote two weeks ago and the options that this board has now tonight is the result of that pronouncement from the bucks county department of health okay thank you mr cox i i think that was helpful for everyone to hear thank you absolutely mr aldavis point of it joe are you yeah i was going to say that um you know people say we weren't leading but two weeks ago we were very

099close to asking for the face mask and the community was there asking for the face mask to be optional and at that time we worked and asked dr damskur and he had worked with the superintendent group in the county and wasn't quite there yet but you know things have changed so i think some of the hard work we did two weeks ago may have and of course improving numbers may have helped um you know get to a yes from from our our local authority here which i've been since the beginning very much an advocate to continue to follow his guidance because i think not every county has a good uh department of health with a director that's so local that's not national or or state level and he i'm just so happy that uh he

100came around and gave uh the okay to our uh solicitor in a sense to feel comfortable enough allowing that so it's a legal thing why two years two weeks ago we didn't go forward and i'm happy to support uh the measures that have been put out there from the public tonight thank you and i appreciate that mr hidalgo i just want to clarify dr damsker didn't make that recommendation to me individually he made it to the community in public at large and and that's what this board is entitled to rely on that that recommendation from his office to the entire bucks county community is something that the board can rely on in making its decision that's true but we're relying on you for the legal advice and i took that from the public comment and

101related to us so i appreciate i'm relying on you that's correct and that's accurate as well mr hidalgo anybody else with a comment so mr cox we're going to read the um it's going to be on the amended motion this is the motion on the agenda seconded by dr thorward and then i believe he has a secondary motion that he wants to bring from the floor so we should do a roll call on as it's stated right now yes sir that's my recommendation okay i just have a question oh mrs brooks please when does the summer student programs begin dr lambert i know it's yours uh we have summer programs beginning for students with ieps beginning june 22nd running through august 19th thank you yes so we're reading d as is just for clarification sorry

102yes denise brooks mckee yes joe hidalgo yes kristen marcel yes yes motion passes 8-0 mr block is not in attendance all right now now dr thor i'll go back to you if you would sir yeah i'm going to address the elephant in the room which was mask optional starting tomorrow i move that effective tomorrow at 6 a.m mass can be optional for all students and staff in the council rock school district for the rest of this school year second second mr bilik more discussion this is uh not nearly uh as simple a a motion to to consider as it may appear on face value i ease more easily came to fully support mask optional for next year i more easily came to support mask optional for the summer programs um because the state order will

103expire on the 28th so we're very close to that many of the summer school students are older and have had the opportunity to be vaccinated um it is not as easy for me for this um and i really try very very hard to keep my objectivity and do my due diligence in trying to understand um all the things that i consider in taking a vote and it you know it's very hard because there's a lot of um divisiveness in the community and the rhetoric is more extreme than anything i've ever seen so um it there we're no longer at a place where you can agree to disagree it is now at a place where if we disagree you're my enemy um i have gotten direct emails the board has gotten direct emails um that i'm

104a child abuser i'm illogical um a lack of internet intellectual curiosity damaging to kids it is very painful to hear that as someone who is dedicated 25 years to this district as a community volunteer as a board member i have wanted nothing but the very very best for every student for every staff member for the community and so um there's a lot of commentary like you don't you're not listening to me you don't hear me and and it you know i hear everything i read everything i talk to so many people and i simply disagree for for reasons that are rooted in my research and my um experiences so where i struggle is that i've gotten countless emails phone calls met with parents who are not as visible who made decisions to attend school based

105on our health and safety plan that included masks begging me what can i do to keep the masks on for the rest of this year to allow the time um you know for the progression of vaccine rollout for um you know just for things to run its course and and and um you know keep the commitment for the decision that they made to finish out the school year with a certain understanding if i'm understanding it correctly uh legally there is still a state order in place and and simply i'm understanding it right what dr damsker has provided is a defensible way to basically not follow the state order that's that's generally correct ms brooks there is a state mass mandate that remains in place that was the legal issue that i referenced two weeks ago

106what's happened since then that enables me to offer the opinion that i offered tonight is that the local arm of that state agency the bucks county department of health which under the statute arguably has primary authority on these decisions that's arguable it's not been subject to a court case that i'm aware of but under the statute arguably the local department has primary jurisdiction it has said that masks may be optional in all situations in bucks county so as occurred from time to time during the last 15 months there's a divergence between local guidance and state guidance the last time that i that comes to mind the last time that occurred as far as i can remember is when a local department of health issued protocols with respect to the masking of athletes that diverged from

107the guidance and requirements that were issued by the state and at that time i advised the board that either option was available to the board and so my my legal opinion is that that is the case here that the board could if it wished leave in place the protocols that it currently have has which derive from the state order it also legally can vote to adopt the guidance that came out of the bucks county department of health thank you um so i i appreciate uh the information um from bucks county but it you know as with anything you don't make a decision you know you find the one one thing that agree you agree with or you're going to listen to just one source of information because you wouldn't need a board would you you

108wouldn't have to think about and deliberate uh you know figure out what what position you have so it's very uh you know the bucks county decision on that is in conflict with the cdc with the pennsylvania department of health with the american academy of pediatrics they have not changed their recommendations 494 districts in the state i believe have not changed their position on that um the the the mask optional um information it speaks to people who are vaccinated so i mean i i would consider some openness about um relaxing things at the secondary level where the vaccine rates are likely higher but at the elementary level where no vaccine has been available that's where the the conversations that i've had with community members who live with immunocompromised people um you know who have um you

109know children with certain health conditions that's where it is it becomes much more difficult for me so the motion as it stands i would i would not be able to support for that reason but if we wanted to reframe it to separate out the elementary level i'm open to that discussion thank you mrs brooks anybody else on the board thank you um as always mrs brooks i find you very persuasive and so well thought out um i appreciate all of my board colleagues in terms of their really critical thinking and desire to do what's best around this issue we've revisited issues throughout the year as has been someone has stated previously as information changes as circumstance changes we revisit issues we're revisiting this one and it's a very different conversation to me than the last

110time we had it because of our the advice of our council with dr dansker's recommendation i feel much more comfortable agreeing with this motion and additionally practically speaking the temperatures that we're going to be looking at next week are going to be very very difficult especially in those buildings that aren't air conditioned removing masks will alleviate some of that discomfort so i i would be able to support this thank you mrs mckay anybody else i'll just make a final comment i you know this is i talked about a little earlier we've pivoted along the way here um as information develops sulfine stone the finances um this pandemic in general we've we've shifted and in my opinion we are a leader in bucks county um i spent 20 minutes today talking to dr damskur um because

111i had to listen to another school board meeting last night when i was in the middle of softball practice doug you know that that you can't do both not with 12 year olds um and you know there's a lot of things that were said last night um and and i spoke to colleagues today and i wanted to talk to dr damsker to have him reassure me that the decision that i was about to make or could make or contemplating making made sense uh mrs mckee stole my thunder 90 degrees next week and that's without relative humidity and whatever else comes along um i'm concerned about the elementary kids who may not be vaccinated as mrs brooks said but they're the ones that are going to find laying on the recessed yard when these temperatures hit

112um i i've given my girls to play softball for me the option to wear masks for a long time and i've told the parents it's your choice you brought them in you take care of them put the mask on the right way or don't wear it at all that's my position it's been my position for a long time dr thorward thank you for the motion um i guess we'll go to a roll call if there's no other comment oh mrs marcel hello i did not have a comment thank you thank you madam secretary roll call please mary mckee yes joe hidalgo yes kristen marcel yes ed solomon swallowing excuse me yes mark pileck yes ed tate yes dr thorward yes denise brooks no motion passes 7-1 i believe thank you [Applause] mr sullivan i may

