Spring-Ford Board Meeting - August 23, 2021

001so now in theory this screen will be you just drag it until the mouse hits the edge and it automatically goes down okay i have several announcements this evening so please bear with me first i'd like to welcome all in attendance and all in the zoom and remind everyone again that to please be respectful of your neighbor we will hold this meeting in an orderly fashion just as we did last week the springford school board does believe the community has the right to bring before the board issues and concerns that they may have about items on the agenda or about things in general which affect the district or their children because of this belief in philosophy the board will open an opportunity for community members to share their concerns with the board typically at the

002beginning of each board meeting the springford residents have an opportunity to share concerns and comment about items specifically on agenda items only in the beginning each community member will have tonight dream up to three minutes in which to address the board community members joining us on zoom who would like to make a comment should use the raised hand feature when prompted individuals with their hand raised will be called on during public comment and will be asked to unmute themselves before speaking just to note that tonight um since we i just want to be fair to everybody we usually always go first in the room or just tonight we're going to flip-flop we're going to let the people on zoom go first and then the people uh in the room will go second and each group

003will have one hour so if you're not going to use your whole three minutes please be conscious of that so that if there's any time left over that may give an opportunity for someone else to speak last week there were seven people i believe on the zoom and five in person that did not have that opportunity so let's be kind and respectful of everyone so tonight's format is going to be slightly different to allow for mr rizzo's presentation of a modified plan before public comment please also note i have requested to include the positions of administration nursing staff and sfea ironically i have been the one all along to include input from these three groups in fact i asked for true smith to speak at our meetings so i do apologize publicly for my misstep

004last week there was a whole lot going on and i do believe it shows my humanity because that wasn't er and i would have liked for miss smith to speak before there was any voting that was done also um public comment will be held after the presentation and prior to the vote so that is the way it's going to go this evening in this way we hope to present an alternative that will begin to unify our district and keep our children in school after mr rizzo's presentation as i said we will have some board comment and then public comment and then the vote please remember that in order to meet the requirement of pennsylvania's sunshine law it is necessary to record the name and address of all springford residents who speak during public comment whether

005in person or on zoom i do suggest to again move things along in the room that as you come up to the microphone you say your name and address speak your comments and when you're finished take the clipboard move aside and put the information on the clipboard while the next person comes up and that way i hope to minimize a delay between speakers and maximize the hour in the room 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 the board will do all that possibly can to assure each member of the community has an opportunity to speak on issues however if a large group of people wish to discuss a specific topic the board reserves

006for itself the right to limit participation and total time allocated to that part of the agenda as i just did once the public comment on agenda items is complete only board members will have an opportunity to speak on issues on the agenda at that time however the chair the chair may at its discretion permit discussion on selected items as the need arises finally i respectfully again ask that those individuals in attendance this evening are respectful courteous and civil during public comment and throughout this entire meeting so a few more announcements before we get into our agenda this evening and those are that we did have an executive session prior to this meeting regarding personnel this evening and legal and then also dr wright is on the zoom she is joining us on the zoom this

007evening uh do our student reps have any announcements this evening there are no announcements this evening okay thank you so then our next step as i said is going to go to mr rizzo to present an update to springford's health and safety plan check okay well good evening thank you for allowing me the opportunity to speak as mrs ososki mentioned um as the week progressed last week and some coven numbers rose a little bit and we received some feedback from community members and quite frankly the polarization of our community on the topic of masking we did have a conversation about are there other options that are out there so we did continue as we always do to see what other other communities are doing what other school districts are doing so we're going to be

008bringing forward an option for the board to consider um that does hopefully try to pull our community together in some capacity knowing that not everybody is going to be happy all the time but in the end we should all align ourselves behind keeping students safe so think of the proposal tonight as um sort of like a two-pronged approach or two-phase approach so the first phase is the first four weeks of school this the idea behind the first four weeks of school is let's get students at school let's um get some time in to see what happens with our data what i've heard and have been hearing from the experts that you would say montgomery county office of public health or chop for saying that this this spike that we're seeing is a temporary spike and

009that's a three to four week type spike and then we should see numbers begin to diminish again this allows us the opportunity to see if it trends the way that we're suggesting or not while providing an opportunity for our for our students to be at school and uh and again um to to try and minimize any quarantine which is kind of one of our main objectives here to keep students safe and keep them in school so um when i did meet with our leadership team and i met with our nurses and i met with our administration and i met with our teacher association and one of the things that we are all completely on the same page about is we need to keep our schools open we need to keep our students in school so

