001okay all right we'll start off with a few announcements this evening first of all we did have an executive session prior to this meeting to discuss personnel as a reminder masks are still required this evening springford area board of education believes the community has a right to bring before the board issues and concerns they may have about items on the agenda or about things in general which affect the district or their children at the beginning of each board meeting the springboard residents will have an opportunity to share those concerns and comment about agenda items only each comment community member on zoom and in person will have up to three minutes in which to address the board prior to adjournment there will be an additional opportunity for the community to comment publicly again each community member
002on zoom and in person will have up to three minutes in which to address the board please note as in past meetings i will do my best to balance comments from those in person and from those on zoom all speakers are required to state their full name and address before making any comments in this way the information can be recorded for the meeting minutes this meeting is being filmed to be broadcast on community cable channels and online individuals intending to speak to the board should be aware that they are being videotaped and i respectfully ask that those in attendance this evening or on zoom are respectful courteous and civil during public comment and throughout the meeting i also want to let everyone know that alison one of our student reps is joining us on zoom
003rich is she available okay great and do our student reps have any um opening remarks or announcements this evening good evening we do have a couple of announcements today this past weekend the springford gordon rams marching band competed in the cavalcade of bands in the marching band championships in hershey pa which was their final performance of the season additionally springford earned high marks in the patriot class earning the title of open division champions that is a really big achievement so congratulations to the golden rams student musicians marching band leadership team parent volunteers and ram fans thank you thank you for making that announcement of dd and congratulations to our band okay moving on then public to be heard on agenda items only we'll start with in person so anyone in person that which who wishes
004to make a comment to the board as there has been some discrepancy about true or not true addresses i ask that you please state your name and your true address for the board thank you for the meeting minutes michael poginski 2005 will overdrive rochard agenda item one your vote tonight to update the health and safety plan to recommend but not mandate masks for our children should be very straightforward if based consistently on your own past publicly stated commitments the video recordings from the previous board meetings prior to school opening show this board making three commitments to abide by federal state and county mandates to implement a great stratified metrics-based mass policy until the availability of a coba treatment for five to eleven-year-olds and an updated health and safety plan in september as conditions warranted fast
005forward is now the middle of november the 5-11 treatment is widely available pennsylvania commonwealth court and governor wolf have taken action to ensure the statewide school mass mandate will go away no later than january 17th more likely by tomorrow or wednesday and springfield administration has made some initial though unfinished progress on optimizing the quarantine policy to make good on your promise keeping our kids in school as much as possible perspective is important it can be found in the data since march 2020 20 months ago a total of 63 residents in the district of 50 000 have sadly lost their life with covid digging a little deeper 57 of these deaths were attributed to a single outbreak at parkside in april last april all of whom were very elderly during the last 20 months in district
006footprint of 50 000 outside of the park parkside outbreak we lost a total of six residents with covid the youngest of whom is 49. my source of this data is the montgomery county cove data download we know from 20 months of data that covet rarely affects children look at the cdc data it's very clear and consistent over 20 months we know this not only from the data but the biology as well which tells us that children rarely express the h2 receptor required for cell infection and now children have the option to get the cova treatment which promises to minimize any potential reaction to covet so i asked what else could you possibly want please give our children some solace after 20 months of dealing with this nonsense please follow flu or follow through on your
007commitment and vote yes effective immediately for the updated health and safety plan do not wait till january thank you are there any other comments in the room hi james troutman 199 north limerick road uh i'm going to be talking on agenda a and b real quick um you wouldn't have to have an amendment on the management on this mask mandate which is an awful unlawful child abuse device if you just did one simple thing just give it back parents choice plain and simple this entire experiment is one you could just keep doing this you just gave parents a choice to opt in or out the whole not off letting parents have the choice is the whole issue here it goes against the law to the solicitor i don't know what law you're following but uh
008if you go to civil law uh 21 cfor 5024 i'll give you the extension so you can read it i've emailed you guys on a bunch of things i haven't got one response from any is and i'm a taxpayer so but it is the unlawful to conduct the medical research even in the case of an emergency this is a civil law federal without an independent institutional review board approved protocol including informed consent free of coercion there's a civil law that you're breaking i've brought up the number occurred before that you're breaking um playing just stop the child abuse i agree with the other parents january 17th why wait you know january 17th and february that's flu season that's the worst time to you know be doing that and uh on part b on the thirty
009thousand dollars that you're doing for the covet test i think you should know on that still um there should be no after-school copy 19 tests in limerick i live in limerick i live on limerick road i don't want this fascism experiment in my town thirty thousand dollars should go to the board to get tested for the mckenzie syndrome by proxy and stop trying to sell this experiment to the teachers and the kids and everybody in the uh community that's all i really have to say thank you is there anyone else in person that would like to make a comment okay we'll move on to zoom rich do we have any hands raised dean you may now make a public comment please unmute yourself and then state your first and last name as well as your
010full address hi christy jambowski 310 4th avenue montclair pa i'd like to comment on agenda item 2a please do not amend on the health and safety plan um please do not amend the health and safety plan to make mass optional on january 17th we're entering the predicted winter holiday surge and similar to last year as the district dashboard displays december january and february will be the time of the year with the most cases and the highest community transmission the current health and safety plan correlates mask requirements with community transmission levels and it's following best practice guidelines to have masks required indoors when there's a substantial or high community transmission regardless of vaccination status and this helps to keep our students in school and both students and staff safe and healthy and safe from getting sick
011also the county quarantine rules haven't changed less masking means more close contacts and students quarantined and out of school i would ask that the board get feedback from the school nurses and their recommendations before making any changes to the health and safety plan lastly a building was closed just days ago due to the number of cases and having mass required likely kept many students and staff from getting sick please don't make masks optional and do not amend the health and safety plan now in november for a situation in january that will likely follow last year and be the peak of the winter surge in cases at the very least i ask that you make if you do have to make any changes or want to consider them please wait until the new year when it's
012closer to the end of this mandate on january 17th when you can assess the data in the case load and where the situation is at at that time thank you we have any other comments on zoom go ahead deb you may now make a public comment please unmute yourself and then your first state your first and last name as well as your full address hi this is the bharti roy 203 holstein drive collegeville pa i'm calling to express my concerns regarding agenda item 2a first this agenda item refers to updating the springfield's health and safety plan that this board had approved few months back effective as of january 17 2022 which is next year as some of the current board members will be rolling out soon does it make sense for them to make decisions
013that are going to be effective outside their tenure the motivation behind this seems slightly misplaced second let us all acknowledge as per the student spring first dashboard the graph definitely is going on the wrong trend 44 tested positive last week 70 students are currently quarantined due to in school exposure some more are quarantined due to exposure elsewhere fifth sixth building had to be closed last friday as contact racing was overwhelming so it is surprising to say the least that instead of an agenda item to discuss strategies about getting springford out of the current situation especially before the holidays we have an item to talk about removal of mitigation strategies that took two months into the future we have no idea how this virus will behave in december let alone in january so in my humble
014opinion it is absolutely premature to take a vote on this agenda item today i do pray and hope that we see a better 2022 when we can start relaxing the rules but we all need to understand in a pandemic mitigation strategies have to be based on community transmission rates also you need to take inputs from the school nurses and staff that are handling covet protocols and contact tracing masking making masks recommended rather than required will have a huge impact on contact racing which is already an overwhelming task for everyone involved i request you to please stable this agenda today in lieu of solving the current day problems of contact racing and let the new board make decisions closer to the time of impact thank you very much for listening thank you rich do we have
015any other go ahead kate you may now unmute yourself please state your full first and last name as well as your full address catherine doyle 310 woodland drive 19426 i'm speaking to agenda 2a i would like to ask the board to maintain the current health and safety plan requirements regarding masks indoors requiring masks based on community transmission levels ensures that the district is doing all it can to reduce the spread of covert within the school and community when we are at substantial and high levels currently masks are only required for k through 6 when rates are substantial or high and only for 7 12 when rates are high with the 511 population age of 511 population still in the process of being vaccinated and a higher percentage of those families having children that are ineligible
016for vaccines due to being under five requiring masks at high and substantial levels provides a higher level of protection for that population finally i want to ask the board to consider the significant number of cases that occurred in the 5 6 building and the need to move all classes to virtual on friday to allow the nurses to complete contact tracing until the source of that significant increase is determined any decrease in mitigation strategies even two months out should be postponed especially with the upcoming holidays most likely leading to higher transmission rates in the upcoming weeks as they did last year please base your decisions on appropriate metrics like transmission rates and vaccination rates in the community in the school population i also ask that you survey the nurses and provide their recommendations before voting i
017hope that you maintain the care and policy that will continue to protect the student staff population their families and the community thank you lauren you may now make public comment please unmute yourself state your full first and last name as well as your full address hi this is lauren day 57 greenbrier drive phoenixville pa i'm also commenting on agenda item 2a i just ask that the board table this motion until january and we can use data to move forward from there right now with the cases in the 5 6 building and not knowing if it's in school transmission or not i think it would be premature to vote on something that we we don't have the data for in january thank you emily you may now unmute yourself please state your full and first name
018full first and last name and as well as your full address hello this is emily lucier i live at seven long meadow road and royals3a19468 i'd like to speak on agenda item 2a i'd like to reiterate what has been said that please keep our current mitigation process um mitigation strategies in place we don't know how the virus is going to behave for the next two months and with the current state of affairs in the school how we've seen that there have been so many cases in the fifth sixth center it would be prudent to see how covet is gonna behave how it's gonna affect the school district and then to act and i'd also like to state that our family has not been enrolled in the school district based on some of the actions that
019this district has taken some of the mitigation strategies have been very lacks and there is quite a number of families who have also stayed cyber outside of the district and it would be it would it would be really prudent if this board could take actions to mitigate the spread of covid rather than take those strategies away and you would see re-enrollment come back from these families that have decided to go cyber so please do the effort do what is right to bring these families back into the district and to protect the students rather than to sway them away thank you allison you may now make public comment please unmute yourself uh plan to state your full first and last name as well as your full address alison o'brien 505 andover lane collegeville19426 um i was
020just speaking on a agenda item 2a i wasn't sure why an amendment is being proposed to the health and safety plan to only recommend masks for staffs and students despite what level of transmission we're in the superintendent already presented a health and safety plan that the board previously voted to approve with the input of nursing staff this health and safety plan is based upon data and the level of transmission and spread in our district we should focus on a data driven plan and let that dictate whether or not masks are needed thank you teresa you may now make a public comment please unmute yourself then state your full your first and last name as well as your full address hello my name is teresa westwood my address is 70 plymouth drive royersford pa 19468 like
021several of the other parents that spoke before me i'm also going to urge the board to please pause on voting on an amendment to the health and safety plan as others have mentioned that the metrics that we're seeing in our school footmen are high and not looking favorable at the moment i hope sincerely that that starts to come down um but between that and the fact that as others have mentioned we have the holidays coming up and as was mentioned by the first speaker he's right vaccinations are now available for 5 to but most children if they have gotten even one shot have not gotten to and are not yet fully vaccinated so at the very least to protect those children and anyone else that might not have chosen to get vaccinated during this time
022of high transmission i hope you too will pause on voting on changing the health and safety plan i also hope to see a data-driven approach i agree mr rizzo has already presented a plan that leverages clear metrics to make decisions and to make them easy and take any emotion or politics out of that i hope that you will stick with that and i hope that you'll make a sound choice this evening not based on emotion but based on data thank you rohit you may now make a public comment please unmute yourself state your full first and last name as well as your full address hi good evening everyone this is rohit goswami from 5800 club drive college well i'm making comment about agenda item 2a i request both to maintain current health and safety plans
023and please put a pause on any amendment to the guidance this evening uh my request is based on uh number one as we approach holiday season and montgomery county level still approaching significant or high levels this is going to further go up so that the current decision that we have should be maintained the current situation in school as we are receiving emails every day uh it caused the contact raising stress on the overall system uh so severe that the school has to be shut down on friday so we we should uh continue to follow uh what the guidelines are at this point and not change anything uh the system is stressed so much that i'm giving an example of one of the class i have witnessed 13 students out of 22 were out on thursday