113this goes into effect tomorrow morning yes i believe that's what the motion was 6 am tomorrow morning all right ms o'grady given there were a couple minutes after nine can you just uh go ahead and put out a communication and we should probably do it via text as well as email thank you mrs mckay i want to continue sorry uh let's see you're an e thank you i am not getting the motion up so i'll see if i can do it from memory i move to approve the health and safety plan as content contained in this agenda second any discussion on board yeah i'm sure you do dr thorbert sorry no it's fine i i am when i i'd like to amend that motion i'd like to motion to read we'll approve it with the

114caveat it vacates next friday at the close of school i want it gone so i can make a separate motion or we can amend this motion that the at the close of schools on friday this goes away i don't know that we're gonna have that option um and i am not probably well-versed enough on this to to speak publicly too much and mr cox i don't know if you are but we did have a countywide meeting today where it was communicated to us that a health and safety plan is going to be required next year and the reason why or at least one of the reasons why is connected to our esser funds so failure to have a health and safety plan it sounds like it's going to be a very different template and very

115different components but um from the sounds of things today failure to have a health and safety plan would uh probably void our as our funds that's that's in the fall though again i don't know enough from a detailed standpoint i just dr thorward i i believe that this is still a legal requirement okay then i will amend them we take everything but we follow the bucks county department of health in and take all the cdc guidance out if we have not already dr lambert the plan contains components of both the plan that we have that we initiated 12 months ago was basically given to us by dr damsker we have revised it along the way i have always consulted with dr damsker on those revisions so i can't say to you that some of its

116cdc and some of its bucks counted it's a combination of both i'll focus then on requiring a doctor's note for a mask exemption is that in the health and safety plan it is that's the part i want removed that should be parallel choice as we just did in we i i didn't put any changes to the health and safety plan coming in tonight because i didn't know where tonight was going so health is we have the authority you excuse me you have the authority to make changes to that health and safety plan prior to revising the document and submitting it to pde so you may do so now that you have made these motions i will go back tomorrow and i will be revising the plan regarding the mask to reflect that i i have

117um did you need to say something mr clark i was just going to say dr thorward an exemption request is not even necessary now the board has rendered that moot masks are masks are purely optional as of as of tomorrow and uh and so that is not an issue the the board has just removed that from the plan so that the work in my the way i hear tonight that whole section on mass will change to mass or optional and and that plan can that that the will of the board will go into effect as at 6 am tomorrow and the plan can be amended in due course to to make those adjustments and i will say that i i if i may i do not want to be quick to start making changes to

118the plan at this point in time i believe that the template will change i believe that in my opinion will likely morph into something that is not so stringent but more along the lines of healthy hygiene practices that we recommend that people follow um so i i think it will in my humble opinion there will be some drastic changes to that plan i just don't know at this point in time where we go with that so i've already had conversations with our athletic department about the what we're doing in the summer time with athletics some of that's all going to have to change so we will be making changes i just was trying to slow pace until i have better sense of exactly where this is going to look after june 28th and i respect

119that dr lambert my stance on this health and safety plan since it was implemented is that it's harmful to kids and i still believe that so i'm trying to kill it that's all um and and if it's going to morph into something else so be it and i'll stop i will stop and i just that's just where i'm coming from and i i do want to say if i may and i try not to say too much is this health and safety plan has been extremely difficult for our buildings to implement over the past 12 months there have been many unpleasant conversations there have been decisions that have been made that are unpopular i just want to thank our administrative staff in the buildings our nurses our teachers for doing what they have to do

120to implement this board approved plan it has not been easy and publicly i just want to thank them for what they've done over the course of the past year thank you dr lambert i certainly second that absolutely mr oldago please yeah thank you and dr lambert thank you so much you've really championed the the health and safety plan this year i really appreciate all the hard work and and thought put into it um i just don't see the motion i know you read the motion but um it's not on on board docs for the public to see what we're just you came in just we were are we required mr cox to vote on this tonight yes but because the board has imposed on itself the obligation to do it at each regular meeting so

121so yes can we wave it no because parts of its sunset unless renewed okay so we'll just work out a few things right now and uh leave it we're talking one week so i i i will the main point is that the board has amended the health and safety plan to make masks optional as of 6 a.m tomorrow so next board meeting are we back to them trying to figure out like in fine-tuning is that what we're going to do next next board meeting when i'm not here i'm just kidding it's good no i'm i'm i'm good thank you that'll be july so yeah roll call correct mr cox yes please mr madam secretary please i'm confused hold on yeah mrs brooks are we just continuing we're just approving the plan with the updates based

122on the results of the past vote there are no updates to this plan as according to dr lambert uh it's just renewing the board's previously board approved plan everyone understands that the mask that's the environment is now optional right those are the changes that will be made and as dr lambert said he'll work on those changes tomorrow and of course we'll circulate that to the board one violet is ready just the information is getting a little conflicting and i don't want any conflicting information out there i i so i heard dr lambert say that he's going to remove the mask requirement from or make the mass optional in the health and safety plan then i think i think i heard mr cox say that nothing was changing in the health and safety plan so i

123just don't want we at the time that we we wanted to allow kids to play outside without mass there's a lot of conflict out there kids were still getting yelled at about having mass on so i don't want that to happen again with this situation so i don't want any conflicting information tomorrow when kids come into school i want them to be able to either have a mass corner have it have it off whatever they want without anybody telling them different so i just wanted that to be clear and i don't want to be conflicting information so let's be clear so dr lambert said that he's going to remove it from the health and safety plan the current language and you're going to make that uh make it read that the mass are optional for

124for anyone that's because you clarified that last time you asked us does that mean adults also so anyone's children students visitors in the school right and adults staff okay and just to clarify the language that i believe mr cox is referring to i don't want to be presumptuous says the the italicized sections on page 33 will no longer be in effect at the conclusion of each scheduled monthly board of school directors business meeting and less agreed upon by vote of the board of school directors at that meeting and that section is primarily dealing with our protocols for quarantining and handling positive cases which we are still following the guidance of the bucks county department of health i remember that section well thank you all for an amendment that's the reason why the board has to

125renew the plan tonight and it i did not mean to confuse the issue the board has removed the board has modified the mask requirement to make it optional for all individuals mr doggo please i could offer an amendment to strike the doctor's note just to have it officially out of the document that's why i voted no the first time so i if this is my opportunity to get that removed i would like board support to remove the doctor's note for even though there's no face requirement it's still in the plan let's just face mass requirement then let's just remove the part about requiring a doctor's note that would be my my suggestion dr lambert correct me if i'm wrong we will just delete the entire section on a face covering exemption because there's no need

126or a point to have an exemption so doctors no no doctors know it's just yeah it's irrelevant there's a section other considerations for student and staff within that section there's a subsection that is use of face coverings by staff and students that will be deleted and it will say face coverings are optional listen just in all practicality here i certainly don't want any confusion either i will just ask for everyone's understanding that we're passing this motion past nine o'clock we have high school kids showing up uh bright and early tomorrow morning in the six o'clock hour i cannot guarantee as we sit here that this word is going to be completely socialized to every bus monitor or every staff member that we have in the district uh checking arrival of kids in the morning so