010that is the lens that tonight's presentation is going to take so again for the first four weeks which begins on the first day of school and um goes through the the week of our work session meeting september 24th we are um we are putting out there a mandate for ken masks for kindergarten through sixth grade for staff and students we are putting out there um optional not optional but more recommended where we are still going to encourage messaging for grades seven through 12th grade for staff and students um at the k through six level our we would be asking for a form a parent waiver so that we knew we know exactly who is it is not going to be messed an important part of what we are legally required to do is contact race

011so knowing who does and does not have a mask on does impact whether a student ends up being quarantined or not so that's information we need to have in our system so that we can be accurate with our reporting this will be in effect if we are in low moderate or substantial spring forward transmission i want to i want to bring attention to this because as i mentioned last week we had the benefit of being both moderate both moderate substantial and high all in the same week so we got to decide which data set we're going to use our recommendation is that we use spring 40 zombies because that is a community that we are obviously more closely associated with so spring ford numbers are generated from montgomery county office of public health which is

012driven by the information they get from pennsylvania department of transportation department of health so in low moderate substantial this would be the case if we would go to a high level of transmission then we would mandate masks k-12 again only with medical exemptions with a physician's signature for medical professional signature that would be what i would call the first phase the second phase would begin monday september 27th and again we will be reevaluating on september 20th at our board meeting on our work session to see if this is the appropriate course of action or not at that point we would switch to what i think would probably be the standard if you're in low or moderate we would recommend masking for staff and students uh if a family would choose it for their child to

013not wear a mask then again we want that waiver form to be submitted if we're in substantial k to 6 would be mandatory and then 7 to 12 we once again recommend if we go into high transmission like we did in the in the first phase it will be mandatory k-12 with a medical signature as the only exception to that rule transmission level shift this was initially i guess brought forward uh by montgomery county and that's to avoid the the back and forth each week they identified um a level of transmission as two consecutive weeks of data that are consistent so if we're substantial two weeks in a row we will then shift to substantial until we have two weeks of a diff transmission and that minimizes the the yoyo effect of masking out masking

014high low or moderate and again if there is ever a mandate from the cdc pde department of health or office of public health we would follow that mandate we would follow that mandate just want to talk about mitigation strategies because i did read a lot of emails this week um and i responded to as many as i could um but some of the things are authors that we're not doing any mitigation strategies at all and that's that's not accurate um montgomery county also public health in their guidance to schools that's when it's not possible to maintain a physical distancing at least three feet such as when schools cannot fully reopen while maintaining these distances it is especially important to layer multiple prevention strategies these are things we're talking about masking now specifically indoor outdoor masking

015is still a thing that we're not pushing we're not asking for uh there's still some discernment if we're in a large club people are outside you might want to think about masking if we're in a higher level of transmission we're talking about screening testing there are three types of testing that we here at spring forward want to support assurance testing um which is essentially ensuring or assuring that our students and our stuff that are well continue to be well symptomatic testing as we start getting into different seasons if somebody is symptom addict so instead of just saying yeah that's kind of like hope you need to go home until you get a test we can now test in school and if they test negative then they can stay in school and then testing out quarantine

016which is anywhere between that whole day five and day seven of the quarantine and you could test to come back after day seven those are uh that's project acid which is done through montgomery county office of public health in partnership with chop we do cohorting at the elementary level our students stay with each other improving ventilation uh mr hunter could speak to what the efforts they've done on that again continue to push respiratory etiquette um and watching cough covering cough and sneezes do you encourage families and staff to stay home under sick if they're symptomatic um regular cleaning we our cleaning efforts have been above and beyond and we'll continue to be that in our evening in our evening cleanings and as we have identified cases and again we were working towards minimizing minimizing visitors

017into buildings while we had higher levels of transmission starting out our school year just to kind of give you an idea of kind of how things evolved all through last year we had three levels of transmission we had low moderate and substantial low defined to zero to nine moderate 10 to 99 and substantial 100 plus in the spring this past year we started hearing of a fourth so just wanted to show you what it was and what it is in the comparison so essentially the current moderate and substantial is what last year's model was low is the same and substantial is now the new high just so you can kind of see where we are based on the information that we have received the most current information from montgomery county and from pennsylvania department of

018health springfield's transmission is 52.93 per hundred thousand for 4.07 pcr positivity that makes us substantial and montgomery county transmission as of this past friday seventy four point seven per hundred thousand or four point seven pcr positivity also substantial um and just uh kind of as a we um our recruit retooled our dashboard our code reporting dashboard to give you a screenshot of what that looks like and we will keep that updated um that's what it looks like now it is live on our page so you can visit that now and see as we update that you can see the most current data and information i want to talk about quarantine is a lot of questions came up about quarantining what are we going to do with students who miss 10 days of school and and