024so which caused extreme stress on quarantine and everything that follows we should not even be discussing this how to take off the current mandate rather we should be discussing on strengthening the overall system we have installed in last 20 months so it is my humble request to board members to please keep the current health and safety plans as is at least till 17th of january at that point we can take a decision thank you so much uh joseph you may now make public comment please stay unmute yourself state your full first and last name as well as your full address thank you joseph salazar 44 woodley drive in limerick tonight i'm here to speak in support of action item 2a authorizing an amendment to the district's health and safety plan to align with the recommendations
025of the montgomery county department of health the cdc and the pa department of health further discussions during the august board meeting earlier this year it was shared with the springfield community that the primary driver of the health plan was to ensure that our students would be able to remain in school the existing health and safety plan was approved to balance the needs of our community this resulted in k-6 and 7-12 having different guidelines while not everyone was in the community was happy with the compromise it made sense at the time as the guidelines proposed maximized the opportunity for our students to remain in school in either grade designation in the past three months since the health plan was approved there has been significant changes that warrant the health and safety plan be amended as of
026october 29th our k-6 students now have access to the pfizer biotech cobig 19 back seat there was no vaccination option for them at the start of the school year in addition the test to stay program has been approved implemented and began today that would in the event of a student is identified as a close contact that student can now test to say if they don't present any system any symptoms before they would have been quarantined at home for several weeks even if secretary beam's order required masking of schools is struck down prior to the governor's selective date of january 17th i believe setting the effective date of january 17th for the amendment to the health and safety plan benefits the springfield community in several ways first it provides all families ample opportunity to have their
027children fully vaccinated i'm a member of multiple community parent groups and for what i've read there's no shortage of vaccine in our area to the point it's so readily available that springford is currently not even conducting any vaccine clinics second it provides a gap post holidays that if members of our community have been traveling at greater risk of infection there's ample time for any potential infection to be mitigated with our toughest protection measures third it provides our community time to mentally prepare for these changes as it's been a very long 20 months for everyone in the community and to begin to start returning some sense of normalcy to students in our schools i admit making this change comes with some risk however the board and administration have accepted levels of risk already with the existing
028health and safety plan without the additional tools of vaccine for all our students or tests to stay at our disposal not spacing our students six feet apart this year in the cafeteria has resulted in many healthy quarantines and coveted exposures per nursement i can only assume that the benefits having the gyms available for physical education and extracurricular activities outweighed the potential risks otherwise the students would be in individual desks again this year instead of at lunch room tables if the goal is to continue to keep our students in school and to just continue to stem the learning laws that of last year we now have all the tools at our disposal to maintain that goal and begin to return to a more normal in-school setting for our kids i ask you to please approve action
029item a thank you krista you may now make a public comment please unmute yourself and then state your first and last name as well as your full address krista weiss 345 new street spring city i'm calling on action item 2a i um see that year of the past 20 months our kids have been masked in school obviously this is not working um that we do need to go forward and vote on um on amending this amending this since our kids are doing the same thing over and over and over again and nothing has changed because of it obviously the kids have been masked and keeping them masked you have shut down the five and six center last friday and as far as i was concerned that um i have a seventh grader and they're in
030the same building the same air system is in the in that same building so if the 5 6 center shut down then why isn't the 7th grade center shut down as well they're using the same lunchrooms you're not sanitizing chairs between the lunches it's impossible and also with the gyms as well as where the kids are being so having mass 1 kids is not it's obviously not working with the school they should not be on the kids at all and they need you really need to like try something new other than what has been going on for the last 20 months thank you at this time there are no further public comments to be heard on zoom okay thank you so unlike the last time we had this discussion i waited until much later before
031asking the nurses to weigh in that was one of the requests of one of the callers but i already had it in my notes that we would ask nurse smith to jump in and weigh in on this before we um have a discussion and go to any kind of voting measure um so she's on our list for committees anyway for this evening correct mr rizzo so um nurse smith if if you're there on the zoom could could we get her on just to do your report here and talk to us about what you and the other nurses um if you could weigh in on this agenda item and your thoughts on uh going forward yes hi um right thanks this is tough um particularly in the past week that we've had this complicates our views
032on this even more what it boils down to is that if we're in low or moderate transmission i would be happy to attempt this the reason being that i feel like our manpower could still keep up with the requirements that we have to keep healthy students in school exclude six six students do the required contact tracing notifying none of this is easy and starting last week we started falling very very far behind trends that we have seen and we believe in are about two weeks post holiday so here we are two weeks post halloween do we know for sure if halloween is the cause of what has been going on the influx of cases no we don't know for sure but um we can use this you know as we look ahead that we're anticipating
033the same thing after thanksgiving the same thing after our winter holidays so for us to sit here and say yes let's go mask optional i don't agree with that i agree with setting metrics i agree with positively the community um you know positivity rate i believe in following that completely the fewer people we have out in the community that are positive the less chance that someone is bringing it into our buildings and spreading it the less contact tracing we have to do all right the less students we're sending home i understand we have tests to stay it's day one we're ironing out kinks but overall it was a successful day but test to stay is only for in-school close contacts it is not for close contacts in the community close contacts and households the other
034part of test to stay right now at least is it is a program that requires masking i don't know how it will look later but it's a little premature i think to vote on um to vote on the future when we don't know what that future holds however if we look at metrics if we look at the positivity rates and if we look at let's look at yes everyone can be vaccinated but will they because if only 20 of the building is vaccinated we are still going to be contact tracing the other thing is that when you make masks optional we have additional variables so our contact tracing process is far longer i've got to look at who the positive is who sits next to them were they masked were the people next to them
035masks that now takes us so much time just for lunch buses and activities but now you're throwing every single class in there i genuinely do not believe that the nurses will be able to continue this process if we go unmasked i believe that we will need to come up with an alternative source for contact tracing so i don't know if i answered all your questions but that's how the nurses feel about it and and i'm sure i can speak for everybody here when i say we respect your opinion and and thank you for weighing in i think there's a lot of different factors that we're considering and i would like to ask mr rizzo to also weigh in on what your perspective is from this and also your thoughts which i know we've discussed if
036you could share out a little bit about the quarantining the contact tracing just something in general related to where we are with that i think it would be a given that if you were in the test to stay program that you would be masked during that time but if you can elaborate any further on on some of this you would appreciate that sure excuse me so um we did do a survey a lot of people have asked for feedback of staff students nurses um so we did get that i would start by saying that we did administer a survey to all of the all the staff members in our district all the staff members in our district administrators um staff support staff teachers everybody approximately 100 people in our district we surveyed of that we
037received 668 responses as of about noon today it went up another 40 but i didn't get a chance to pull that data in so where we are at this point so that's 63.6 response rate of that 73.8 percent of them believe that masking should be recommended of that 73.8 um of the of those that believe it's recommended should be based on community transmission 40 believe just recommended regardless of community transmission 5.3 of those that responded believe that it should be required and 20.9 believe there should be no change for a current health and safety plan leave it as is of the 492 that recommended that support recommending in some capacity 10.7 believe it should be asap 48.4 percent believe january 17th is an appropriate date 4.1 believe january 31st must be just two weeks after
038the date uh 28.5 believe the end of the second market period which is the middle of february and then 1.6 believe end of marking period three and then six point seven percent believe end of year so um that we asked you know should k to six be treated the same as seven to twelve seventy eight percent believe yes uh they should be treated the same this is of the 492 that recommended 78.78 say yes 22 say no ask the same question of everybody of the 668 responses 74.4 say yes 25.6 they know so it's roughly the same percentage roughly three you know 75 percent 25 percent is a split yes or no who wants vaccines become the once everybody has time to get the vaccine and for them to be considered fully vaccinated administration when
039i pulled them a little while back they generally support the the current health and safety plan with those levels of transmission there were four out of the 28 or so that completed the survey that believed that we should mandate masks for the rest of the school year um and again i'm just providing information as as we have collected it my personal opinion is and when i say my personal opinion i'm speaking on behalf of my whole team the barriers are quarantining kids identifying close contacts and quarantining kids we said from day one our goal was to safely have as many students in school as possible if we don't see some updates from the county or if we get different guidance as far as what we are allowed to do as a district we're going to
040be quarantining more kids or more students will be part of the test to stay program and while today was our first day with it and there were a few i'll talk about that later um there are questions about whether or not we're able to continue to do the test estate program with optional masking i did proactively reach out to the office of public health to ask that very question and the comment that i received was it would seem to me that if there's optional masking in place that test to stay might be more important so there would probably be some revision coming from the county somewhere toward the end of november again i'm i'm concerned about quarantining kids and being able to and being able to keep them in school uh beyond that i know
041that we have to move in this direction um so that's that's kind of where that's kind of where we are at this point the question is when do we move in that direction is is the big is the big thing for me but i just interjected could we please not have the public having uh big discussions while the board's speaking chief lawyer excuse me chief player well it is distracting maybe that needs to be taken thank you for explaining that and for outlining that i hope that that didn't get lost in translation i did want to highlight that the results of the poll that you did the high end of that was that for the the highest percentage wanted the masks recommend it not based on transmission status and for k-12 to be treated all
042the same is that correct out of the 668 responses 40.2 recommended regardless of the level of transmission 33.6 recommended based on community transmission okay thank you all right so we've had uh our nursing staff lay in we've had mr rizzo share with us um the information that he's been able being been able to gather from his team and from the staff here at springford we've heard from the parents before we uh take a vote on this item is there anyone on the board that would like to make yeah i would just like to say that all right hold on linda i mean you're right i mean i think that i think it's going to lead to a lot of discussion so that's why i was kind of going to open it up but we'll take
043let's take the motion first as we're supposed to as is the order and then when i ask for questions and comments when to please jump in at that point okay well i'm wondering can we table the motion well we have we that there hasn't been a motion made yet that's why i'm saying let's follow that and we'll go from there okay so action item a is there a motion for a to recommend the recommendation effective january 17th so moved and is there a second one second questions or comments i would like to table that motion so mark i i have a question hold on a second hold on hold on one second i would like to make a motion to table that motion 2a i second that all right so there's a motion at the
044table and there's a second on the motion that has been put on the table that's the underlying motion there's really no discussion on on this at this point so there would be a vote to table this motion why is there no discussion because it's a procedural act to to hold this um action to a later um session so now we would just vote on the tabling okay so all in favor of tabling the motion say i i all opposed no all right so lori i'm going to go and do a a roll call so that we're clear all right wendy i'm mrs earl sorry no mrs sullivan yes mrs fazzini yes mrs melton yes mr schaefer no mr jackson dr wright yes mr develo and i'm a no okay so the motion to table it
045does not pass at this point so we're back to the motion itself correct and now i can take questions or comments before we vote on that okay are there any questions or comments on the motion that has a second to approve action item a so uh mr zone having having listened to nurse smith obviously there's a lot of concern with the ability to contact trace and and timing and staffing and resources should we go this route my concern is what resources is springford going to be ready to put forth to that effort and again since the 5-6 center was just recently closed because of contact racing and the time and effort that that took are we going to be seeing more building closures in order to to accommodate the contact tracing thus really taking the
046students out of the buildings again which is defeating the purpose of what we're trying to accomplish here so there was a lot in that i'm generally speaking um when we talk about what resources might we need um to to trisha's i'm sorry to nurse smith's point we would probably be asking for extra staff to help with contact tracing to get that done in a more timely manner because our nurses while they're doing contact tracing they're also running the day-to-day tasks of being nurses and that's been you know that's been a lot for them so that would be one thing that we would probably come forward and ask the board to support last week was an anomalous week when you look at for example when you look at the first quarter in the just grades five