127we will do our best that's why i asked ms o'grady to get communication out now but i also want to be realistic about that piece in terms of uh tomorrow morning timing is everything right i'm i understand um i think what mark's saying is by lunchtime it better stop is is what he's i mean what i'm saying is that the last time it went on for quite a few days and and it didn't need to so um either our communication is faulty or people aren't listening to the communication and both of those things i have an issue with and and with listen i you know we all read the emails i i i saw the gentleman trying to hold back his emotions we took away the hearing of this this young girl you know one

128of the are they our key senses because of this mandate so whether you agree with it or not i think everybody would agree that we shouldn't be taking away hearing of our children so i just i want that to stop and i want to stop 6 a.m tomorrow morning and i want there to be no confusion about that and it certainly shouldn't drag on uh for any length of time okay anybody else good all right now we're gonna mrs marcel any comments ma'am i just had a um a question i've been getting text messages from various community members and they were just wondering if the communication going out would talk about bus rides and just you know is it just in the classroom or is it just everything and so i just wanted to share

129that because i am receiving a good amount of text messages from people just trying to get information um to the point that we've all been talking about it making sure people know by tomorrow what you know kind of what this is so i just wanted to share that to ensure that people in the public would hopefully be getting some of that information tonight certainly and thanks uh ms marcel that's a really good point uh ms o'grady i don't know if you were able to catch that let's make sure in this communication that we reference mask optional is all school activities including riding the bus um extracurricular activities the whole nine yards any anything and everything school related and that's a good example of you know just what tomorrow morning could realistically look like i mean

130there's no way yeah there's there's no there's no way that we're gonna you know have word to our bus drivers uh between you know quarter after nine here this evening and uh and when they pick up kiddos in the morning so we'll do our best with it certainly have full compliance dr thorbert by lunch tomorrow uh but uh just so just so we understand the morning just brace the community that you know this is like like i just said a snowstorm there's some slippy roads probably in the early morning and um it's like a delayed school start almost bear with us uh we'll get through this all right we're gonna do a roll call on letter e correct thank you sir the doozy of a last meeting isn't it okay denise brooks yes mark bilik

131mark who stepped out oh um joe hidalgo yes mary mckee yes ed tate yes dr thorward well it's got my motion yes um ed solomon yes kristen marcel yes here he comes oh mark bylec your vote okay motion base is eight nothing eight zero i'm sorry uh letter f i moved to approve the athletic health and safety plan second all right i'm gonna assume it's the same yeah right any objections all right real quick give me a roll call on this as well this is for the athletic health and safety plan yes kristen marcel yeah denise brooks yes mark byalek yes joe hidalgo yes marion mckee yes ed tate yes dr thorward yes ed solomon yes well thank you uh letter g uh mrs brooks bucks county iu please update uh just a few good

132news items last week the iu learned that they had been awarded another five-year grant to cons continue facilitating the ecyeh program which is education for children and youth experiencing homelessness um i know it's hard to believe you know we think we live in a you know an affluent community but throughout the county this is an issue so now the iu will receive approximately 383 000 a year for the next five years to enhance those programs um the iu also brought back reading olympics uh in april this is the 27th year of this event it was cancelled last year because of covid this year it was held virtually there were 96 participating schools representing all 13 bucks districts one tech school and 10 non-public schools that represented 115 elementary teams 46 middle school teams 17 high

133school teams and over 2 000 students participated there is also the iu has what they call the caring community awards and this these awards recognize individuals outside of the iu who've made an extraordinary contribution to the iu and the winners come from within the business community industry non-profits retirees school district personnel so i'm happy to share that one of our staff members suzanne loftus an extraordinary professional in our district was one of those recipients we also learned about the results of the iu stem design challenge there were 80 teams in grades four through eight participating the challenge required teams of four to work together in response to a challenge that would be solved by using k'nex pieces and or recyclable materials this year the prompt was to rethink a product that you would find in

134your home and create one that um or create one that you should would create a product that you would find in your home or create one that you should find in your home the product could be either a new or different way to power your home a new or updated appliance a new gadget for home entertainment in the middle school category which is grades six through eight for the county churchville elementary school had a first place winning team holland middle school had a second place winning team and wrights elementary won most creative design in the elementary category which is grades four and five wrights town was a first place winner richbur richburg elementary one most environmentally friendly and wrightstown also won most creative design at our last meeting we discussed the 2122 comprehensive annual budget

135for the iu which is 186 million dollars plus it is an increase of seven million dollars versus last year which equates to three point nine two percent the iu serves over fifteen thousand students um and it the the iu budget differs from a school district budget because the iu has no taxing authority all the revenue uh comes from various state and federal grants and subsidies and funds from school districts for the services that are actually rendered the council rock portion of the budget for next year is down 2.81 and as dr fraser had mentioned earlier we spent a lot of time talking about senate bill 664 which has been approved by the full senate um it and it amends the school code to permit an optional year of education for students next year due to

136covid um the thing that we talked about at length was uh the extension that this would offer to special education students who would have aged out you know because they've reached 21 years of age and so there was a lot of discussion the bill also has some contentious things about access to some extracurriculars and athletics the piaa has not changed its rules to allow for longer play and and different things so i'm not sure how that's all going to get worked out it's uh still uh being discussed i guess or will have to be worked out afterwards um there are funding concerns because of um how ida ida funds are spent and being over the age of 21. um and then on top of it it's rumored that the governor indicated that he would veto

137the bill as it was um as a standalone measure so much more to come but there's certainly a lot of energy talking about this and how to accommodate uh some of the concerns that uh related out of this school year great as always thank you ma'am uh letter h want to go to mbit mrs mckee please thank you the exec council met on may the 10th along with our routine actions mbit health and safety plan was revised to include provisions for modified quarantine also negotiations continue with mba mbea and there were three capital improvement projects that will be moving forward over the summer so finally i just want to take a moment to congratulate all the graduating seniors from mbit they'll be recognized at a ceremony on june 7th at william tennant high school thank

138you great thank you letter i cref golfing mr tate i'll think mr tate yeah and miss uh marcel as well took pictures she didn't cough she did and the golf classic was a huge success raised thirty thousand dollars for the council rock education foundation great um there's a whole lot of committee people who deserve our appreciation for making the event happen and we also want to express our appreciation again to all of our sponsors particularly eastburn and gray it was a wonderful event a lot of people had a great time and it not only raises money but it's a good team-building event and keep it in mind for next year kref is also searching for an executive director gail acosta who has done such a wonderful job is stepping aside but she's going to help

139us find a new executive director so anyone who knows anyone in the fundraising field um please pass along word we can network and find somebody good for kref and uh that's the extent of my report great thank you can i comment on that please please mr mike oh i just want to um uh mr tate i'm glad you're involved with kraft and and uh gail was a real game changer i i happen to be not not i i don't recall the other woman's name denise you could probably tell me if you remember but she was very good too but gail was a game changer she just gets things i made some kind of off-handed recommendations and before you know it there's an event going on so i i want to publicly uh thank gail for

140all the work she's done and um and it's a great organization and i'm and i'm glad this continues um so good job everybody for clarity that was suzanne ray suzanne resurrected an organization that was that was defunct and um so she you know what what she did to elevate uh the foundation to a point that it was able to move to gail i mean it it elevated which with each spot so um credit where credit is due i i think i said yes she i just couldn't recall her name she was wonderful too but it there is um i work more closely with gail and and there always is a progression but yes suzanne was fantastic anybody else mark keep the microphone you got the finance committee this is this your last meeting but where's