019the fact is that students really don't miss 10 days of school when they're quarantined that's and i think it's important to be clear so i did run this by our nurse looks that i had our timeline accurate so i'm going to read through this there's a lot on here but to try and kind of build a picture for you so you have two students in tools student a and student b one is matched one is not mass if they're three feet apart they are three feet apart they're in school on monday and tuesday and both of them are asymptomatic they feel fine wednesday one student develops i say cloven-like symptoms but you know covid-like symptoms can be almost you know anything that is also related to the cold they develop symptoms they become symptomatic thursday

020they go get a test and they find that they're confirmed positive on friday the parent notify the school of the positive result contact tracing goes back 48 hours from the test or when the student became symptomatic which in this case was on wednesday it's important to mention here that if both students are mastered it's a different situations if that if students are vaccinated that's a little bit of a different situation so day one of quarantine is the first day after the last day of exposure so in our example the student became symptomatic the last day that student a for example was exposed to student b was tuesday wednesday becomes the the first day of quarantine we find out about this on friday so it's already day three of a 10-day quarantine we then exclude that

021student as of monday which is now the fifth day state of quarantine so then the student if they choose to do a test out of quarantine which they can do in our schools if they choose you to test out quarantine then they can come back after day seven which means wednesday they would be back in our buildings and they would miss a total of two maybe three days if they choose not to participate in the test on a quarantine option then they would miss and they would miss approximately five days of school so ten days doesn't necessarily mean ten days does it mean that we need to not worry about our students know it doesn't mean that at all it just means that the amount of time actually missing instruction making live instruction is a

022little bit less than what the 10 days might suggest and just another the cdc order that i believe and mr fitzgerald you could probably open on this a little bit more um it does require that public transportation including school buses masking is required and again only medical exemptions with a medical signature would be honored in that situation and that's that's the general gist of of kind of what we're what we're proposing as an option to keep our schools and open and our students in school so i'll entertain questions mr could you uh explain the difference between the two exemption type extension forms so the parent waiver form would be okay we are recommending masking and as a position of our dish we are recommending masking if you are going to not mask your child for

023a non-medical reason we would just have a waiver form we'll say if you choose to not mask just know that you could be quarantined that the this would be you know this is kind of maybe some of this or whatever and then it'll be a pair of signature submitted and then that would be it it would be done in fact we're talking about doing it through skyward should be done digitally a medical exemption would be very similar to the form we had in place last year where we would ask what the medical reason is and then we would ask for a physician signature or medical professional signature on the forum so low and moderate it would just be the parent um what's the word waiter labor force it's apparent wave reform doesn't require medical signature

024it will be low moderate and substantial for seven to twelve right and if it's massive require k through six or k through 12 then meta the the medical exemption form will be required with medical signature correct and also when you're going through your numbers currently if if whoever didn't add high into the mix we would be moderate today last year's criteria uh if we were in substantial substantial that was a moderate last year right yeah so we're substantial this year because they added high push substantial down but last year it was moderate so looking at last year's criteria we will be considered moderate today correct correct are you on that screen now yes because we're at 52.93 so that would be last year's moderate so you're proposing mandatory k to sex but if the numbers

025go down you make that optional they figure it out we would still recommend masking again that's a lot of concern about the vaccine becoming available for students under 12. um once that becomes available and there's a choice involved and i think we probably have a conversation about that even if it's low or moderate if there's enough transmission going on and you're getting a high number of kids who do have to quarantine and there's a lot of lost learning is it something you would think about going back to folding asking should be more kids in school that's a great question um and early on in the summer i shouldn't say early on i should say the latter half of this the latter half of the summer when we were meeting with montgomery county one of the

026things they were discussing doing was being strategic with when you choose to use masks so in the event that you might have one or two students in a particular classroom the test positive then maybe you maybe those close contacts you tell them they need a mask for a week or two until you know until we find out that they're you know asymptomatic they don't contract covet um or you do a whole classroom so be more strategic with how you use masks instead of just instead of just uh everybody wears a mask thing so would we be willing to understand sure of course but again whatever we need to do to keep our students in school mr mr thank you for the presentation um just for clarity this presentation was presented to nurse smith and her

027her staff the administration and the teachers union so yes um i meet with trish smith and laura mcneil who are the nurse department heads and they reach out to their staff so i didn't meet with their staff i met them and the same with sfda i meet with mrs ritter and she works with her executive council and but i did meet with the whole administrative team and they were in support of this this approach uh yes i actually have a statement for trisha if you'd like me to read it at this time and i know this is also prepared okay it's a little bit lengthy if you notice that makes sense um the cdc and health departments have given schools an opportunity to keep our children in the classroom during an ever-changing pandemic by easing