047and six alone well sixth grade is where we had where we had the concerns in the sixth grade for the entire first quarter they had 20 total cases in sixth grade in the first five days first i guess first five days of the second quarter they had 30 in sixth grade alone so something happened and i'm not convinced it was just in the building and we're investigating that so i don't think we i don't think we make all of our decisions based on what happened last week because it truly was an anomalous situation one that we need to be watching for and know what's going on and understand why but i do think it gives us reason to pause but i still think we should i'm not concerned about our efforts within the building to
048keep our students safe i just want to find out why that happened so if there is something that we're either a being lacks out or b we need to spend more time beefing up than we take the time to do that is the potential there to close the school it's a last resort for us to do that we closed the school on friday because of the contact tracing efforts because parents were getting an email saying there were there was a a positive case in their student's class and then the next day they were getting an email saying that they were close contact they needed to and needed a quarantine that was causing confusion and quite frankly some anger amongst their parents because they felt like we didn't have it all together and it was just
049a very quickly evolving process so we we cooled off the building for a day and we did reach out to the county over that one just to kind of make sure that we were thinking along the same along the same lines so so can i say we're definitely not going to close the building again i can't say that but i'm going to say that it is the last effort that we we would need to employ to make sure that we can uh to make sure that we can get our process done that makes sense so just up sorry just a follow-up um so you did mention you know the likely need for additional staff and you'll be bringing that to the board um i i'm gonna actually coin one of mr jackson's most famous um
050questions which is you know what would we what would that look like how many staff members are you talking what would the cost of that be and where would the funding come from so we've talked about covet funding being already allocated so it wouldn't come from there would have to come from an unassigned fund balance jim lodger had either way of okay he's i'm getting a yes on that so it would come from an unassigned fund balance as far as exactly what we would need it's hard to predict what we're going to look like you know at that time frame you know how much more support we would need i would imagine you know we would need a couple of more a couple more people to deal with the contact tracing and and working with
051our covered liaisons and our school nurses i can't speak exactly what that would look like as i said um i think that would be a start um but again that's that's kind of where we are right now thank you so when the contact tracing if somebody's vaccinated do they have the quarantine they do not have quarantine so we're already making an assumption that no one in springfield is going to get vaccinated they have two months to get vaccinated you know this goes back to two weeks to flatten the curve and two years later we're still talking about this we already know that the vaccine is readily available and it's a three-week cycle from the first to second vaccine for students right so we're now making assumptions worst case scenario that no one's getting vaccinated and
052everyone's going to cover it they're all they're all assumptions i mean we don't know at this point how many students are going to get vaccinated what we're saying is that we're giving options and we're giving notice that that come when when the mass quarters lift the fight of state and once again we we sit here as a board and say we'll follow the state when there's orders now we're going back to what our original motion was when all the hoopla started was we're recommending exactly what the cdc the county and the state recommended back in august and they were recommending that we're taking the same verbiage of what they've currently stated and that's and that message is is that they recommend master warren and that's what we're saying we're recommending mass rewards so we're not
053very varying off of that at all um and also what no one's talking about is it's i don't think i can't remember if it's the end of november or the end of december the pcr test is going away the one that everybody runs to and everything's based on and that test is going away why is it going away do we know why that test is going away if somebody say it i'm not going to say why is the test going away well i believe what people are saying is that it's not effective exactly so i don't know i'm not a medical person but that's that's that's the reason why the test is going away and that's and you know there's been a there's been a movement to get the kids back so everything's available and
054and what we're doing is we're going back to what the cdc and this to everybody states including county that they recommend mass or war and that's what we're voting on we're going to recommend basically exactly what the cdc is stating nothing more nothing less all right so i really want to add to that because i have a number of things okay guys hold on so i i do think that by going all the way to january 17th which i know there was some discussion do we need to go i got lots of emails i heard all about that but that is when our governor has strategically planned to lift the order the mandate because it is two weeks so it gives that two weeks after the christmas holidays to to kind of filter that through
055before that's lifted that's that's one thing i wanted to say it also by waiting until then we're giving two full months for the five to 11 year old age group to get the vaccine and if i recall back in august i had wanted to do this recommending the recommendation at that time and we pulled back because we wanted to unite the community and we wanted to find a compromise okay we'll acknowledge that that 5 to 11 year old age group can't get the vaccine let's make sure that we protect them and the people around them but now they can and we're talking two months later who are we to say in that after that time period that we're going to order this now when wolf is is gonna say that we're recommending it okay then
056then we'll recommend it okay but i i don't see i think the reason for the order the reason for our hsp all of that was to protect that 5 to 11 group which can now easily get the vaccine it's not like it was the vaccine when it first came out and many of us were trying to figure out where are we going to get it staying up late trying to schedule all that that's not the case with this you can go to skip back you can go to writing you can go almost anywhere and get that vaccine it's not difficult to get it so if you want to get it you can have it you also have a full week at thanksgiving and a full week at christmas where the kids are off from school
057take them any time during that week during one week and then the other week but there's plenty of time to get the vaccine before january 17th so we're giving that time um i i think that that that's it in a nutshell i think that i'm very glad to hear that the county is going to have to take a second look at the quarantining the contact tracing and how important that that that the test to stay program will be even more important for us if we're not going to have the masks i'm totally okay and in agreement that if you're in that test to stay program while you're testing wear the mask right because we don't know there's an unknown there totally on board and okay with that it has to stay on the buses because
058that's still with the cdc okay with that too but just in general how can we do anything different than than what these these other people are doing then then what wolf is saying when we've been saying we have to follow what wolf is saying now if that order from beam is vacated or or or something that that does happen and i think there's a stay on that right now i know there's a stay on that right now but if that does go away i think we go right back to our hsp until we get to january 17th i do not want to do this before then that specific date is in there for the reasons that i just outlined so those are my comments on this does anyone want to add anything more that's right
059yes i would thank you so um my first question is i'm questioning why we are addressing this now why this is coming up at a work session it's not even on the agenda to be addressed next week there seems to be this concern that this needs to be taken care of right now right here when what i'm hearing is that it's going to be so much better in january because all these students will have been had the opportunity to get the vaccine so why the concern now when we meet on january 17th i believe is a a meeting and at that time or at any other time you can see what those numbers look like if um what my other board members here are saying that these our numbers should look so much better we
060should be in such better shape then then let's play that out let's play those terms out we are in high right now when we were last discussing this in september we were only in substantial we have been in high since september 23rd so right now to talk about we're getting rid of the masks is and actually it's amending our health and safety plan that we had voted on and approved is really not in my opinion what our focus should be on or really our focus should be on the quarantining strategies which is what we have been talking about with the test to stay requirements and trying to get the students that are being quarantined that are healthy back in school um if our numbers aren't going down in in except in january if you listen
061to nurse smith and to mr rizzo we're going to be doing more quarantining of students potentially so i think this is something that we you know we had all figured we would be revisiting in mid january um and i'm not like i said i'm not sure why we're doing it at this time so that's that's my my opinion on this um i we talk about getting more staff to help out which we know is hard to find staff and it's also um takes a while for that to happen they don't just come on board the next day so i just didn't think that this is an un untimely i'm i'm confused as to why it's an action item on a working meeting and that are let's we're going to continue as a board we've always
062continued to look at this and we'll look at changing amending our safety and health plan in january when we see what the numbers are at that time and in the meantime focus our energy money is being requested funding in um for the quarantining um i mean not for the quarantine for the testing uh so that will cut down hopefully on our number of students or quarantine let me let me just respond to that because i did put it on i did ask for it to be on as as a voting item tonight so i want to take ownership and responsibility for that and the reason that i did that it was was very calculated i'm being very honest that next week is our last meeting before january 17th and i do think that our parents
063and our community is tired of us waiting to the last minute to decide what we're going to do so i don't i don't want to wait all the way to the 17th and that 17th wasn't a number that that i randomly chose and discussed with mr rizzo that 17th came from our governor and that's that's why it was i think it was very strategic on his part full disclosure i've never given him much credit i did like that date that's that's true but i will say that i did appreciate his thought process behind behind that date at the same time our next meeting as a as a board isn't until the 17th of january so that is why it is on there if we were going to go round and round for hours and hours
064tonight i wanted to have next week as an opportunity to wrap it up so we don't leave the community hanging over christmas vacation and i will also say too then at any time if it was to go the numbers were to go drastically in another direction or or be skewed in another way this can be revisit revisited as we have done over and over again and again the last 20 months so it's not that that this is just finally put to bed unfortunately it may come back and be something that we have to visit again but in in light of the planning that that the government is doing i felt that we should stay in sync with that and let our community know what our position is otherwise these kids are back to school january
0653rd the orders that lifted the 17th and we meet the night of the 17th to what go round and round again before we make a decision i don't think that's fair to our parents or community and so that is why i put it on for tonight [Music] usually i don't usually like to repeat what people have already said because you've already said it but i'd like to make my position clear as well if you'll recall we had a lot of um a lot of uh people kicking back at us for not for not making a decision ahead of time it was like the next day this is what we're going to do and parents don't have time to plan here you've got two months you've got time to get your kids vaccinated you've got time
066to make an older plan if you don't like this and you want your kids to be only wear their mask or or they they want to go virtual whatever it is they've got time to make those plans if things change like you said if things there's suddenly some great big new infection we can revisit it so it's not the end of the earth we are currently at high right now just to be clear can i just cut i mean you know i will i will not be sitting here on january 17th when this comes up again um but to your point mrs zazowski and i think what's really important for our community and for our families is really to think about um a board meeting on january 17th and if things aren't going so well
067and if the first two weeks in january our numbers are really high and that mass really you can't vote on the 17th to put everybody so that ever nobody has masks on the 17th and then all of a sudden everybody's mandated again on the 18th i would i would suggest maybe what you want to do is make this effective date on the 24th so that you're not making a decision at 11 o'clock on monday the 17th to be implemented at 7 30 on tuesday the 18th but again i won't be here i'm just cautioning because if things don't go as planned or if numbers are where they are and changes too this plan have to be made it you you will be putting our community in that same negative position to say you know hey
068we we were looser today and then tonight we're making a decision that's an effective tomorrow you may want to give yourself some time to be able to better assess that that's just a suggestion yeah i'm a fan of what she's saying i think that you should look at the data listen to the nurses and i mean the two things that have been my mission from the beginning is to keep kids in school the safest place for children academically socially and emotionally is in school and the best way to keep them in school all the experts the educational experts the medical experts the psychological experts say is to keep them in school is to do it with our best mitigating efforts which include masking and i think until we get down from high to substantial or
069moderate or low and we're not quarantining so many and of course i hope that a lot of people get the vaccine but we don't know that and until we see the results of that we're still going to have lost learning and social emotional issues and we're going to have staffing issues i mean you're talking about adding more staff that we're going to require for this contact racing we still have teachers who are quarantining causing us staff issues right now if we have less masking at higher substantial we're going to have greater staffing issues all of that prevents us from keeping kids in school and increases lost learning so i think you should wait till the 17th and if our numbers are great if vaccination is high wonderful then proceed but i think you should then
070communicate to the public and do it in a thoughtful manner don't yo yo back and forth like this i mean you have to wait till the data supports your decision before you then communicate it to the public not jump ahead that's just my opinion thank you so just to the contact tracing and the quarantining you know they do concern me on this and and but i think that there's they're being looked at also i think we've already added and i hope that they'll be revised i also think we've already added some nursing staff and i think if we take all of that and i'm not saying to ignore all of those details but again the primary reason that we did that compromise in august was because five to 11 couldn't get the vaccine and now
071we're giving them two months of time and aligning with what governor wolf has said that's i think that's where i'm i'm falling off absolutely i totally agree we're giving them the option and hopefully they do do that but if we still have a ton of contact raising going on it's still going to cause us lost learning and we're still going to have to have quarantines and we just don't know if that's you know going to be the case or not so briefly if i may just chiming in so i think many of us sit up here and you know serve on this board because at least during the campaign season and what have you we talk about supporting teachers so it's refreshing to me to hear that an overwhelming majority of teachers support the amendment