141bill this is bill stone's last minute oh are you trying to do all the business for the rest of the year and there's like 21 it's called a mic drop 26 motions what have i done to you bill no reason to go out slowly all right so we had a um finance meeting on may 13th i think it was um we talked about a lot you're going to hear all about it tonight we're going to vote on it all uh but most importantly we're going to vote on our final budget um and see where we land with that um so bill i'm going to let you i'm going to stop talking and let you take it away because i'm going to save my breath for the motions you like to handle the consent sure i

142move to approve casino jenna items b through m as contained in the attachments to this agenda second dr thorbert hey mr stone i don't have anything to add to the consent agenda items that were discussed at the uh finance committee meeting yeah and all these all these items there's a lot b through m obviously but if you if you look at the youtube channel for our finance committee it was all covered in detail all right can i move on the item n i move to approve a one-year s-a-a-s agreement with synopsis for a financial projection mr barley hold on a second we didn't get that recorded let me get that recorded first yeah oh excuse me i'm sorry happy happy feet tonight relax was there emotion there was a motion it was second by dr

143thorward yeah is there no he jumped into it is there any objections hearing none we're going to ask the secretary to record everything with unanimous consent um please proceed mr billy daughter ate her birthday cake by herself about a half an hour ago okay item n approve a one-year renewal synopsis financial i'm reading the item i move to approve a one-year s-a-a-s agreement with synopsis for financial projection software exactly i am making this recommendation for a one-year renewal of the financial planning model software just to retain the work that's been done over the last several years for the next business administrator who will then have the opportunity to choose whether to continue to use that software or use something of his or her choosing right sure any further discussion any objection hearing none i'm going

144to ask the secretary of record the motions passing unanimous consent continue mr bilox i move to approve the 2021-22 insurance renewals second second dr thorward any more discussion objection hearing none i'm going to ask the secretary to record the motions passing unanimous consent and keep going mr bilac i moved to approve the agreement with decision support group for transportation consulting services in the amount of thousand five hundred dollars second second dr forward mr stone any comment here yes please uh this uh recommendation is to engage a consultant to assist us with the impending rfp process for transportation services the contract that we have with first student expires at the end of next school year and we are looking to have a consultant assist us with the development documentation and evaluation of those proposals we had

145an open competition for this uh rfp we received two responses and we do recommend decision support group uh for their uh for this service great any further comment from the board any objection and hearing none i'm gonna ask the secretary to record that as well passing united's consent keep going mr bilat cue well this is for the peacers funding reform accountability resolution but i don't see a motion do we need a motion for this yes it reads the okay so i make a motion uh to approve the piecers funding reform as attached to this agenda is that sufficient yeah second i'll second it mr stone you want to comment on this yes please thank you we've discussed this resolution at the april and may finance committee meetings um and the the resolution seeks three three

146items uh the first is funding reform uh to the employer contributions required of the school district it also demands transfer transparency in the uh with the results of the probes under which the psr's organization is currently under once those are completed and also accountability from the pesos board of trustees with respect to investment performance and to ensure more robust policies around internal controls and conflicts of interest this is a critical resolution because council rock school district taxpayers send 20.2 million dollars on a net basis to psr's every year that that amount is actually initially 40.4 million dollars we received 20 million back from the state but that state share is still taxpayer money that that is that is being contributed back to us and don't forget that our employees who make contributions out of their

147paychecks are also taxpayers many of them are taxpayers the reason we seek more accountability is that if there were greater investment performance from the fund that it is possible that there could be rate reductions to all school districts and so that is why we've recommended that this resolution be considered this evening great thank you thank you any further discussion from the board any objection i'll just say as i said during the initial presentation that every taxpayer every staff member everybody who who contributes this in one way another should be absolutely furious with what's happening and it's been happening with peace or so i appreciate you taking the time and effort to draft this um we submit a lot of funds and there's there's a lot wrong in harrisburg uh regarding uh piecers and hopefully the

148fbi gets to the bottom of it but i appreciate you doing that bill great thank you mr marlin anybody else any objection all right hearing none i'm going to ask the secretary to record it passing unanimous consent and we're going to letter r almost done i moved to approve the service agreement between bar fitness service incorporated and councilwreck school district for equipment maintenance at the middle and high schools second dr forward any comment mr stone a very small dollar request but we are happy to standardize the maintenance of our fitness center equipment at our four secondary schools good there's no dollar amount written on here do you want to just share with us what that is 880 total okay any further discussion any objection all right i'm going to ask the secretary to record that

149as well the united the st recommends the approval okay this is again there's no i moved to approve a one-time operating fund transfer from the general fund of 58 843 and 34 cents the capital reserve fund uh this transfer will be recorded in the fiscal year ending june 30th 2021. second second dr thorbert um thank you mr salomon uh we've received another 58 000 from a federal tax credit program for alternative fuels as the board knows we use liquefied propane gas for the majority of our bus fleet mr adams remains on top of this program and seeks this funding when it does become available so the recommendation is to transfer these funds into the capital reserve and combine them with funds previously transferred and utilize those funds at mr adams recommendation for future safety equipment

150upgrades on the school buses good sounds good any further discussion for the board any objection hearing none i'm going to ask secretary to record that as well motion passing with unanimous consent mark i move to approve the crespa collective bargaining agreement amendment memorandum of understanding as attached to this agenda second second dr thorbert mr stone do you have a comment about this actually i think this one's miss taylor i think actually mr frederickson is uh going to give you a brief overview as soon as he's able to this is a this agreement is between the crespa and council rock i think it's really good for the district one things that we've struggled with i've struggled with since i've been here is to right-size the i.t department to accommodate the changes in technology over the last

15117 years it's been very difficult to do because as we know once a person starts working here it's hard for them to leave um i've had two retirements in my department this year and i have another one that's going to be happening in january of next year and that has allowed us to rethink the way that we do business in the it department so one of the things we're doing is we're replacing one of our senior positions with two junior positions the idea being is that we'll be able to at a much lower salary rate bring people into the district and give them an opportunity to get experience and the idea is that they will grow in their positions and then move on as it is in the real world in most i.t departments that's

152what happens people get experience and then they move on for better opportunities there's very little room for growth in in the i.t department at council rock and most school districts because people stay in their positions for a long period of time so i'm hoping to create an environment where people can come in with their energy their willingness to learn create create a learning environment and it's worked well in my past previous lives so i think it'll work here and the other thing we're doing is we're also adding a manager and that's later hopefully you guys will approve that as well infrastructure manager position that will start to manage some of the things that i've been doing to help free up some time and to put more dedicated resources on some of the requirements because we've

153you know by tenfold increased the technology in the district and we just don't have enough time in our current staff to manage all of the requests that are coming in so we're looking to long-term reduce uh our reliance on external consultants be able to serve ourselves internally and at the end of the day hopefully if things go the way that i'd like to it'll net a savings of around two hundred thousand dollars a year to the district so excellent any further discussion from the board now matt when i was on board you and i spoke about your your staffing levels and some of your vision of your department and um i'm glad to see it come to fruition um i'm sure there's more to go uh more once but yeah congratulations you saved money and