028the distance mitigation effort to three feet apart and relying more on the effectiveness of masks this prevents the healthy students who are close contacts from being sent home to quarantine for everyone is masked and really this this barber is obnoxious um last year we quarantined approximately two thousand healthy students they never got coveted we quarantined about two thousand students so we did fourteen so that's the lens north smith is looking through last year we were forced to quarantine many students the vast majority of which never developed the illness this caused great anxiety and strain on the students parents and teachers and the incredible disruption to education without consistent mass use we will be required to contact facebook quarantine our exposed students the same as last year we don't want to send healthy students home anymore

029if masks are mandated contact racing is cut and dry as long as no student was within three feet of the infected person for greater than 15 minutes closed contacts remain in school only symptomatic students kids at home we eliminate quarantining from the equation and we keep healthy students in school consistently if masks are optional the process of contact facing does become more complex we have to determine if sorry the infection for a positive person to determine close contact that process that i explained you earlier um and then we determine if uh if the individual was mass or not if not then there's a quarantine if they were that they may not need to be quarantined but they should still be symptom monitoring um then we must be reasonable about our ability to track which students

030are wearing masks and when we cannot micromanage this but we do have a plan for skyward to be able to know who was and was not masked the nurse's recommendation says let's have the numbers dictate the rules the greater the community and since the greater the chance we have positive cases in school the more students potentially exposed for this reason we support mandating masking meaning only exemption is with the md signature if the county is in substantial or high transmission which is at 50 plus once our community is at a moderate or low level of incidents less than 50 we we go mass recommended we'll have a far better chance of avoiding quarantine when there are fewer positives let's finish this statement thank you yep and mr ritter hi how are you um mr reached

031out today and uh let me know that you guys wanted to hear where we were and our focus hasn't changed we just want the kids with us in person the data from last year tells us that our kids thrive academically socially emotionally when they are in the building with us we haven't perspective hasn't changed our focus hasn't changed we just want them we want them here and whatever plan keeps them here that's what we want so if if the masking because of the because of the quarantine issues right we don't want to quarantine healthy kids if the masking is there so that they they don't have to be quarantined your your group will support support that to be able to keep more of them in the building it bothers me that last year so many

032of them were quarantined and out of the building when i'm in full honesty i'm still in the corner that we shouldn't be doing this but if that don't please please but my biggest my bigger concern is that i don't want to see healthy kids quarantine because of the the quarantine rules or laws that are in play so as much as i feel that last year we complained about the different groups pushing down on us and we weren't going to allow that to happen and by recommending their recommendation we were kind of handing it back to them i feel like they're forcing our hands because if we don't do this and they have to quarantine we're going to have too many kids out of school that don't need to be out of school and mind you

033they're not going to have virtual school they're going to have wednesday every day and i don't know that that's good for our students so what i'm hearing is sfea would would support them asking at least maybe on the tiered approach or dictated by the numbers to get them in school and keep them there is that right whatever keeps our kids in the buildings we need our kids five days a week we need them in person the data that we collected in the spring proves that they're better with us absolutely they're healthier with us sorry do you foresee any staffing issues based on this approach staffing issues are either um there you know there's always the risk that we're going to be short on south but i think we're going to be in a good place

034uh nurse trish um and miss lee's have been having conversations about how to manage the contracts raising peace and some of those things so um we're working on that if there's a need uh so so uh miss lisa's event is aware i don't think at this point we're gonna have a staffing issue other than what we normally have each and every year at the beginning of the year if i have actually a couple of questions um first what is special about september 27th i i just i it just feels like a very arbitrary day it kind of feels like let's do something and appease the group and then change so i'm just trying to understand that's a good question actually um it was a suggestion from a few people that reached out to me that

035they identified another school district that was doing something a little bit different i looked at it as far as how long i think i i picked and i picked it i picked that date because we were going to have a board meeting on september 20th and we have received a little bit of criticism in the past over making decisions and voting on things after 10 o'clock at night and having to take effect the next day this gives us an opportunity to have a conversation knowing that there's not going to be any changes that wakes said families can prepare for the following week when we revisit this so it was really more of a strategic give us time to talk at the board level and communicate with our families and really anything else yeah i think