072and they support masks optional so i vote with extreme comfort there because i stand behind the things that i say and i don't just pick when i want to support teachers or when i don't that's number one and then number two i'm still perplexed because you know this obviously has brought experts out of the woodwork with opinions and how can it be that we're in high right now with masks being mandated i mean how is this possible because i thought masks would have mitigated everything right what we do know is that masks prevent a student from seeing a teacher smile it prevents a teacher from seeing a student smile and that to me is unacceptable beyond the smile mr schaefer i i have been told too that they're you know and whether this is across
073the board or just a few teachers that have experienced this but students behavior in in the classroom has not been um superior i mean there there's there's been some and it could be just an undertone it could be one or two kids it could not be a whole lot but that um the mask is used more as a something to hide behind or a shield and maybe they do a couple of things that they wouldn't normally do or things like that so you know i mean there could and and i'm just saying like listen if we're just gonna tell hyperbole i can give you i i literally have 20 studies and i can give them to you i can even list them here about i have i have a lot of studies and i can
074give them to you from the journal of american medical association if you would like them i can give them to you and in reference to the campaigning and the teachers um i do want to say that i know that everybody on this board is always very supportive of teachers and the only one currently on this board that you know we're running i don't think that they would have ever used or taken advantage of you know teachers in that or any and so i'm i just wanted to make sure that we're all aware that we all support teachers i'm you know and and to tell you the truth i'm not completely i didn't get to hear all the data exactly on the survey there was some confusion there as far as teachers who had supported the
075recommendations of masks however masks being removed however not at this time so i really couldn't go through that um but i did do a recap i know what our nurses recommended though i did do a recap on that that the greater number was that it was recommended not based on transmission status k-12 be treated all the same and i think january 17th was the supported date mr rizzo is that correct uh of the respondents the 492 that voted for recommending i'm recommending recommending masking it was uh 48.4 um supported the 17th okay thank you all right so with that we will um we will take our vote and we will go from there um all in favor of action item a as it's written say aye aye any opposed no no okay so we'll go
076around again mrs earl hi mr sullivan no mrs fazzini no mrs melton no mr schaefer hi mr jackson hi dr wright no mr develo yes yes motion passes we also have action item b is there a motion no i can't i will take the rest it's okay i can't sleep there so move is there a second second questions or comments on b mr rizzo could you take 30 seconds just to explain that real quick so we spent a lot of time talking about test to stay on the when i we started our year we talked about two other ways testing out a quarantine and symptomatic testing and what we had mentioned a month ago was that test to stay would be in school testing out of quarantine and symptomatic testing would be done on tuesdays
077and thursdays from four o'clock to six o'clock if one month ago we brought it forward to you it was a sixty five thousand dollar price ticket this month is a thirty thousand dollar price ticket the reason being is um philosophy philosophically for the last motion we took uh the hourly wage of the highest teacher and we used that for all of the hours we'd have a not to exceed amount this is a more practical amount that is based on a fixed hourly rate for the people that would actually be doing the work so this 30 000 is actually a more accurate number more accurate not to exceed number and again that pays for the that pays for the staff to work it and then again that's six per day for two hours twice a week
078um yep that's that's it any other questions or comments on b all in favor say aye aye any opposed that motion carries c through g we'll take those together questions or comments all in favor say aye aye aye any opposed those motions carry now we have a presentation by dr murray to speak with us to speak with us on the spring forward learning loss plan hi good evening as you mentioned this uh tonight i'm going to be presenting on the learning loss plan i want to first start by talking about some of the buckets of money that we have that this learning loss plan is based on as you know we have our esser funding funding one two and three i'm going to skip past sr 1 and 2 because it doesn't really apply here
079but what we are focusing on is the arp sr3 funds where we had about 4 million dollars we had about four million dollars um for the rpsr overall funding of the four million dollars four point three million dollars there's a status used for learning loss and that's eight hundred and seventy one thousand seven fifty five so that's already been it written in and allocated for learning us in addition there is a new bucket of money so to speak which is called the arp esser seven percent set-aside that is a new bucket of money that is specifically designed for learning loss and that's about 241 000. so within the learning loss bucket as i mentioned um we have funds that are allocated specifically for learning loss within esser so we have 871 755 that has already
080been allocated within that overall 4 million dollar budget now we haven't necessarily spent all of that we know that within the esser funding we have that earmarked and we can't touch it because it has to be used for learning loss so it's earmarked but it has not all been allocated yet and that's what today's plan is really going to show you um is a plan for how that money would be spent in addition we have that set aside that 240 000 that i just mentioned but there is some red tape when it comes to using that there is some pretty clear criteria on how that 241 can be spent and in order to have access to that you have to follow the criteria and spend it in very certain ways there is also a small
081chunk of money for the summer enrichment and after school programs as well and i'm going to talk about that a little bit more detail so the application is due on november 29th for the seven percent set aside this includes the 241 000 and you'll see here the specific allocations that we are identified have to be spent in order to get that 240 1000. so a minimum of 72 595 needs to be spent on student social emotional and mental support uh 24 198 needs to be spent on professional development on staff for social emotional mental support 19 000 359 needs to be spent on reading support and intervention and then that leaves us with about 125 831 that is unassigned from that original bucket of 241. in addition we've been allocated 40 about 48 000 for
082both summer enrichment and after school programming and again what we know about this funding is that in order to use that you have to check the boxes and make sure that you're using it appropriately for each of those so i'm going to start first with the student social emotional mental wellness if you recall on the commit the the board has previously approved through the arp esser funding the use of some emotional social emotional support through lakeside and school counselors school psychologists bcbas and social workers so our plan with this money is just to reallocate this would be no new spending but to reallocate some of that previously approved money through on the ester grant to be able to cover that and meet this criteria so this would include no new spending for professional development as
083you recall we need to spend a minimum of twenty four thousand one ninety eight um for the for the grant requirements and the idea behind this is that this will be focused on social emotional coaching sessions primarily for the elementary team our social emotional team has come up with a proposal for having three training dates on saturdays one of our greatest challenges this year is finding time to do professional development it's incredibly difficult our our lean professional development days are already booked and we are having a very difficult time getting subs to be able to cover so that we can do some of our normal professional development so the sel committee came up with three dates and the money on this 24 000 would be used to pay participants to attend those dates thereby meeting
084the criteria of hitting that four thousand one ninety eight the total budget for this would be about twenty five thousand in addition um the summer rams program which we were very proud of last summer as you recall in summer 2021 we spent approximately 250 000 most of that went to staffing including coordinators teachers nurses office hour staff and resource officers and also the use of ireti so this money has also been allocated into that overall budget and one of the supports from the from the curriculum and technology committee is that they would like to see this program done for a couple of more years so what we've done is allocated 275 000 each year of that learning loss fund to to run summer rams for two more consecutive years that would include staffing supplies and
085one of the things that we know we need to improve on is our registration process so that would be part of this as well to be able to clean that up and make that a little bit more user friendly our hope with this approval is that we would start the advertising as soon as as soon as we can start planning for it in december lock in our staffing nice and early let our families know that we're running the program again and i think that pre-planning is really going to be key to the success this year but this plan would include running that summer ramps program both in the summer of 2022 and 2023. in addition one of the buckets of money is the after school program approximately forty eight thousand dollars and we looked at
086where um where this really could go to most use and the first area we identified is through keystone tutoring um keystone as you know is the end of year assessments for um algebra 1 biology and literature so our idea is to allocate money towards the high school to be able to to pay teachers to run a tutoring program that is specifically designed to help support students in the keystone content areas in addition we would be looking at having the remaining money from here split proportionally across the buildings so that each building can run after school tutoring programs and this would be used to pay teachers as needed on before after school program this could be done either individually or in small groups and can also support those students who are being quarantined teachers can then
087work with them either before after school as well we can honor our teachers time through that so in summary i tried to color code this because i think there's a lot of moving parts with a lot of different buckets of money um but what you will see here is again that arp esser that eight hundred and seventy one thousand dollars um you'll also see the set-aside which is the 241 000 and then the individual allocations and then the overall budget what you'll see on the top line is the summer rams program that was already approved and run obviously in 2021 we have the next two consecutive years 2022 and 2023 and that's approximately eight hundred thousand and you'll see in order to kind of fill towards that we would be using impart that arp esser
088and then part that summer enrichment piece in addition we also had summer school supports this past summer we ran an eld program we also supported our summer school through edgeseer our credit recovery and so we would be looking at repeating that program as well for three consecutive years and that would not to exceed 90 165. in addition we've also previously approved the gateway program that is up to 42 000 that's already been approved so that's already part of it but i wanted you to see how it all comes together in the full package you'll see the social emotional support that's the 72 thousand again that's not new spending that would be reallocating we have the social emotional training which is the elementary coaching that comes to about 25 25 000 and then you'll see the
089two keys the two after school programs tutoring programs for the keystone tutoring exams and also the k-12 before and after school program the final piece on here we had about 132 000 remaining if you recall both at um the board level and also at the committee level i conducted a presentation on supporting i ready which is an intervention program a diagnostic program testing program for students so i thought this would be a good opportunity to use the esser funding specifically for learning loss in this way so what we would be able to do is um if you recall the initial proposal was 386 000 at the time the um the committee decided not to move that forward that was in about england i believe was september and it was just for the fact that we
090know that it was a large lot amount of money this covers three years of access it's not 380 000 every year it's a 380 000 upfront cost with this new seven percent set aside available bucket of money were able to cover a good portion of the i-ready if we were to go in this direction we would not be able to cover it all so would still leave with about 253 700 coming from the unassigned fund balance so what our hope is is to share this presentation with you this um this plan for how we would address learning loss or how we would allocate the funds that are addressed for learning loss um and what you will see is a motion that would be approved next next week that would cover the overall plan of this
091including um the plan and the budget associated with that so with that i will take questions just briefly um so learning loss is a very sort of vague term for me i mean just as a member of the board so are we what sort of are we applying some data to this um i realize social emotional health is very difficult to assign data to as well but how are we going to measure success after this spend given are there like you know do we have a present and then a future we close the gap we celebrate you know that sort of thing great question so this year we've really started to focus aside from this plan we've really started to focus on re um reintroducing all of the assessments we've done in the past last
092year we had a very difficult time getting consistency with data such as nwa map or fnp just because our students were everywhere so this year we first tried to start with that um one of the things that we like about the i ready assessment is or the i ready program is that it provides a diagnostic assessment in the beginning and then there's benchmarks throughout the year that students can take that three times throughout the year and then there's individualized instruction so primarily the majority of what i'm talking about is referring to the i ready but what we could then use is that data to also drive our summer ramps program one of the things we last last summer we opened it up to everybody we knew that our families were in much dif very different
093positions as far as what their needs were and some were bringing them back to summer rams because they wanted to get them back in the building and we accepted all students we need to have a discussion for summer rams about whether or not we want to do a little bit more focused and targeted intervention for students and use both the iready data and also nwa map to really target the the students who would be participating so with that we would then have i ready over the course of three years so we can use that data to determine did it have an impact over the summer did it have an impact over the couple um the three years of the program in the beginning of the presentation i thought you said this what was the seven
094percent set aside number in the beginning of a presentation that you had it was 240 it's 241 983 is a seven percent set aside is the seven percent set aside and then there's two buckets one for the summer enrichment and one for the after school programs which are both 48 396. so is that within the 248 or whatever so it's additional yes so then the total seven percent set aside is 338. i don't believe the summer richmond after school fall under the set-aside but they fall within a kind of a separate they have three separate spreadsheets when they gave us our allocation so they had the 241 on one spreadsheet and the other two on two separate spreadsheets so i don't believe they are termed underneath the seven percent set aside but i have to
095follow up on that because i'm trying to follow what's written in the agenda as well because the numbers are um because when you when you talked about the the original money that we got through esser was a little over a million dollars uh for the for learning loss and we already we spent to like you said we spent like 250 000 whatever which brought us down to eight hundred and some thousand dollars correct so the the original allocation that we had for learning loss through the arp esser was 871 755. i confirmed that with mr fink to make sure my number was accurate and that's of the 4.3 million dollars okay so the money that we spent this summer then uh the learning loss of ram whatever whatever you want to call it the summer