154you and you're putting things in place that you want which is important any other comments any objections hearing none i'm going to ask the secretary to record that passing unanimous as well i'll make a comment if i may oh please yeah once quickly um do we owe an expression of appreciation to the folks at crespa for accommodating this change you must be reading my mind i would like to thank the leadership of crespa for being so willing to work with us and partner with us and for agreeing to this change thank you mr tate i'm i'm glad you mentioned that i i you know we value very highly the excellent relations we have here with our bargaining units and um they're precious and um i know you miss taylor work very hard to maintain those

155relationships so does mr frederickson and dr fraser and everybody in in positions to do so so i think this is once again evidence that we maintain excellent relations with our bargaining units and it's valuable so thank you very much yeah nice job mr tate thank you what are you uh do you mind if i take you and v together uh please do i move to approve the personnel actions is contained in the attachments to this agenda and further i move to approve the personnel actions addendum as obtained as contained in the attachments to this agenda second second dr thor any discussion on this quick question doctor forward question for mrs taylor um we're i reviewed them we're releasing a tremendous number of full-time subs in these two uh things their employment contracts have ended is

156there any thought to keeping some on because we're going to have some of the same problems in the fall you can smell it coming so um do you need help with that or approval or anything like that at the moment um we're i think things are going well we have to end the assignment it's required um of us and then we also there's a piece that goes to unemployment as well that's required so it's perfunctory um that the assignment the end of assignment goes on for approval we like i said a little while ago our secondary postings are all active our specialists are special ed probably by monday all of our elementary openings will be active and our desire is to retain those that have done a great job we won't be able to retain

157everyone because we hired so many long-term subs this year but we we will be looking very very closely and hope to keep as many as we can so thank you i'll just comment we were able to do what we did for kids in opening schools because you hired all those people and i want i want publicly to reflect that you know that was incredible work so i i i don't want to lose again and and i i want to make sure you are empowered to keep us in that position thank you and i we owe a great deal of thanks to our team of long-term substitutes some of whom have worked in multiple assignments this year and have been unbelievably flexible and willing to do anything to help serve our students we've been so fortunate

158to have such a strong team around us during such a tough year our leaves have neutralized back to a normal environment of maternity leaves and illnesses and other such things we can only hope that as all things are looking optimistic this continues to look the same fair and that's another reason with the cyber conversation earlier you know we have an opportunity to start looking at our staffing levels you know we can go into that bucket that that are being released so to speak in reality they are i guess and and pull them back quickly before they're snatched up by another organization so that's great any other comments from the board any objections or hearing none i'm going to ask the secretary to again record the motion passing unanimous consent we are at letter w i

159move to approve the 2021 summer program pay rates as contained in the attachment to this agenda second doctor forward any comments anything real quick i mean it's a series of hourly wages that we're voting on for the public to know there's nothing in there that's radically different than any other year except that we added the extra programs for summer remediation correct we just have more and and there will be in july additional approvals because the special services department is still hard at work hiring additional staff i just wanted i mean we're blowing through some of these i wanted to indicate to the public i apologize okay any other comments any objections all right hearing none i'm going to ask the secretary to record that as you know is concerned as well letter x motion number

16025 is in five parts wow this is painful i moved to approve the following items for bid number 21 dash 34 computers and nutanix i don't even know i'm saying that right to the following vendors category 1 chromebooks to cdw for the amount of 1 million six hundred eighty eight thousand one hundred sixty dollars subject to audit category number two i'm sorry there's six points category number two chromebook adapters to cdw for the amount of 712.50 subject to audit category 3a laptops to net services for the amount of 27 223.75 subject to audit category 3b docking station monitor keyboard and mouse to net services for the amount of 8568.25 subject to audit category number four desktop computer to ask technologies for the amount of 645 540 subject to audit and category number five nutanix to

161ask technologies for the amount of five hundred eight thousand dollars subject to audit quickly second before thank you take a drink any any any discussion for the board any objection all right hearing then i'm going to ask the secretary to record this with unanimous consent as well and finally uh letter y all right here's the big one for the night i moved to april the council rock school district final 2021 2022 general fund budget and tax resolution with a tax increase of 1.99 equating to 132.8073 mills as contained in the attachments to this agenda and subject to final solicitor review the second second dr thorbert mr stone thank you mr salmon i do have a brief presentation uh for the board to update them on the changes uh to the budget that were made since

162the finance committee meeting on may 13th where a tax real estate tax increase of three percent was recommended so i believe it's important to update you before you consider this budget for approval the 2122 final budget executive summary brings in our revenues at 248.8 million dollars and our expenditures surpass the quarter billion dollar mark 250.2 million dollars there is a budgeted deficit of 1.36 million dollars meaning that our expenditures exceed our revenues by that amount however we are able to use fund balance to balance the budget um and i would like to note that that 1.36 million is less more than half less than the prior year's budget deficit of 3 million dollars we've had to make a few adjustments to the budget in order to change to to move from a three percent real

163estate tax increase to the 1.99 percent recommended this evening the 1.99 real estate tax rate uh increases our tax revenue by 3.3 million dollars that's approximately 1.6 million dollars less than the 3 percent tax increase would have generated so in order to bring this budget more into balance we made adjustments to the line items over on the right-hand side of the screen here we decreased the budgetary reserve by 96 thousand dollars and we decreased the transfers scheduled for cip or summer maintenance projects as well as future technology purchases uh we decreased those amounts by approximately one third which is consistent with the reduction from a three percent real estate tax increase to approximately a two percent real estate tax increase we also made a further reduction to the health care budget and that's why our

164if you recall our budgeted deficit at presented with a three percent real estate tax increase was about a 1.25 million dollar deficit and so this is very similar to that i also do want to point out that we made a very small change to the both local and state revenue line items this is a net zero impact because we received slightly more money from the state gambling funds to pass back to homeowners through the homestead farmstead credit and so we were we increased the state revenue that we received and decreased the local revenue that we received but again no impact there the millage rate increase of 1.99 percent as mr bilik noted in the motion increases the millage rate to 132.8073 mills that's an increase of 2.5913 mills the change in the millage rate also

165does have a very small impact on the homestead credit it actually increases it by two cents over what was presented on may 13th so uh homeowners that qualify for either the homestead and or the farmstead credit will receive a credit in the amount of 290.76 that's an increase of a little bit more than seven dollars over last year's amount the impact of that 1.99 percent real estate tax increase is measured on this slide in three different ways the first is for a home assessed at the 25th percentile of all residential properties in the district approximately 28 thousand dollars the annual increase when comparing the 21 22 taxes to the 2021 taxes is approximately 64 dollars for a home assessed at the median assessed value of 36 800 the increase is just over 88 dollars and

166for a home assessed at the 75th percentile or a higher assessed home would have an increase of approximately 130 dollars i shared this chart at the finance committee meeting and it shows that the board has over the time period of act one has a history of approving tax increases at or below the act one index the orange line is the act one index and the blue bars are the tax increases and you see the revision to this year's or the upcoming year's tax increase on that last blue line to your right this provides a more detailed look at the final budget summary showing revenues split by local state and federal sources it shows both a historical and a comparative view of the budget i'll note that the local revenue is the primary driver of the

167increase to our overall revenue budget that of course includes the real estate tax increase but i also want to remind the board and the community that many of the local revenues that had been reduced fairly substantially in the 2021 budget this current year's budget were was that was done intentionally uh at the time when uh the pandemics impact was unknown we've we've seen our revenues come in uh as uh similar to what they did prior to the pandemic and so i am confident that we can begin to return those those revenue numbers to levels pre-pandemic and that's why you see a 2.3 percent increase in total revenue which is greater obviously than the 1.99 real estate tax increase on the expenditures which are the these these numbers down here you see that the primary increases