036i'm concerned about one about the timing but also you know and again you know then september 27th we then have a board meeting that will go till 10 or 11 o'clock at night and potentially new data is received and and it shifts things my concern is certainly for our families when we look at adjusting masking based on the levels and and kind of having this variable um to me it's very quite frankly you know okay so is the new data out what does the last two weeks look like do i have to send my kid with a mix tomorrow do i not send what is it just feels like it's going to be a roller coaster and very difficult to manage and to to remember and to keep up with and i think creating some

037some stress and anxiety throughout our community and so i'm a little bit concerned with the model as it stands i feel almost more like we would better serve ourselves to you know kind of go through the first marking period with a model and as we did last year re-evaluate that model kind of as we approach the end of that marking period um so that there's just some more four weeks isn't that much time especially when you're talking about some of our younger students who are just trying to get into the swing of things and then all of a sudden there's another change and another change and it makes it concerns me with that i do have a question on your presentation so what i understood and these are my words and please correct me what

038i'm understanding really is this first four week period masks are required for everybody however kindergarten through six would require a medical waiver and seven through 12 requires a waiver whether it's a parental waiver or a medical waiver but it's required masks are mandatory without a waiver is that true correct yeah i mean because they're correct right so if you don't have a waiver masks are mandatory so the baseline is masks are mandatory kindergarten through 12 and then what we're actually i mean that's how i'm reading the presentation so that's why i want to i want clarification yeah the presentation said for for when we're in substantial it says the master recommended 7-12 and if you're going to opt out of wearing a math you would need to submit a waiver form that is only signed

039by the parent which really means they're mandatory and if you get a waiver then they're not then it's an option i mean it's an option to the family right it's an optic so the choice is there but the baseline is so i just wanted to make sure i understood that they're optional from 7 to 12. only if they have only if they have a waiver but it can just be a parent form i understand that's what i said okay i said they could have either one at seven or twelve so could run for six is medical only seven through twelve it would be either parental or medical as long as they have a waiver then it's then they don't have to wear so i think there's a difference though there's a medical exemption form and

040then there's a parental waiver parental labor is more of simply a notification for the purpose of our nursing and our staff to be able to do efficient contact racing so i mean you can look at it thank you um and then i think that that's those were my couple questions just on the presentation and making sure i was clear on on everything and thank you for sharing the statement from um nurse smith and and thank you to mrs ritter for presenting on behalf of sfda i just had a question about staffing and probably this is more seven to twelve especially for having the younger kids mask to begin with but if we have breakthrough which we've been having for some vaccinated as the numbers get higher are is this something that our subs can handle

041and we have enough staffing in case teachers have to quarantine i could probably let miss lee speak to a little more than me but i would say that she's been very proactive in securing building substitutes to allow for a buffer in case we find ourselves in a situation where staff do end up being working we are encouraging our staff to stay six feet away the the guidelines that have been provided to us say that the the three feet exemption and that's what it's called a three feet exemption from close contacts only applies student to student and that's i think where some of the confusion comes in if you think of close contacts as the traditional definition that has been in place since began six feet away from for less than 15 minutes that is still

042in place the only difference is an exemption between students if both are masked they can be between three and six feet apart so we are encouraging our staff to to stay with the state six feet away to not put themselves in a situation where they could be a close contact or could potentially transmit mr rizzo so first off um i would like to you know thank you uh one board member's opinion i think the collaborative collaborative approach that you took with all the major stakeholders um within the district resulted in something that um i feel you know is much different than let's say how we however we got to where we got to last week so um i think it's also fair to say that unless masks are mandated forever and ever you're gonna have

043a few board members that are just gonna not agree with whatever's put forward so to me um this is a very i'd say healthy compromise and i appreciate the work that went to to getting here and thank you for it ms malcolm i just like some clarity you're okay with the program the approach if it's more than 30 days six days 90 days you know i just was trying to understand what this september 24th september 27th it just feels very arbitrary to me it feels very i don't know it didn't really sit very well when i read it it felt a little bit like it was you know quite frankly it felt like it was a placating kind of a inaction on the part of the administration and i was struggling with that i don't

044think that that was necessarily the intent it just felt that way um because it was just felt like a random date out there and i appreciate your your explanation i'm still processing so 60 days would be better i'm just trying to understand is it the timeline or is it the content of the presentation i i was again i was asking a question for clarity i was trying to understand if there was a reason that that date was selected is there something that's supposed to change is there something expected to happen is there something anticipated in that timeline that would warrant this you know kind of shorter window i do think you know certainly you know for children consistency is important and when you continue to change things every you know in four weeks and then