096rams yes where'd that money come from it came from that bucket so what you're seeing here is all of the money and all of it put together so for example the summer rams 2021 even though i have it shown as 800 000 that includes what i spent this past summer from the art pastor i wanted to present it as one plan right so then you're you're you're only dealing with 600 or some thousand left correct because you know when i i know that when we originally talked about i ready there was a lot of questions about it and i and i'm concerned about we're throwing in close to four hundred thousand dollars into this bucket and um i i i believe what mr schafer's saying like there's still things that we don't know we don't
097know yet and that's what i've talked about numerous times i talked about that you know this whole learning loss is going to continue for at least additional two to three possibly two to three years possibly longer and i have concerns about you know as we do this over time where the money is going to come from uh to keep that program going so fair enough and i agree with you i think that's one of the approaches i took when trying to plan out this whole budget is i wanted to cover this for a couple of years so it wasn't just a once and done so with this overall plan it wouldn't cover it would cover three years of summer rams it would cover um three years of those summer school supports and it would cover
098three years of i ready that could be used as the tier one interventions within the classroom right i do agree with you that having it's not just a once and done as far as trying to right but it's but it's you're talking about overall you're talking about 1.4 million dollars right and you kind of threw in is 386 000 and then you talk about of that 254 000 is going to come out of the unassigned fund balance well how what's going how's that going to be replaced so um the unassigned fund balance i don't have a plan for that okay well that's a quarter of a million dollars yes which there's a reason why i don't assign fund balances in place and if we take out of it we there's reasons why and what we
099need to do to put back in so that's an issue in itself and i'm and and i don't see anywhere in here to incorporation or maybe it's maybe you mentioned but i didn't hear it how does our special education students play into this um so the special education students would be all this would give us access for all students so that can certainly be used as part of that but this is we don't know it would include all students okay but we know that all students have different needs correct and different needs costs associated with those different needs vary so the each student when they participate in ireti they would take a diagnostic assessment and the diagnostic assessment is supposed to identify what the specific needs are and then provide instruction to help address those
100needs right but what i'm saying is that potentially you might not have enough money i'm sorry to implication potentially you may not have enough money with this plan correct i'm trying to be completely transparent that this plan what we could do is eliminate the i ready piece and then we would still be left with 130 000 that we could still allocate through through the plan so yes no you'll be 254 thousand dollars or no you actually 386 thousand dollars if you don't implement the ira no matter what i read is costing 386 000 correct so that's almost a half a million dollars that you're putting towards i ready and and it still goes back to the question that we never have answered yet because we don't know and i don't expect you to when i
101think about what mr schaefer is kind of saying is that we don't know what we're what we're going to be confronted with um over the next two three four years so i just i when i look at all these numbers it just doesn't and then taking money out of you unassigned fund balance i i mean i have real issues with that but isn't that what i mean i i understand nobody likes to take money out of the unassigned fund balance but when you've had a pandemic and you have this much lost learning isn't that this the time when you need to occasionally use unassigned fund balance to infuse some money and then pay it back once we've gotten our students back up to where they should be i mean when we have a stadium that
102needs to be ada compliant we sometimes take money from capital funds to do this type of thing because we want to have we need you know we have all these things going on and we need to have an ada compliance stadium so i i think that this is in this case a necessary evil um i also think that you can't i mean i understand that you're saying that we don't know what we don't know but i don't understand that that's a reason then to not support uh these lost learning issues and the social emotional issues that as we've all talked about are the biggest fallout from the pandemic well property never has budget issues first of all um second of all i think mr develo is saying i agree with him also uh mr fazzini
103it's just not that we don't support it there's a concern where the money's going to come from and that's going to be the challenge i mean here we're saying 21 22 and 23 where next year is 22. so i think it's just something that has to be on the radar of this board that in order for us for us to continue this this program that we have to find money and and the best thing to do is to talk about it now so moving forward we can put that on the on everyone's radar um dr murray one quick question are we covered for devices with this program well i'm sorry one more time covered with devices devices would not come out of this bucket of money i i know i'm going to look at jim
104fink i know that we had devices come out of some part of our besser but it would not come out of this this the learning loss funding part is that accurate the devices came out of sr funding uh what new devices would be needed nothing nothing with this so there's no need there okay so the um the 386 000 for the three years is that the next three years which is going to tag on or is that included this past year so we have three more years the time would start when we submit the po so um it would not include this i mean would start moving forward whenever we would submit it so if it means we go december december we go december december they're not going to count this year as a full
105year okay and um i i know it's expensive we've talked we've talked about this um one of the things that i know that you were looking for are solutions for a multiple from a variety of things one of them is for the past learning loss that has occurred that we know it takes multiple years for students to catch up with what they have lost another concern is the um the current the students that are quarantining right now those that that are are either um well or well enough to do work that the my understanding is the i ready provides at least k through eight with this students of the teachers the opportunity to provide what would be considered meaningful work for their students because i know we've been talking about those options they were tasked
106kind of with the school board right so i want to i want to get back to my action maybe if you feel that this is the best tool for that but the other quarantining the the current and the loss that has occurred but also this would cover our summer programming then for the next three summers so we could have provide similar programming that we've had in the past so do you feel that this is the the best tool to answer those three things that we're looking to address at this time so i i do i i realize that one of the things i struggled with it was the price tag of it um and you know i shared that at the um at the curriculum committee as well i do think it's a great product
107we used it over the summer so it was a good opportunity to kind of pilot it we were able to get good data from that and what i liked about the program is that after you have the data there's two things that occur number one students automatically have an individualized learning path based on the results of the data that they can use at any time they can use it in the classroom and in the buildings they can use it at home the other piece i liked about it is that the teacher then gets the data and can specifically push out lessons to individual students based on their need and this could be for remediation this could be the student who needs a little bit more one of the things that we're really trying to push
108in our especially in our elementary buildings is the idea of doing station work within our classrooms where teachers can work with small group instruction know that small group instruction is where a lot of power comes from as far as learning loss and recovery but in order to have the opportunity to work in small group instruction you need to have something else for your other kids to do so in the class a teacher would set up learning stations and that might be an independent activity it may be an opportunity for cooperative work but they're all meaningful learning opportunities and one of which can be a technology station where students would work on i ready within their individualized learning path and where where their needs are so it really offers a nice opportunity to meet students where
109they are provide resources for students during quarantine that a teacher does not have to create content they can push it out push out lessons that are where the students are and i think it also gives a lot of good diagnostic data to be able to better understand where students are so that we can meet them at their level both in i-ready but also instruction within the classroom as well i also wanted to add that the curriculum department is also going to evaluate all digital programs for need and redundancy so hopefully that will mean that we can eliminate some things and that will reduce some of our costs and possibly um we can return some money to the balance on assigned funds i'm very glad you you brought that up because i i did not mention
110that but i think that that needs to be part of our three-year plan this is specifically three years and within that three-year plan we need to really evaluate this program in comparison to some of the other programs and then have a continuation plan beyond there i don't have the continuation plan right now because i really want to see the data over the next couple of years but what our department has to do is evaluate after three years did it do its job and are we done with it because we addressed learning loss or is this a valuable program enough that we want to continue and if that's the case then we need to look within the curriculum budget to have more of a sustainability plan because this is quite a quite a price that would
111need to be built within the curriculum budget um but with that i think we have to do our due diligence by evaluating all of the digital programs that we have and see whether or not there's any overlap whether or not you know what that continuation plan would be after three years go ahead does that include canvas i'm sorry does that include canvas it's not because canvas is the shell canvas learning management system but what it might include is the content that we're developing through springford cyber so it's spring for cyber content will be developed within canvas at that point we should have the majority of our classes cover um created and we would then evaluate is this something that we would need in addition to the content that we already have created does it do
112two different jobs but i don't think it competes with canvas itself because it's two different purposes and two different platforms so the the only thing i'm going to leave you with is that um you said you you touched upon my other question and we're going to spend 400 000 upfront they want 400 000 upfront which i have a hard time supporting that i would never pay 400 000 for a software package up front when we don't know how how how well they're going to deliver on the package how well it's going to meet our need i mean there's so many there's so many things that come into play um and then how does that you know after year one two or three what does year four look like and what is that going to cost
113i mean we don't know i don't know this is this is and these were some of the questions i asked you when when you originally brought this up a curriculum about iready um not that i'm not necessarily against it but i mean this is how we get into trap of all of a sudden we have a half a million dollar package and now we got to go to the budget and add that back add that in somewhere along the line well half a million dollars is a half percent tax increase so half a million dollars is a lot of money i guarantee you the price of this isn't going down in three years i've spent many years in the software industry and i know that once they got you and you have it integrated into
114your system into your school they're not coming back with oh we'll we'll give it to you for because we're really nice so it's it's it's pretty expensive endeavor and um and i again when i'm looking at these numbers i just i'm just not and i don't like the money coming out of unallocated fund balance as well but that's either here there okay so i just want to go back to when we were talking about this in curriculum i think my major concern was about keeping it for the summer because i thought it was you know maybe a little soft last year because it just needed more time to be developed and rolled out and i know you were trying to pull it together there was just so much else going on so i know that
115you wanted to start early and you did even mention that tonight that you want to get the ball going sooner and have it more systemic have it have a better plan to approach it and how it's going to get rolled out and communicate it so my biggest concern was keeping it for the summer and then i was happy to see about the extra money but it does scare me a little bit about pulling there's still a balance and a significant balance that has to be pulled from the nsign funds and the other thought of that is that we're still paying for these other platforms and i i thought the plan was going to be that we were going to evaluate their effectiveness compared to what we know about iready and then decide which way we
116were going to go forward but not necessarily with both i think then the extra money became available so it was like okay let's do this too and and truly about which items that we want my question is we're still looking at that 241 000. if you want to do this is there any way to do that um evaluation of the other programming get out of that save some of that money to apply this money has any of that been looked at i i don't think that we can do it that quickly um and i purposefully prioritized the items up here where that using the money cause the curriculum committee did mention they wanted the focus to be on summer rams so we i wanted to do that first so i did put this in a
117kind of a priority order here so that the summer rams would take take place over the next couple of years and then that remaining money would then be allocated for the i ready if we could so um that that evaluation takes some time and because those materials are used in different capacities it's not something that i would feel comfortable saying i could do that right now and get it to you within the next month i would prefer that we would maybe move forward on the rest of the plan and not on i ready and then we can take more time to do that then but at least have the plan of moving forward with the rest of the plan can can you do the rest of the plan without the i ready do you lose
118that arp s or do you lose that seven percent by not doing so what we will have to do is show um the one bucket that we wouldn't would have to address is that nineteen thousand three fifty nine that would need to be sport uh um spent on reading support and interventions so you'll see that that covered some of the i ready that would fall under that bucket so i would need to have a plan to be able to cover that 19 000. the rest of it though would hit all of the other targets because we are spending it at least the minimum on the social emotional we're spending the minimum on the pd and we're spending the minimum on on the summer and after school program so you're saying you could do all of
119the others and then do an inventory of what is working in our district and decide at a later time after a very strategic overview of what we have what works well and then decide if you wanted to continue with that programming or move to iready we don't have to do this all at once correct we could do it in steps correct and not touch the unassigned funds correct so so the plan what we could do if that's the will of the board i could adjust the motion to include everything that's on here with the exception of i ready um and then we would just have to be aware that there is a certain that's not a spend down of the entire um learning loss plan but that gives us about 132 000 that we would