168are due to the inclusion of the fund transfers that that i discussed a few slides ago for both cip and for future technology purchases i will also note that there is an increase in charter school tuition which we've experienced this year as a result of the pandemic and that is as as of this moment budgeted to continue without the certainty of enrollments for next school year so there's an increase in that line item and expenditures are coming in 1.6 or 4 million dollars higher than the prior year budget and you see here the 3 million deficit budgeted for the current fiscal year and the proposed 1.36 million dollar deficit budgeted for next school year the last two slides are the pie charts that i show they look very similar this one indicates that the majority

169of our revenues 79 excuse me 77 percent come from local sources those are all of the taxes levied real estate tax earned income tax being the two largest state and federal sources comprising 23 percent and then the use of the fund balance continuing to decrease it's now at 0.5 percent of the overall revenue budget then the expenditure budget has a few additional slices to the pie but salaries and benefits as a people-centric organization coming in at exactly 75 percent of our total budget our debt service is 7.5 percent of all of our expenditures the 300 to 900 objects which are all things supplies equipment professional services everything besides those other items comes in at about 16 and you see the two very small slices for our transfers and the budgetary reserve that concludes my presentation

170thank you thank you mr stone any comments from the board at this time hearing none i'm going to ask for roll call please oh mr aldago last second oh you know i won't make a comment you sure yeah mrs marcel do you want to make a comment before we go to roll call uh no thank you okay great madam secretary roll call please marion mckee yes joe hidalgo no kristen marcel yeah ed solomon yes mike barlick no ed tate yes dr thorward no denise brooks yes five to three past five three three how was the committee dr thorward thank you um as promised at the last board meeting um we've got a couple policies coming before you um the changes we're going to make to these two policies are minor um they've had solicitor review

171um i was going to do a first read and then a second read but dr frazier has indicated and you can certainly chime in that it's important to him to get these done now so i'm going to ask that the board i'm going to move to approve these tonight we'll go through the the the changes um and then we'll go from there mr cox do we need to waive any procedures to do that or no doctor thor okay i i i like i said i had and dr fraser you want to just tell us or tell everyone why and then and then we'll get to that yeah i'm happy to and thanks dr thor work it's really twofold one is that uh again next friday is our last student day and uh our teachers in

172particular of course uh do not work over the summer so i think it's really important that we get this passed and communicated out uh and two uh as has been mentioned earlier we do have a number of summer programs and even more students participating this summer than what we typically do in the summer and as dr lambert said earlier those uh programs begin in just a couple weeks on june 22nd so i think it just sets us up systemically for uh best success to get these passed uh this evening they're important enough to do so thanks thank you um and then we'll we'll have a real policy committee meeting because uh many members of the cabinet have asked for some policy revisions um we're gonna do that via zoom um we're still collecting i know

173it's a busy time so i've been dragging my feet but these were kind of important so we'll start with the first one i moved to approve the modifications to policy 209 health examinations screenings as contained in the agenda second mark mr biot um matt can you show these on the screen or were you not prepared because i'm happy to read them i was not prepared to do that i apologize i'll i'll read we're inserting into policy 209 which was uh revised not that long ago um let me pull it up here i'll read you the title i have the uh the change dr thor if you'd like me to read it uh yes please do because you worked on it with mr cox yes the the change that's included in both this policy and the

174second policy is the same and the statement is as follows accept as may otherwise be required by applicable law regulation state or local order as required for participation in a program or activity with a third party that requires otherwise it shall be the policy of the council rock school district to neither require a student's vaccination against coven 19 nor inquire into a student's coven 19 vaccination status i'll just note that board docs is slightly different than that but the pdf file that's attached to bordex is correct um so these were the the policies that we brought up at the last board meeting re around vaccination um mr cox very politely suggested them be put for them to be put in policies versus a blanket statement i i agree and so this is one of the

175two uh we have before you uh the rest of the policy remains exactly the same we're we're just covering a new facet based on covid and vaccines so you want a border yes since since these two policy changes are essentially the same just in two different areas can we do them all at once and have the discussion around the general nature of the policy changes yes mr bilic there you go um then i'll make a second motion um i move to approve the modifications to policy 314 physical examination as contained in this agenda second mr bilox a second any discussion on that sir the only thing i would note is that the reason this language appears in two different policies is that 209 applies to students and the 300 series applies to employees and i

176want to thank you for i mean i had some suggestions and you found a better place to insert both of these so that's nice work thanks for a pleasure yeah you want to roll calling us yes please mr salomon just in case there are any dissenting folks we're going to put her to work madam secretary can you give us a roll call for policy number 209 in 314 please 209 and 340 and 314 combined okay um denise brooks yes marion mckee yes joe hidalgo yes kristen marcel she's she's off they have dropped she dropped okay um ed solomon yes mark bilick yes ed tate yes dr thorward yes that goes with the same right or you want to do the second one no they're combined together yep we're good thank you mr frederickson yeah thank

177you mr cox mr frederickson we're going to move the facilities uh mr tate please thank you mr solomon um facilities committee did not meet last month because it was not necessary we have a number of items starting with a which is the consent item agenda consent agenda items i moved to approve consent agenda items b through h as contained in the attachments to this agenda second second dr thorward any more discussion uh for me i'll i'll be voting no on the items that relate to um the renovations at whole crest or um sulfine stone so i think that is um items b through g if if i'm right on that separate them that's um not all of those apply to it yeah right or is it just being say i'm sorry so it's just with

178the exception of b and c b is hillcrest correct these whole crests you're right there's some others uh in here so it's just b and c with the exception of uh b and c i can just i can just vote uh yes with the exchange section of b and c right work okay [Laughter] that would be yes with the exception of b and c okay yes dr thorward yes denise brooks yes marion mckee yes joseph hidalgo yes with the no yes kristen marcel oh she's awful um agenda item i um i moved to award the agreement between the council rock school district and dewey engineering inc with professional fees based on a sliding scale fee structure as included on the attached proposal subject to audit second second dr forward uh mr taylor any comments on

179this uh not unless there's questions on this one any questions or discussion from the board i have a question for you mr lisa i don't mean to be a nudge here but is this for either of those two projects we talked about before so find soon or is this just this is for summer projects summer projects very good thank you you good bye i am good mr president okay thank you any objections i'm hearing none i'm going to ask the secretary to record that with the unanimous consent mr tate keep going jay i moved to award the bipolar ionization bid 20-55 to jbm mechanical inc in the not to exceed amount of 682 thousand dollars subject to audit second second dr forward mr taylor yes so this is a project that we did discuss at

180the may facilities meeting but we did not have the bid results and i think it's important just to touch base on um a little bit of the history of the bipolar it's not an exciting subject but it's important that we understand what we're proposing to put in the schools because there is some there are some articles out there and claims uh that and other claims that challenge the um validity of the bipolar uh product and specifically um if it does combat virus if they're um if they uh emit or release any toxic chemicals and some other questions and there's articles and there's you know pros and cons so um we um we did do some extensive research we had dewey engineering do some work and we have a document that's included in the board packet