045potentially every two weeks thereafter i think it becomes very difficult for children i think while they are resilient and they will adapt i think there's also a level of consistency that's really important for children in creating a safe environment in which they can learn and thrive and develop and grow i just that's my opinion so i'm processing that information and trying to see where that where i fall mr rizzo did you not start the presentation off with the reason why you picked that date was we're talking with the county that this delta variant spike is predicted to be on the downward at within that time frame so we are select the answer the question is yes but we are what we were told was we'll see sort of like that spike happen around the first

046week of school which i believe for a lot of districts outside of montgomery county is this week um but then it's a sort of a three to four week and then you see it go down we are seeing our numbers over the last three weeks they have gone up not approachably so but they have gone up and um so the three to four weeks to me seemed like a reasonable amount of time to see what happens if they level off if they start to decline or if they continue to rise and then that gives the 24th is just to give the board time to consider four weeks of data on the 20th to make a decision for what can happen on the 27th if we're not ready to move out of phase one so a

047couple questions one is is that i just wanted for claire clarification purposes mr fitzgerald has the cdc mandated anything as of today related to mask wearing [Music] that well um but to your question in terms of masking in schools it continues to be a recommendation from this okay the state come out with any recommendation any mandates for masking in school as of today again if something unless something came out in the last hour or so i'm not aware of any any mandates from the so that's very empowerment health hasn't mandated anything in your in your knowledge for the school systems no i'm not aware of it the montgomery county board health come out with any mandates as of today related to school masks it's called masking and mandating mask and school again they've not mandated

048they they have guidelines which they are recommending that they're they're looking to the department of health and to the cdc but there's not there has been any differentiation of like an order from right so they're all sort of all still recommending as of now yes right did the county commissioners come out with any recommendations i i'm not aware that that any commissioner or commissioners that have to act as a body has come out with anything okay so and mr rizzo with the with the county coming out with their contact racing have they provided any studies or evidence other than we uh quarantined a lot of healthy kids last year but is there anything that's supporting this recommendation from the county as far as contact tracing within three free versus six feet versus mask on mass

049so towards the end of last year the cdc did enter a couple of our montgomery county districts and started to collect some data on three feet versus six feet and whether one was safer than the other they did report out on that last week a little bit to the superintendent relatively inconclusive for the results other than that aside from some of dr rubin like he talks a lot about studies and about some of the things that are going on um but there's nothing concrete that i have correct exactly right just for instance if if we stuck with the current recommendations of everyone that i just mentioned um and students were not wearing a mask and they were how to be quarantined we could still based on the lack of evidence or back lack of anything

050we could once again be quarantining healthy kids and that's why i have an issue and that's what i mentioned earlier i also want to go back to uh the survey um just like the survey is one piece of the puzzle and i really just want to put that out there it is one piece of a very large puzzle and we did surveys before and we didn't always sit up here and say well the survey says this so we're going to do this and we didn't do that this time because again it was one piece of a very large puzzle and maybe we didn't make that clear that we were looking at it as only one piece but there are a lot of different things that we've looked at to come to the different decisions that

051we've had the times that we have to change course a lot of it has to do with information that floods us we do try to share that out as much as possible and during this crazy world that we live in it's not always possible to get everything out and not everything is received or heard maybe in the way that it is intended to be received or heard not blaming anybody muggling the parents not blaming us i'm saying that sometimes it just happens i will say that we also receive the most emails we've ever i think received in the course of this last week and i do appreciate i for one speak for myself that i appreciate the information that came over certainly information that was presented in a positive way because people remember you catch

052more bees with honey than you do with venom so it's very that some of the emails were very caustic and we we have to balance that we have to hear that but please know that we read your emails and we hear you and that is why we're trying to do something where we have all the stakeholders and everybody together and try to do something to unify us because this has to stop so the division has to stop although i will say that i personally am still in the position that we are not abdicating our responsibilities up here rather i feel that there are other people that are governing entities that are experts that are paid legislators it should be making those decisions however um we did hear from um i personally did hear from cerisi

053this week from mr tarisi asking what he could do to help while others that had sent letters and such were more encouraging us to do something so that goes either way but here it is it's on our lap and the quarantine of healthy kids is going to force us to do something more to avoid that i think this might be the perfect scenario for that um although i still worry about lunch because how does kobet know it can't get them during lunch right i don't know how that is and that's going to be something that we're going to have to deal with that being said those are those are my comments on thank you if i met just one more question so if in the event and this is just something that um if they