120still have to identify which could be used for that or could be used for something else or could be reallocated to one of those other items as well i do just want to point out as if we decide not to go forward which is fine um with that that we will have a summer loss learning program and we will have tutoring um but we won't have a day-to-day um program that's working on kids who are being left behind by quarantining and kids who are being left who have just due to diluted education virtual and in person who are you know day-to-day we're not really working on lost learning well i i don't know i mean the keystone exam tutoring is not something that we have and that would be used to help the kids that
121took the keystones and as a result of covet maybe didn't do too well tutoring but that's an after-school thing that's not not something that's my class the one piece i need to then look into more is that 19359 because that indicates that we have to use a minimum on on reading support and intervention so i have to look at the exactly what that means and how we would identify that that could potentially mean that we could use it for i ready for the summer but i would need to do some more digging onto that piece first before i could commit either way on that piece but that would be the only other bucket that wouldn't be addressed in the other items that are listed in this budget can you can you look at that for
122next week thank you yes i'm concerned with this um i'm gonna support my good friend at the end of the table miss fazzini um we shouldn't be value engineering this right now this is an item that should have been vetted at committee and the costs were talked about so nothing is new with the cost where the costs were are coming from which is this is not new i just think this is not it's not new but not not everybody was was in favor of i mean that there was there was discussion about it i think it was agreed to that um we'd have dr murray do a presentation um about the the information to be shared with the full board but i do not believe there was a consensus um as to where to go
123with that is that fair to say i think there were just still a lot of questions i don't know at the past couple committee meetings there haven't all the committee has not been there so that's true i was on zoom on the or the phone call on the last one and i did struggle to follow along but i did follow up and get that information too i'm just not 100 there fair enough so we're asking dr murrah to go back and massage this and bring it back to the board i thought what i thought i heard her say that the adjustment would be to pull out i ready for right now so that the board could approve the the other items so that they continue to develop like implement that plan is that what i
124heard you say with approval i'd like to go and submit the application that's due on the 29th for everything else if the committee if the board's not ready to move forward with i ready we can pull that piece out and bring the rest of it and over the next week i can figure out that 19 000 and make that really clear and make the adjustment on the motion for next week as well or that can be also a part that we know that we just have to address within the plan because that application is due the 29th so you really need to get that ironed out and finalized i think this is clear as mud but um i i support you in this dr murray i just don't support awarding this down with all due
125respect to the board members here so you're going to go back and massage this and bring it back to us what do what do we gain by what are we losing here yeah i i don't support watering it down either my questions that i asked weren't about watering this down my questions were asked about how the money is going to be replenished back into the into the fund balance and my questions were related to after three years there's a cost and where's that where's that money coming from that that's all i'm asking i mean i'm not saying i don't support the recommendation i do have a problem where we keep buying these packages and a lot i'm sorry but a lot of the things that you talked about this evening was the same things you
126talked about when we were talking about canvas so i struggle and i in a curriculum when you talked about this last month i did ask that question what's the difference between canvas and i ready and the biggest thing what i heard was that i already set up this better setup or situated for assessments right and there's there's already lesson plans or lessons or that are available through i ready that that the staff doesn't have to develop if i remember correctly they were the two big pieces right so because i was trying to understand what we just spent we're doing all this with canvas we put this whole movement towards getting canvas implemented getting teachers on cameras getting the lessons because i struggle when i hear that if the kids are at home because of quarantining
127all these lessons are supposed to be available in canvas now right not all the ones that are being created through springford cyber yet i'm not talking about i'm talking about in school here because if canvas is being fully used these lesson plans these lessons are available for because that's what that's what we keep being told when when when mrs oscar brought up last month when she talked about you know students that are quarantining they're missing out because we're doing asynchronous learning and she was concerned about that and the biggest response that we got was that no this information is available for them to do the lessons at home through canvas right so we're talking about another 400 000 roughly on a tool another tool that does assessments and has pre-packaged lessons correct correct right and
128we still don't i and i asked two questions that doesn't has nothing to do with you has nothing to do with this package i always ask these questions all the time if we're taking the money out of on out of the uh the fund how's it going back and then and this plan does not talk about we're spending 400 000 and then three years from now it's only is it a three-year license is it is it a license for eternity i mean it's a three-year-old it's a three-year license so in three years it's there's going to be a price tag and we don't know hey we don't know what that is and that should be negotiated up front i know mr fitzgerald is always all over tough negotiations but we should already have that baked
129in we should already have an answer to that question we should say in three years the price is going to be a seven percent increase or whatever so if we go into this relationship and we don't know what our renewal is going to be get the checkbook out right so so i'm not i agree with mr jackson some of this is clear as mud but i'm not saying water it down all i'm saying is that i'm asking these questions that we need to have answers maybe the board doesn't maybe the rest of the board doesn't care maybe they do i don't know i'm not hearing that i'm just asking these questions because if we're going to spend close to half a million dollars on a four hundred thousand dollars in a software package we're spending
130four hundred that doesn't matter where it's coming from we're spending four hundred thousand dollars on a package so these are questions that we should and this is the same thing i said to you when we talked about a curriculum these are the same the same questions that we still have still didn't get you know an answer for and i'm not questioning i'm not you know if this is your recommendation then i'm not questioning that because that's what you're here for you're supposed to make these recommendations but i am in a question to spend and i'm going to question you know what i what i just mentioned sure dr murray is the intent of i ready really to address the learning loss within the district and really you know as you're looking at a three-year contract
131are you really anticipating it being three and done or is there an expectation that there's a potential for renewal at a later date i i can't tell you that right now i think the idea of having um the ester funding to be able to fund part of it right now was appealing so that we could specifically use it to address learning loss right now i think that would be part of the three-year evaluation that we would do to determine where does that fall within some of our other programs for example we have nwea map we spend about off top my head i think it's about 57 000 a year on that it is an assessment program but it doesn't provide the instruction so we would do an evaluation on that to see is the data
132that we get between the two of them something that maybe we would consider replacing or how would those two programs complement each other in the future um but that would be part of what we're doing so truthfully if we didn't have ester funding i'm not sure that i would be bringing this right now but i am bringing it as an idea of addressing learning loss um and with this money that can be specifically used for learning loss we did have success with it over the summer but i again i i'd be lying if i didn't say the price tag itself to me is still something of a concern um but i do think that it's a quality program thank you cinderella i you're correct order now is not the proper term and i know your
133heart's in the right place you have lived this budget for the last decade so i know the questions that you're asking and they're completely valid um yeah i i am concerned where the money is going to come from in the future but then it becomes the balance of what do we do to address it versus the concern for where the money is going to come from and sometimes those are very tough decisions you and i both know that and this is going to be a tough decision going forward it's just going to be tough on the budget and i'll leave it at that but now i guess i'm on your last response i'm really confused because are we bringing this in for learning loss are we bringing in for a long-term solution towards addressing students
134helping with student assessment i mean what what is what is the goal is that i think the goal is to be able to use this program to diagnose where students are ideal clearly what's that over time over time clearly identify where students needs are and then provide direct instruction to be able to address those specific needs now is that something that might be filling a gap right now because of the challenges of kovid and over time we may say okay this did its job and we're done we're gonna not use it and not renew it possibly is this excuse me is this something that i can say we're gonna have for five ten years i don't know i can't tell you at this point potentially but i would want to evaluate that so and i
135think right now we are in extraordinary times and i don't think three years ago anybody could imagine we are where we are now so in three years where will we be um i do think that it provides solution at this moment i would like to see and you know canvas is uh is a vehicle for for lessons on i ready has the lessons there and the assessments and everything built in but i would like to to kind of follow on that vein is that um one of our goals as a district has been to get as many lessons for our students specifically designed for our students up on um canvas and you know continuing continuing to do that may provide us with that opportunity to uh or fill that need so that we don't we
136may not need to have this kind of program three years from now to it wouldn't provide the same kind of assessment but with the less expensive assessment tool i mean that would be something perhaps we could look at too but seeing that we don't know where we're going to be in three years but we do know that at this moment this would would answer the this um the summer program for us the quarantining learning loss at this moment um that we have and also the past learning loss we're trying to catch up on i find um that i think it's a valuable tool for that at this moment and worth the risk that we don't know where we'll be with it in after the three years are over so just a question on that because
137i think you're right i guess the kids are quarantining they're following along in canvas and they're doing their work asynchronously and and the the schoolwork is loaded into canvas like dr wright is saying so for this hefty price tag how would you propose how do you propose this is going to help those those kids that are quarantined want to keep doing what's on the canvas they want to stay with their class so that when they come back from from quarantining which you know i hope is shorter shorter and shorter with with the test to stay program but they come back from quarantining they want to kind of jump right back in and be with their class so they're really going to do canvas you're having them do this for kids that you identify on top
138of is that a huge percentage i mean i think i'm i must be missing something no it would not be this would be a tool that would be used in the classroom for all students so then it would it could be accessed through canvas but it would be it would be a tool that can be accessed for all students and used as part of instruction for all students so when students are potentially quarantined the teacher would still post content on canvas but they could also say work on your i-ready individualized learning path for 20 minutes today which would be again right in line with what they might be doing in the classroom because it would be a tool that could be used in the classroom right so the the if you were looking for a
139skill for example um a teacher would be covering um adding fractions with unlike denominators would be their their goal that's the pennsylvania department of education has said that this grade level is something that they're supposed to learn the student isn't there the teacher can put the lesson on canvas say this is what we're covering these days but the student isn't getting that same kind of instruction so an example of how this tool could be used is that they could the teacher could assign them the lessons and i ready that aligned with this they could take an assessment if they know had that skill then they're fine they could move on but if they don't it would provide a tutorial for them and the opportunity for them to learn and then the teacher would get this
140information to be able to tell where the student had learned that skill so when they come back to class they would be in the same place that's a very my own mark with that i mean it's a very simple i thought that was a very good explanation simple thank you okay okay so what is the um direction of the board then to dr mr earl were you going to say something at one point on this job i was just curious about the um the three-year situation for the i-ready program one why is it take it or leave it three years there's no negotiating that it's one year at a time no i um they have mult they i could buy it for one year um we were able to get a discount by doing it
141for three years um i did not think that when we dropped it even down to two years the pricing for two years didn't make sense first three years so it kind of fit and it fit within the plan of but we did get discount for having multiple years okay so direction thank you dr mary i think that a lot of the questions and comments um is there a direction from the board as to would we like to see the um motion as it is for next week or do we want to ask for any changes or additional information i i would lean towards leaving it the way it is and thank you very much dr murray i i think that we're we're charged with um you know educating students i mean this is this is
142a school district and and where there's you know mr develo has you know expressed you know a lot of concern over learning loss in the last um months you know 15 20 months and so i think this is an opportunity to help close that gap and i think it's critical and i think it's our core mission and goal and objective and it's why we exist and i think we need to make sure that those kiddos get um you know fill those gaps and if this is a tool that will help them accomplish that i think we move forward um with the plan as dr murray presented this evening so thank you dr murray um the last sentence in the motion says three-year access i ready for math and reading k to eight but i thought
143i saw k-12 no i ready is only k to eight so what was the i'm confused now question is what is the direction of the board no that's not my question my question is that's okay i saw a k-12 up there and that's where i'm looking to use i think that was tutoring okay all right thank you other thoughts from other board members i'd leave it as it is i'd like to go forward with it so okay dr mary thank you all right moving on to boarding committee reports student reps alison i think you're on the zoom and adida do you have a student student rep report for us this evening uh yes we do uh so today we will be presenting the november student [Music] um and with that i hand it over to
144ali thank you adidi uh good evening i'm going to go over some recent events that we have had in the district for our students um the fall place place at darella was performed on november 12th and 13th the fall festival for the middle school took place on november 3rd students in the 1012 center participated in an alice emergency drill during homeroom on thursday november 11th and the high school marching band placed first at the cavalcade of bands competition last weekend in hershey which i think adidi addressed in her announcement at the beginning of the meeting so i extend another congratulations to our band moving on to the next slide um i wanted to highlight some veterans day events um that we had going on across the district one of these was a virtual veterans day