181and we also had element environmental solutions do some research as well to touch on the merits of the bipolar ionization and specifically needlepoint bipolar ionization which there is a difference the technology dates back on bipolar to the 1800s and the needlepoint is at the forefront of bipolar products that people are putting in buildings today to improve the indoor air quality so you know it's been a since the pandemic hit it's been a nationwide you know effort on facility managers in all facilities to improve the indoor air quality and we can only do so much with the outside air improvements we have older buildings that don't have the same ability to improve outside air so this technology is definitely a technology that is worthy of consideration there's certainly no system that will be 100 percent effective

182in killing viruses but we do know that this proposed product absolutely neutralizes viruses and the added benefits of mitigating mold spores pollen bacteria and odors so the product alone in a classroom is going to improve the air quality for allergen issues uh for viruses and and the technology generally works by charging the the particles and the particles uh attracting and growing larger particles they get caught up in a rather uh standard air filter so instead of replacing our air filters with nerve 13 which really our equipment doesn't allow us to do because the fan motors will be challenged by a closer knit filter in a lot of those units so this allows us to put this forward of the filter those larger particles get caught up in the filtration and they're not floating around the

183air and in fact some of them will become large enough that they just drop from the air themselves there's a couple key pieces of the equipment one is the ul 867 which does certify the safety of the electrostatic air cleaner and the other is ul 2998 which certifies its ozone free because the concern is it produces ozone which would be dangerous for staff and students so we've specified units that do not you know emit ozone and they are safe electrostatic units and the other key piece of this is doing pre and post construction testing making sure that we are creating a safe environment in the school for the occupants and indeed improving air quality so we'll be able to validate the improved air quality with the testing that will be performed as well so for

184the reasons of the improved air quality for the staff and we do have a lot of concerns for you know spores in buildings for pollen and certainly for for viruses i think it's a worthy product to consider putting in our schools and it would go in all of the schools it goes directly in the terminal units in each classroom it goes in the rooftop units it's also connected to the building building management system so we know if the unit stops functioning it will send us a signal to let us know that in that respective building that unit has stopped we would also put them in the seoul fine stone building because we wouldn't touch that building for a year from when we start this project so those units would be used for replacement units down

185the road so that would just be a stock for us in the district so i think for for the reasons that are outlined in the attachments and for that brief overview it's a worthy consideration to improve the air quality uh district-wide thank you mr taylor so that's every school building correct yes thank you that's good any further discussion mr duncan total cost is like 600 and some thousand dollars 682 000 yes okay and so when we did speak last time there was the safety articles out there and i see the due diligence i'm looking through the in literature or documents given earlier today with that said i will vote no because you know to have to test units for safety yeah you know i know you're doing the right thing you feel the right thing

186to do but for me i'm just not comfortable at this point to put in things that you have to test to make sure they're safe and i'm not saying you're wrong i'm just not going to vote yes for this today and i appreciate it thank you anybody else all right have a roll call please madam secretary mark butler yes ed tate yes yes denise brooks yes marion mckee yes joe hidalgo no kristen marcel um ed solomon yes good mm-hmm yeah violet yes okay letter k here we go okay i move to reject all bids received for the sale house stair construction bid 2011. second mr violet doug do you want mr tell you want to comment real fast uh real fast yeah we didn't have the bids at the time of the facilities meeting we

187did receive the bids the number for uh the construct the removal of an existing deck that is structurally challenged and the replacement with a new with uh stairs was extraordinarily high in the range of 37 thousand dollars for pressure treated construction certainly not worthy of consideration so we did do a code study based on the occupants that are in the building with the special services programs and in fact the deck and the stairs are not required by code so what i would recommend is the rejection of these bids our team can remove those stairs and and deck we can put a guard up at the exterior sliders we can secure the sliders and and put not an exit and we still have a safe means of egress from the building to grade on the on

188the floor level and we don't really even need the the basement exit so we are in compliance without those egress stairs and the deck is not used as part of the program okay thank you any further comment from the board any objection hearing none i want to ask the secretary to record that with unanimous consent thank you thank you move to new business yeah um it's 10 15. uh if we're gonna move this to exact session my my original discussion item you want to schedule zoom meeting or something i i i'm trying not to be a nudge and and push this anymore this evening we're not going to function properly anyway mr cox said okay with you um yeah i i let's circle back with me and yeah we'll figure something come up with a

189timer pigtail on another exec session if we've got one coming up i i'd appreciate that two points uh before we close the meeting i just uh mark mentioned it earlier uh mr stone this is your last meeting with us um i don't know what to say other than what's been said in the past you know you've brought a lot to the district um those shoes will be incredibly hard to fill um and i think i speak on behalf of the board in saying that uh we wish you the best uh we wish your family the best um go serve well uh you deserve everything that comes to you it's been a pleasure working with you second oh mr aldo please we did discuss that i would bring up something at new business um so are

190you going to talk about bill stone no can i finish just something because i i was i had a very nice thing written here as finance chair i apologize i just took that's all you voted me here and i got the question and i regret it every meeting just kidding um you and i will talk after uh as we have been before but bill just quickly you're an absolute professional you're going to continue to be a leader in your profession and this is a huge loss for council rock um i hope we'll keep in touch and and i've learned a lot from you and i really appreciate this relationship but best of luck and before we move on joe capua this is your this is your capo's last meeting yes okay if i can just

191say you've been an absolute delight an absolute delay i've really enjoyed the conversations we've had you know outside of the meetings and uh you're going to be missed too because you it really is a bit of sunshine having you here at the dice yeah so i took that from you no it's that's fine you gotta buy like um mr hildago mine's not so you know so fun and and cheery um we were we were speaking we were getting some emails and i think someone who spoke in public today about certain concerns that some people are having about um maybe some of the words she said equity diversity white privilege is something that only came up after i came to the school district and read some emails and i had never never heard anything like that

192before in my life but things like this have been coming up the last few years and now they're they're making it into the classrooms and i'm seeing more and more uh evidence of uh of maybe things that i'm not sure we should be doing from my standpoint as a overseer of of the school district that i feel we are being equal or equitable really and maybe be segregating from political standpoints people and so um we could talk maybe about certain examples and i want to bring this out to the public and i think we really need to open up this uh discussion starting tonight about a tough tough it's tough stuff because it kind of segues into the division in our country that's been going on pretty heavily since 2016 and you know lines are

193being drawn but they're it's filtering into the classroom it's affecting the education it's um it may be uh in in a way that i it's in a way that i'm not comfortable with because i see examples of it and teachers i'm sorry uh parents and maybe even teachers would would complain about some of the things that are being uh circulated or asked of of students in our school district so really in particular because i said i was going to bring it up to a constituent who was very concerned about a privilege check which is something that was put out to students that kind of concerns me and i have many more a few more examples that come to mind but that in particular was something that i want to know where the school district stands

194with content like that where we are asking uh children uh students about their privilege and how they feel about certain things i'm not saying i'm i'm against anything from inequity diversity and uh um you know tolerance standpoint when we did the whole survey i really thought hey we shouldn't be looking at people by the color's skin we should really be categorizing people by the content of their character like like it's been said in the past and maybe uh it's more of a bullying thing or a socio-economic issue but we're we continue to draw lines from the color of people's skins and and i just think we have to figure it out i'm not an expert i'm not that eloquent but i can tell you what feels right and what doesn't feel right and a lot