054obviously for students that are eligible for vaccination if a student is vaccinated will they have to be quarantined no they will not unless they're there if you're if you're vaccinated and you're a close contact you are not quarantined you are encouraged to symptom monitor them right if they're symptomatic they would have to correct it's very symptomatic no but if they are then they would have to yeah thank you is that the same for teachers as well yes um i would like to ask a clarification question on that if you're unmasked and fully vaccinated um would you still be exempt from quarantine as a close contact okay thank you if you're asymptomatic are there any other questions or comments from the board so mr fitzgerald i believe we're going to turn it over to public comment

055at this point and we're going to start um on zoom this evening just to i'm trying to balance comments in the room and on the zoom we'll start with zoom this evening and should we exceed one hour we'll then turn over to in person aaron are you ready to go we're ready deborah de roy you may not make a public comment please unmute yourself then state your first and last name as well as your full address hi this is the bharati roy from 203 goldstein drive college bill ba my comments are about agenda today we are all very excited although little nervous about the full steam reopening of springfield area schools with in-person learning starting next our primary goal right now should be to keep our kids in school and not out of it for

056this to happen just as the highly transmissible delta variant of covert 19 is surging through our area it is important that we use all possible risk mitigation strategies available to us namely distancing good ventilation hand hygiene and universal masking when indoors hundreds of signatures collected via an online petition supporting universal masking in springfield schools k-12 was sent to the board members today early morning and in response to that one of the respected board members mentioned that there is another petition asking for masks to be optional in schools and has similar number of signatures so who should they support with all humility i will like to add that this is not a popularity contest in fact it is actually sad that we parents have to write repetitions like this because the school board was unable to

057take the tough decisions last monday i feel we are all on the same side or rather we all should be the invisible covet virus is our common enemy here and we can only beat it collectively and not via individualistic ideas please also note that the differentiating factor between grades k to 6 and 7 to 12 grades are just vaccines but data available on montco website is not showing very high vaccination rates among adolescents actually ages 10 to 15 is only about 30 percent fully vaccinated and ages 15 to 19 is 57 different policies regarding masking in k to 6 and 7 to 12 really does not make much sense right now at least in the beginning of the school year till you have more data on vaccination status unfortunately the compromise looks more complicated than

058it should be and the motivation behind it does not look logical for most kids mask optional is equivalent to no masks at all especially for teenagers in grade 7 to 12. for mars to work as an effective mitigation strategy the compliance rate has to be really high mask optional does not cut it most private schools in our area that successfully conducted in-person learning last year had one common denominator they followed universal masking indoors i toured one of the oldest school buildings in the district today and was reminded how closely kids will be sitting in the classrooms and move around the building with about 650 kids and more staff per grade i'm not very optimistic about the longevity of in-person learning without universal masking in all grades for everyone who is concerned about mental health aspects

059of our students please realize staying quarantined or doing virtual learning from home is worse than going to school with a mask on so please think allison o'brien you may now make a public comment please unmute yourself and state your first and last name as well as your full address hi my name is alison o'brien 505 andover lane collegeville19426 um i'm asking the board to please amend the health and safety plan and mandate masks 4k through 12 and at the very least k-6 i don't understand this four-week masking period um like christina was saying it just seems like an arbitrary time period that was just picked out it's not like kovid's going to be gone at that point where delta's going to be just disappear at that point we all know that masking is an important

060part of a layered approach to keep our children safe and to lower transmissions and the amount of quarantines until a vaccine becomes available schools in other states are defying governor's orders because they know the importance and efficacy of masks pa state can senator katie muth recently sent out a letter to superintendents in her district with masked optional plans urging them to implement a mass mandate she said quote it is vital we have our children back in the classroom and to do that we must do everything we can to make classrooms safe this is not the time to do what may be politically expedient or to leave the decision to individual parents and their preferences your decisions must prioritize the health and safety of all students and staff and in turn the health and safety of

061your district's larger community end quote and speaking of senator muth i was shocked and appalled when i learned that springford was the only school district out of 12 districts in the senator's area that did not attend a single coven 19 meeting with her office to me that's just shameful and i don't understand why one offer an offer is um out there to get through this pandemic together it was just ignored and we were the only ones that ignored it it's not one expert or one doctor it's not one study or one investigation it's not one organization or institution it's the substantial and overwhelming whelming scientific consensus that children in schools should wear masks you still have the chance to make this a successful year please don't let this chant slip away masks need to be

062mandated in school to make our children safer and to give our schools a chance to remain open and again i don't think it should just be this four week period i think it should be at least a marking period so then we can assess the data for at least four k through six but just this picking a date is it just it just sounds ridiculous thank you christine d you may now make a public comment please unmute yourself and state your first and last name as well as your full address hi chrissy jambowski 310 fourth avenue montclair i had stuff prepared but i just want to say thank you to the board and to the administration for putting together a plan and revisiting this after last week's board meeting um i really appreciate it as