145celebration at the 56 center and across the district all students reviewed the history leading up to veterans day and uh the significance of the day with presentations from principals uh and teachers um and then we have some pictures on the slide uh chronicling some of those uh veteran's day um events and celebrations uh with that i will give it over to adida and she will cover some upcoming events for us uh thank you ali so for some upcoming events that we are having as a district winter sport november 9 and we are having thanksgiving break next week um from the 22nd to the 26th uh report cards will be available in skyward on november 17th for the class of 22 there is a players gourmet fundraiser pickup on the 18th additionally we will be having
146parent-teacher conferences on the 18th and next week as well on the 23rd so there is some registration via skyward and the last day to sign up is on the 17th so just a friendly reminder if you haven't done so um this year we will have the option of choosing in-person or virtual meetings and um with that we also have winter keystone testing from the 1st to the 15th of december we will also be having a lot many musical concerts coming up in december featuring the orchestra on the 7th the chorus on the 10th and the band on the 14th we are also having a ct testing on the 11th and winter break will start from december 24th to 31st thank you any questions or comments for our student reps thank you both for a thorough
147report um curriculum and technology mrs fazzini um this is my last board meeting report so i want to thank dr murray and mr catalano for the pleasure of working with them over the past few years they've done an incredible job creating and deploying a virtual and a cyber school in record time under unusual circumstances from the moment dr murray headed the department of curriculum she viewed technology not as a tool or a resource but as a seamless integral part of curriculum and education she has had a vision of what can be and how to move forward dr murray was researching lms systems and working on a springford cyber school plan before the pandemic began then she had to with the help of her team and the administration implement both educational models and implement training for
148teachers students and parents in record time over my tenure mr catalano behind the scenes has researched and significantly improved springford security he has had to shift from implementing modernized learning over a five-year timeline to suddenly condensing the entire operation he oversaw the acquisition deployment training and troubleshooting of the project over the past year and a half i've watched teachers superintendents principals administrators and nurses work long hours together collectively to develop creative solutions to problems they've never encountered before and i just really want us the community to know how much these people who work for springford care about public education and your children i also want to say how much of a privilege it is for me to work with the employees of this district so i asked the public to keep this in mind and
149try not to engage in toxic behavior like name calling blaming calls for resignations attacks on social media and aggressive heightened rhetoric creating a toxic climate only produces division it produces chaos and serves to undermine the motivation of the district employees and produces little to no actual progress but please stay engaged with this district and the school board working with the district providing constructive comments and criticism is welcome and needed realize we all need to focus on and support uncovering addressing and solving challenges and issues nothing is easy or perfect in a school district of 8 000 students but putting in the hard work collectively keeps us constantly moving forward and provides our students with the best education and environment i know a lot of springford students as i'm sure you do too they're amazing they're
150smart resilient courageous funny competitive generous ambition ambitious and engaged i believe they are our community's most valuable resource and that providing them with a great public education and all the tools they need to reach their potential is one of the most important jobs that there is and i think springford works hard at this mission every day anything really worthwhile is never easy it requires constant work all right so here's my report uh curriculum and technology met on wednesday november 3rd at 6 30 p.m uh on the agenda this week is the purchase of parent and family engagement newsletter at the cost of 1 400 to be paid for the title one funds to be paid for with title one funds sorry there's also a renewal of my typing pal and turn it on these are
151annual curriculum renewals and budgeted items dr mary also presented a detailed and comprehensive learning loss plan which you saw today uh a streamlined version of it the committee discussed how learning loss would be addressed at the elementary and secondary level the continuation of the summer rants program the social emotional support staff professional development use of i ready and also the curriculum departments talked about evaluating all the digital programming for need and redundancy mrs grady uh presented an overview of the work development and details of the district literary program that fulfills the pa state literacy requirements the plan was finalized in september after a lot of hard work and many volunteer hours of a cross section of springford staff it will be posted on the springford website where anyone can read over the comprehensive document i
152encourage the board members and the community to look it over and review how the district is integrating literacy throughout instruction and throughout throughout instruction and professional development in technology mr catalano presented an update on technology the tech department is addressing individual special education requests some students need special technology and the department is helping them with that the department is working on the assessment enhancement and adjustment of access points in all buildings they're collecting data from each building to troubleshoot access and improve speed the tech department has supplied five substitute teacher devices and accounts for each building and all instructional assistants were deployed devices last week the use of technology within this group will be evaluated at the end of the year mr catalano is also creating short videos of tech information tips and instruction that
153he will be sharing with the district with the district are there any questions questions okay thank you um policy mrs earl well policy me the committee met last monday the 8th and we continue to plow through the 3 4 and 500 policies that the pennsylvania school board association had reviewed for us and sent back with recommendations to adopt as is or consider for retirement so we have sent eight of them to our solicitor for review uh and we'll uh bring them back for the uh ford's consideration for first uh reading next month or in january two additional ones will be brought back after review and we'll probably have to have a discussion on them at in the january meeting and additional five policies uh will be brought forward in january for full retirement and uh
154that's that wait thank you are there any questions for mrs earle all right then um mr dabello or mr jackson i think you subbed in for mr developer finance or i'll present next week okay based on dr murray's need for money i gotta wait till next week and present now sorry dr murray and same goes for property same goes for property i present next week okay so western um i was on the zoom at the last meeting i don't think no i was away that's right and okay so yeah so um there's been some um changes going on at the western center and some new developments so earlier in the year a new principal was hired and now there is a new administrative director mr david living good from the pottstown cte comes highly recommended
155and is excited so the western center is under new leadership and um i for one would like to see springford stay in a position in a leadership position over there we are doing some exciting things where we are adding some structure some policies and protocols putting those in place that maybe have lacked a little bit but really putting a framework around what's happening over there and looking to use that as to set up our new administrative director and our new principal for success so that is where we are at right now we do not meet um in december so our next meeting will be in january any questions about what's happening over at western right now okay um moving on then we did hear from nurse smith so mr rizzo thank you my report's actually
156rather short tonight first i just want to update the board that our modified quarantine test estate program did begin today it was relatively smooth there are a few little bumps as anything is when you first implement but we're excited to report that it was uh it allowed us to safely keep a fair number of students in school today thanks to trish smith laura mcneil aaron crew and chief boyer for helping get the program up and running as well as our administrators and testers for making it a reality it's a big lift it's a heavy lift so thank you to all of them fall play i just want to touch upon that quickly i know that it was brought up by the um the student reps i was very fortunate to be able to see thursday's
157performance of the senior high musical cinderella i'm senior i play cinderella the show was fun interactive and the audience really enjoyed experiencing theater in person congratulations to director ms jackie lippencott and assistant director ms kelly german the volunteers the cast and the crew for what i consider to be a very great performance i generally leave the world of athletics to mr mr mcdaniel but i do want to draw attention to liv curry congratulations to spring forward spring four girls soccer player liv curry on being voted pioneer athletic conference liberty division most valuable player and earning pennsylvania soccer coaches association all-state team honor for the second year in a row liv is the fifth player to earn such a distinction back-to-back all-state honors impact history so congratulations to liv for her accomplishment and then my last
158announcement is that this is uh the first day of american education week this year it is the 15th through the 19th and we encourage our community to celebrate public education by sending a message through many thanks springford in addition to our outstanding teachers we encourage sending messages of thanks to our support professionals and substitute teachers it takes a village and we are very proud of our village that's my report thank you very much thank you mr rizzo any comments from anybody okay mr fitzgerald do you have a report for us this evening uh just very briefly um there was a lot of discussion in action middle of last week surrounding the the statewide masking order and where it stands as of tonight um for about five or six hours there before the uh the commonwealth
159appealed the decision to uh the supreme court there was really a and anyone's guess as to what would happen next we are in a stay as as of right now surrounding that order um however over the weekend the plaintiffs in the um in the current litigation sought to have the stay lifted by petitioning the commonwealth court as i understand it the commonwealth court gave the commonwealth until midnight this evening to submit a responsive motion surrounding the request to lift the stay so there could be some level of action by the commonwealth court this week on the issue candidly i'd be surprised if the commonwealth court would lift what is black and white law about an automatic stay but stranger things have happened so um stay tuned because there could be more action in the future
160in the next few days on this issue so mr fitzgerald should that stay be lifted or should the order be vacated prior to january 17th it is my understanding and for the public to understand we would then default to the hsp plan that was in place because the change made tonight does not go into effect until january 17th is that fair to say so the community understands that correct if um if something were to occur between now and then you would go back to that last approved plan before the order came into place so it was at your second august board meeting where there were modifications to the health and safety plan that created the you know looking at the various case levels in the in the area that would be the applicable plan that
161would be in place essentially effective the next day should something occur okay okay any questions or comments for mr fitzgerald all right then um minutes a and b i do have a question about the minutes and this may be directed more towards mr fitzgerald um about this but the rumor mill has been going on saying that um incorrect addresses are given by individuals um particularly in person but i suppose it could happen on the zoom as well and i think we had that discussion at one point is there any there's nothing we do about that what is is it the honor system i mean i did ask earlier tonight because i knew that information right information had been shared with me so is it mostly the honor system that we go on for that in
162terms of who participates at our meetings the answer is yes we we would ask that the public and members of the community who qualify be the ones who are participating but we we have a difficult time if not impossible time governing official addresses and frankly we're not going to be zillowing everybody's address after the meeting to see who lives where so we would ask that the the public do adhere to the requirements of our policy okay thank you any other questions on the minutes a and b personnel a through k please note that um a4 cynthia heffernan is resigning from royersford not brooke there any questions on a through k just a general um statement around resignations for uh you know our teaching population i'm just curious i know it's it's not just unique to
163to spring forward but are we are we tracking on some capacity um if this trend is sort of becoming an alarming piece because i'm trying to just pace with it on a monthly basis but it seems like we're certainly dealing with more resignations than i've ever seen in my tenure on this board mrs lease thank you we are seeing an uptick not only in our school district but in school districts across the country as far as educators getting out of education at this time this is not something that is just a spring forward um trend that we're seeing and was that um fair that you did that you hosted was that helpful to you did that generate any good results thank you for asking we did hold a vendor fair so a lot of our
164vendors have been struggling in helping us out it did generate help for the substitute teacher service they said this has been their most successful job fair um so far to date so that was excellent however we are still looking for substitute nurses so if anybody's interested i'm going to do a quick plug to please contact ghr or the hr department and we will happily put you in touch with them mr shaffer just to add on i do exit interviews with every employee when they leave the school district and the trend really just is people are burned out and and are looking to move on at this point thank you finance a through i questions or comments property a and b questions or comments programming and curriculum a through d questions or comments okay conferences and
165workshops a through d questions or comments yes mr jackson there's a number listed there for the sat training but that is i looked at it too but that is a training that where you need multiple people involved it's a team approach would you say mr rizzo yeah sure so sap training is requirement to be on the sap team we have 11 building level teams anytime somebody comes into the district that belongs they should be on that team they have to get sap train certified to be part of that so what we did here was there have been several requests from other buildings we tried to pull that all into one motion instead of continually bringing motions forward to the board for consideration but that's this is virtual correct this one is virtual yes and it's
166still seven grand okay yes the training is 295 dollars per person so that plus the cost of substitutes okay all right other business a any questions or comments be one through nine or a first read of those policies in the 300 level questions or comments there c and d are two policies that are submitted for approval they would be second reads are there any questions or comments on those okay word comment i think we did have um mrs fazzini thank you for your comments before your report is there any other board comment this evening i just got a couple quick things uh one is is that you know last month we recognized the student but we kind of i feel like we kind of glossed over it um and i don't think the student received