195of what's going on doesn't feel right to me and so i'm in a position here to try to shelter our uh you know school district from unwanted things that might not be fair and equal and maybe we just educate the kids and stop trying to teach them a certain political sway or not so with that i don't know if the school district wants to do it now or if you have if you want to get into it because i know it's late but i would like to give the opportunity for us to sit down and and tell the public what we find is appropriate what's not appropriate and how we're going to go about moving forward uh tackling these issues as it trickles into the classrooms you know so there's policies if i could just

196look real quick that i would like to revisit um in regards to this if i could just get it for a second and dr frazier do you do we have policies about this already that uh that you want to speak about tonight or would you rather save it for a policy committee meeting i don't have anything mr hidalgo from a policy standpoint yes i think i think my only comment this evening would be to reiterate what i put in my communication on friday which is that as a school district certainly as a superintendent i do believe in diversity equity and inclusion um and the board has consistently supported that work uh in the past where where i think where i think sometimes the the specifics go awry and mr hidalgo you've just mentioned a piece

197of it is when um in the course of trying to make sure that all of our students regardless of skin color race gender um faith etc um when we we want all folks students uh parents staff members we want everyone to feel welcome to feel like they belong to feel valued to be accepted and what we don't want to do in the process of getting to that point is to make anyone else feel badly about who they are you know whatever they were born into their lot in life and so i do worry about um you know anything i think that has the word privilege associated with it that we use with students because because i don't want kids feeling badly about themselves i i think that i think we all understand that um some

198folks have have different opportunities than than other students do and we should strive for an understanding of that and even a level of empathy in that but but we certainly don't want anyone feeling badly about themselves or whatever circumstances they were born into i think that's where that's where sometimes this uh this work or perhaps specific assignments have gone awry and i think as a superintendent i think us as a leadership team we uh we can should and will put guardrails around that i don't know exactly what those guard rails are but the concept around it is to make sure that in the process of trying to create understanding and even a level of empathy again is to is to make sure that no one is feeling badly about themselves i appreciate that so much

199i really do i know that you're passionate about this subject and always have been and and i appreciate that and i agree uh and sometimes when you try to work so hard in one uh area you create a new problem and that's what i feel like we've done here so i'll thank you for that i wanted people to know that we are on on the side of equity equity and we're not perfect and we're going to work on uh on this subject so i would just state thank you he's not in the room anymore matthew fredrickson for sending me looking at a few policies we could look at 105 curriculum 321 political activities academic standards and 103 non-discrimination in schools and classroom activities and use those to try to guide forward maybe we'll be a

200leader here in trying to you know because um nobody's wrong we're all trying to do the right thing i truly believe that and uh we're gonna work together to make sure we come up with the best outcome so i just thanks i said i was gonna mention at the school board meeting so i'm glad and i appreciate your response as always thanks mr thank you dr thor would you have a comment if i if i may um i won't take too much but dr frazier i i i appreciate you saying guard rails i would have said lanes i think curriculum curriculums for any subject should have lanes and you know some of these topics don't belong where we've seen them either age related or subject matter related and it's happening a lot it seems to

201be happening a lot now it could be a product of virtual learning it could be for a lot of reasons i'm not i'm not accusing anything but um to mr hildago's point i agree we need we need to come up with a way that we get this fixed um not tonight but um you know and i'll add those policies to our list for review we may not review or change anything in them but we can certainly add them to the review to to look at i agree thank you i just say something sure mrs brooks i don't think i don't view this as a huge problem that needs to be fixed i don't think the issue is with the curriculum itself i think this is an issue of some assignments so it's it's it's not

202the wholesale curriculum or the approach that the district has um that is the issue so um i i think it relates to specific assignments that we should definitely um you know have uh systems in place to you know make sure that you know there's some checks and balances second sets of eyes maybe some kind of rubrics or things that we measure things but the continued path of supporting themes of diversity equity inclusion in our curriculum is critical thank you you're welcome anybody else yeah if i may mr tate please um very briefly um i agree with ms brooks i don't think that there is a widespread problem that we need to address um there will always be incidents where a teacher's assignment or a teacher's comment might be misconstrued or might even be be a

203matter of poor judgment but that's not a board matter that's a matter for a curriculum coordinator or a principal or if necessary an assistant superintendent or a superintendent this is not board business the board i mean it is you talk about a slippery slope the board getting involved in curriculum and matters of culture and politics is is i mean uh it's like the scopes trial or something um i don't think there's a widespread problem that needs to be addressed i have all the confidence in the world that when these kinds of problems arise which they do on an occasional basis and they always will particularly perhaps with a young teacher that our administrators are fully capable of dealing with the situation every time we one of these situations comes up and again they're rare the

204report that we get back from dr fraser strikes me in every instance as absolutely satisfactory the administrators have dealt with it they've recognized that this was problematic for this reason sometimes there's an apology extended because there was some poor judgment but my goodness if we start taking away discretion from our teachers that would be a sad day so i just do not want to perpetuate the idea that there is a widespread growing problem that needs to be addressed i do not believe that thank you thank you sir mr odago please thank you mr tate i appreciate that very much one of the things i was thinking about in doing this because you say it doesn't happen very often then what i'd like to do as part of the policy not to get there and tell

205them what to do what not to do uh so much for you because you're right maybe a slippery slope it goes both ways so i agree with you there but maybe we could have like a form or something that parents can fill out because instead of getting these emails let's let's just have a form and that we can decide on our own how often this happens or not and i'd like because that's one of the things i was thinking i'd like to track how often this really does happen because i can say i got one email and then all of a sudden i talked to a few people and this is something that was systemic you know but the parents don't i mean in that one instance meaning that it would be like something oh

206i got that assignment too and out of 100 people that got that assignment one person complained about it so all i'm saying is uh if we can track it that's part of the policy change i would like to do is create some kind of way to administratively check i don't want to get involved in the day-to-day operations i i always was one that wants to give teachers the uh the discretion to do what they want to do uh but when they're if they do something and their parents like hey you know what that's not right well then there should it should be documented and there should be consequences if there's a repeated uh offenses anybody else yeah so i just have to comment i i i'll agree with miss brooks i don't think these issues

207are widespread but what has popped up or are pretty surprising um i i couldn't disagree more with mr tate one of our requirements is a proven curriculum as a requirement of the school board so um if if we're not if we're not a proven curriculum what are we doing here we're elected officials of a government entity it's our job to hear the accolades and the complaints of our of our um uh constituents and to uh direct the administration appropriately we are not here just to agree with the administration just be happy with the resolution or or never disagree with a recommendation we must approve curriculum and when it goes off the rails guard rails is a really good term we have to we have to correct it and it happens from time to time and

208it's bound to happen because people come into this job any job with different ideals and different thoughts and it's going to happen but there's a reason there are nine of us up here on this board we're elected to guide this district guide this district challenge this district and be responsive to the community we can't just say no we're not going to do that that's our job and we must do it period okay good anybody else uh do you want the public safety announcement about communications yeah i think we should uh so unfortunately our uh communication system blackboard uh is experiencing issues that's why ms o'grady you saw her step out quite a while ago so the decision earlier this evening about mask optional 6 a.m tomorrow has at this point gone out to all staff

209it is posted on our website it is posted on our social media channels but no email to parents or text to parents has gone out yet because the system is not cooperating with us so we have staff who've been working on it for the past i don't know 60 or 90 minutes we do expect it to be resolved but uh unfortunately as of this moment uh this is where we're at well fortunately it's getting out to some degree because we're getting pelted with emails and texts from parents so if anybody nobody has anything else i'm going to adjourn the meeting thank you you