167the recognition that they should have and i think possibly to maybe rectify that next week or in the near future because that student scored they're one out of 600 in the entire country nation nationwide global global unplanned international and we uh i don't think we truly gave that the recognition that that student deserved uh we spend a lot of time in recognizing a lot of things here at springfield rightfully so but i think in my opinion i could be wrong but just in my opinion we kind of like glossed over that that that's a huge a huge accomplishment i think that's just and i think we should do a little bit more than just seems like an honorable mention you know during a meeting but that's just can we have a resolution can we have
168a resolution it's an alumni correct what can we invite her back yeah i mean i just was clarifying it is a student who graduated she graduated last year i understand that but i'm just saying that it's still a student of ours that did something that is an unbelievable of course i'm just throwing it out there i'd like to at least invite her back so that we could congratulate her in person because we did talk about how proud we are but we didn't get to say that to her i agree with citabello it should be more than the pat on the back um you know send no way for a week in hawaii or something i don't know but it should be more than that right jackie ritter i'll do something better than that um i
169got a couple items here oh all right sorry um two other quick things uh mr rizzo uh so the parent advisory for special education where's that at i mean i know that we sent out some initial emails to one or two people but is it is are we rolling is it in process or what's going on with that i don't know if katie davis is on the call or not i know that i know that she had reached out to the people that were interested in in helping get that thing get the um uh get the council up and running um as it's a parent-led thing i mean they've had a couple of they've had a couple of monthly meetings uh parent meetings as well so her um parent professional development sessions so if mrs
170davis is on the call we could ask for for an update where she is i didn't ask her to be on the call so i don't know if she's able to be here or not okay so i will be able to i'll get an update to you on that but i know that they are moving forward i don't know just exactly where they are moving forward right now okay so is the ball in the parents court because i agree with you it is a and that i don't want to confuse that with the the instructional sessions that were held that's two different things but the with the parent advisory is this is it in the parents i just want to clarify clarification is it in the parents court now the basically start moving forward with
171it or i mean that's that's i guess what i'm asking well and that's where i want to get clarification i don't want to say yes if if they're waiting on mrs davis for something okay i'm just going to get yeah let's okay good and the last thing is is that um it was mentioned a few times this evening about you know our band championship at hershey winning cavacade um which is which is enormous uh feat in itself but what i don't think if everyone realizes that our high school band has been winning that competition uh in hershey since i'm looking at the flag so i want to make it i think it's uh back to 2000 and 2008 i believe it is and then there was like one year we didn't win it and then
172we came back with a vengeance and been winning it every year after that this this is this is a huge accomplishment i mean when when our band shows up at this competition all the other participating bands say oh no springford's here um and then i i've had the opportunity to go down several times to actually watch them perform and when you see the level performance of where springford is at compared to the other bands that show up it's amazing in fact the one year i won't say which university or which local college did a show while they were figuring figuring out the numbers and piling the numbers for the winners and that went on right after springford performed and i have to tell you that our band then blew what that college band was doing
173away blew them out of the water and um i know it's been tough we we used to bring the band in here and recognize them for uh for everything that they achieved i know it's tough to get them all in here you know because of covet but i mean i think that you know the community at large needs to understand that the commitment that these kids have uh is amazing and i and and you know mr rizzo you know because you have you know a few of your kids participating that i i've said it before and i'll say it again i believe that they are they are probably the hardest working group of students in the district when it comes to that specific um involvement i mean it's just amazing i mean they're they are
174you know over the years the growth overall as far as the band and what they what they've been achieving is just amazing and again i think that and you know and i don't want to take away you know students reps did a good job of recognizing the band this evening for their accomplishments but i just want to say you know how amazing they really are and this isn't just a multi-year i mean this isn't just a single year championship this is something that's been going on for years and they too deserve um i just wanted to make sure that we just didn't do a flyby and say oh yeah the band won the competition that was a great for the weekend and we move on i just wanted to make sure that that we gave
175them the proper recognition because it is an amazing achievement um uh and a continued continuation of all the successes that they've had over the years i just got a couple of things here if i may just to follow from what mr de bello said yeah i think we should do something for the young lady and maybe we should even acknowledge the teachers who were instrumental in her achieving um that wonderful award um back to the alliance is it a for the five or four ieps is an alliance alive alliance and advisory board or is it one for everybody or what is the district trying to do with this because i i've heard different versions of the truth so i'm trying to understand if it's an alliance for the district and an advisory board for just
176parents or is it a combination of both well the intent of it is for parents have an opportunity to collaborate with each other and as a group to be able to liaise with the special ed supervisors to talk about concerns areas of need um how you know what where they could grow some more where the district can get some feedback from them as well so it's kind of a little bit of everything because i know mrs bell has been beating the drum on this and we really want to see this develop in and and move forward to where there's growth instead of separation that's what my concern is so hopefully you'll be just one group interacting with the district in highway where they define that that's going to work and if you don't know say
177i don't know but i think katie should be on the calls or attend the meetings going forward because this is going to come up more often okay okay um just not because i i think we just and maybe mr rizzle next week you could take five minutes and just explain because there's the parent advisory parent of our lives whatever you want to call it but then there's the instructional um sessions that are being held which is just for parents to be able to participate and learn about the iep process 504 all that stuff so it's it's it's not all inclusive the the parent advisory group or parent alliance group was uh when i when i originally brought this up was modeled or talked about modeling after some other districts that are doing it and it's
178a it's an opportunity for parents it's a parent-driven organization to to come together and and and and basically be a a collaborative cohesive group that could then interact with uh with the staff and present ideas findings um i just just with all that i just want to make sure that it's not the purpose of it it's supposed to be a powerful group it's not the uh in information sharing and information uh you know with amongst parents and and working with staff it's not geared towards basically a session for parents to get together and just you know it's supposed to be um it's supposed to be really about you know working together as parents and then and having interaction with with with staff i concur with them stabilo uh staying with that topic are we still
179doing are we still telling parents that we can only do zone for the iep meetings there's no face-to-face and if there's a reason for that if you don't know you can defer to katie but i would like to know if that's what we're doing well i know that i do know the one parents request in person meetings they happen i don't know whether it's a choice all the time i do know that a lot of our parents have found it convenient to be able to be in iep meetings through zoom so they don't have to take days off of work to come into the building they could just step out and then participate so but whether it's it's not 100 virtual and it's not 100 on zoom i just don't know what the criteria are
180to determine whether it's going to be in person or in zoom okay all right one question on that so do parents know they can request in person i don't know okay okay that's something we should be able to share with them that yes you can do this or you can do the other i know i just i mean would the board like me to have an answer for that for the board memo or to present next week i think that's something katie can answer pretty pretty quick yeah the memo is fine mr rizzo smoke signal board memo that's fine just a good response okay that's all i have right now thank you any other poor comment i already had a special supervisor email me saying that the parents get to choose which way they want
181to have the meeting oh perfect perfect thank you for that check it off okay any other board comment all right then we'll go to public to be heard and we'll start again in the room if there's any comments um hi mary jane mcmahon 187 abbey drivers for pa so i just wanted to comment a little bit on the district learning loss plan that dr mary presented tonight um so 400 000 is a lot of money right so one of the things that we talked about was outside of the i ready but using the data related to ireti in sessions in the grades like in small group sessions and small group learning sessions and things like that and i just question it if we're social distancing if we're wearing masks i'm not really sure how we
182accomplished that so you know while i ready might be a good program maybe it's not the time for i ready maybe it's i don't know you won't be able to do that um i'm concerned that it's k through eight only it's reading and math only i'm very concerned maybe personally and selfishly because i have a child that's older and i didn't see anything related to addressing learning loss in the older grades things like maybe s.a.t prep or a.c.t prep or using the 132 000 that we would have as an overage to spread out to the upper grades um i didn't see anything or maybe the nineteen thousand dollars i didn't see anything at all about that um and then the only other thing is where would the additional cost which i think that was already
183addressed thank you very much anthony frigo 1003 main street linfield pennsylvania i had the opportunity a few weeks ago to attend the uh full festival for the seventh and eighth grade and i want to thank the board and the home and school association for providing that opportunity to the students and i actually volunteered and they parked me up in the bleachers to i guess i was to keep these children from one side and i was watching it and i was thinking i don't see any problems here the uh there were children dressed up as unicorns and chickens and they were all playing with each other there was no there were no oppressors and there were no oppressed as the edi and critical race theory would lead you to believe there was a mosh pit in
184the middle of the field at the 50-yard line and i don't know what they were doing in there but they looked like they were having a good time uh well i reminded me of a television show i saw years ago coach one episode a child wanted to a student wanted to go out for the football team he was obviously not a physical specimen he goes out he gets destroyed and the coach comes back to comfort him and he says you know i'm really sorry i can't play but i would like to participate because you're going to win the national championship in two years he says how do you know that i said well i did this analysis and again i'm thinking isn't that the objective here yeah edi critical race theory would lead you to
185believe that in order for this child to be successful we're going to put him who's he's a running back behind the safeties so that he can be successful but as in what happened in this case in this case the coach found his gifts and exploited them well not exploited this was probably the wrong word he he uncovered their gifts his gifts and and the child was unable to uh participate in the football team and i think that's really the goal here and edi is not going to achieve that goal and actually they vetted this carlos wiley that you have engaged and i said this before and i'm going to say it again and if i have to say it again i'm going to say it again okay thank you we've hit three minutes thank you
186a couple things i wanted to bring up uh there were questions earlier about why we're seeing a rising case name and address please oh sorry michael liberginski 2005. what would drive worse um uncovered something interesting today this is from bob harvey one of the three commissioners in bucks county the reason for the dramatic rising cases has to do with the state deciding to add into our case counts and the case counts of other counties any and all coveted re-infections dating back to the beginning of the pandemic that means that anyone who was reinfected twice infected twice more than 90 days apart is not considered an additional so now we're double counting everyone all the breakthrough cases and people who are getting reinfected interesting so secondly back to the doctor's note so uncovered an interesting email
187here from dr john george i think a couple people the table probably know him he's executive director pennsylvania association of intermediate units he writes a couple days after acting secretary beam uh sent the mask order it says guidance update it is anticipated that updated guidance to the mask order will be released late afternoon two to four p.m be posted to the pennsylvania department of education website here's the important part the guidance will attempt to tighten the medical exemption but it cannot alter the order nor can it impose any additional requirements eg doctor's letter interesting lastly i just want to maybe take us outside of our springford bubble here and remind everyone that in the state of florida every school district now is mass optional in the state of texas every school district is mass optional
188in the states of iowa north dakota south dakota there are probably others there's mass optional so you've probably heard about the massive explosion in cases for all these schools that are mass optional and then over in europe where the eu cdc not only is mass optional but they've recommended against primary school kids wearing masks shouldn't come as a surprise i'm sure you've all heard about this because there's been a massive outbreak of kids getting covered right because if they don't wear a mask they're going to get covered right no it's not happening that's all i say how's it going james troutman 199 north limerick road um you guys just admitted that the pcr test don't work when you you just approved it for thirty thousand dollars which blows my mind uh the vaccines for kids
189are not approved yet until 2026. the vaccines are experimental the experiment on the kids was approved let me get that straight again the vaccine was not approved you guys keep bringing up the vaccine saying it's approved but it has not been approved until 2026 the experiment on kids has been approved again the experiment on kids uh your nurse that's um was talking earlier she definitely suffers from mckenzie center by proxy she's delusional her numbers don't even add up to the montgomery county numbers on the montgomery county website so wherever they're getting their numbers up we're not going to call out any okay the judge four out of five judges say it's illegal to break you can't interrupt me lawyer you cannot interrupt me during my three minutes to speak i am a stockholder here you
190are breaking the law sir you cannot stop me you haven't even let me finish what i was saying i'm done you're not done you have no right i have three minutes of unanswered you've been argumentative you cannot suck you didn't even get to hear what i had to say about who i was talking about so you totally you don't call the royce ford police then no this is the stockholders meeting and i am a stockholder because i'm a property tax holder [Music] i mean no you cannot stop me okay this is my time you're gonna physically remove me from a stand i didn't even get to say what i don't touch when you're done dude [Applause] you're gonna change me now now you're under arrest stop touching me yeah i pushed you you're pushing me
191you