063a parent wanting to send their child in person for in-person learning um i just wanted to say um if the thought behind the new plan is based on looking at local numbers and hyper locally looking at where we're at for risk transmission um we do know based on other parts of the country that it is going to get worse before it gets better and there will be increased cases in our community so we will have positive students and staff in our schools um so you know we can't you all as a board and what you decide you can't control what happens in the community in private homes and what people are doing and the choices that they're making but you can enforce policies to control how safe our schools are and universal masks are the

064way best way as we saw last year to limit that transmission that's happening in schools and also as you discussed at length limiting quarantines i would just ask if they if you would maybe adjust the plan to have k-6 masks required until those children under 12 are eligible for vaccination since we really do not have a time when that's going to happen and it's you know sometimes it's false sometimes it's winter so just keeping that in place for mandated mass k-6 until those are eligible for vaccination and then the tiered approach with 7 to twelfth grade since they are eligible at this time so thank you very much lauren day you may now make a public comment please unmute yourself then state your first and last name as well as your full address hi this

065is lauren day 57 greenbrier drive in phoenixville i'm commenting on agenda item 2a i'm requesting that the board amend the health and safety plan to require universal masking for all staff and students in k-12 montgomery county is currently in high transmission category as it came out today we know that mass work we operated successfully last year with little to no in-school transmission if mass are optional we'll have mass quarantines and closures staffing will be an issue and substitutes are already saying they're willing they're not willing to substitute in buildings that are not requiring mass even if you do not believe in mass or science we all have the same goal our goal is to keep kids in school in person safely the only way to do that is to require universal masking um school's a

066place that we send to keep our kids safe we trust the teachers the administrators and other families to do the right thing there's a group of parents that are advocating for no testing sending sick kids to school and not quarantining so all students can have natural infection their reasoning is to get everyone sick so we can get over this this is terrifying as a parent it's obviously that we have lost the trust of other parents we are depending on the board teachers and administration to keep our kids safe i beg that you require universal masking in k-12 if you cannot do that please do it k-6 at least until vaccines are available our children's lives are literally in your hands please make the right choice mandate mass until vaccinations are available for k-6 thank you

067okay doyle you may not make a public comment please unmute yourself and state your first and last name as well as your full address catherine doyle 310 woodland drive college excuse me spot the timer for a minute we're not going to do this in the room we won't do it go ahead mrs uh speaking on agenda item two-way i'm gonna have to ask officer um chief boyer to intervene so please let's just let's just not do that folks speaking on agenda item 2a tonight there was another revision to the health and safety plan six days before the start of school year a new plan that has more safety precautions than the original plan that was approved in june is now on the table will there be metrics written into the plan that must be met

068before the board can reduce prevention strategies i hope so because the safety plan approved on joining 22nd stated that maths would be required for all k-6 staff and students until vaccinations are approved students have had an opportunity to be fully vaccinated and or health recommendations change to support on asking for all students regardless of vaccination status neither of those criteria were met last week and while districts across the county were revising their plans to increase mitigation strategies due to the rising transmission rates five members of this board voted to decrease risk prevention strategies for the most vulnerable students who are not eligible for vaccines or monoclonal antibody therapy with no explanation other than passing the buck to the state of the board of health or county the five of you made this decision knowing that

069without a mask requirement there would be an increased risk of in-school transmission and the number of closed contacts would dramatically increase requiring more children to quarantine even if you do reverse your decision and approve this proposed plan how will parents students and staff trust you won't reverse your decision again with no basis on transmission levels vaccine availability treatment options or input from health and medical professionals i would also like to see any changes made to the requirements be provided with at least two full school days to ensure ample time for parents to make decisions on how they wish to proceed and for teachers and staff to implement any necessary modifications to the building or classrooms the primary objective of the administration award should be a safe consistent and sustainable in-person education for our children at

070this time the best way to achieve that is through a mass requirement an additional medication strategies like outdoor lunches additional hepa air purifiers in the cafeteria and utilizing additional spaces did the risk reduce the risk of transmission while they were unmasked in eating my sixth grade daughter asked that i include this sentence from her i ask that you do what is right not just for the parent trying to send their kid back to school safely but for the child wishing with all their might that they can thank you you may not make a public comment please don't mute yourself then state your first and last name as well as your full address arnautoula 49 goldfinch circle in phoenixville pennsylvania um regarding agenda item 2a um i just want to say if this plan was put

071together as a compromise and to make sure that students do not quarantine in large numbers and let me pose this for you to think about right an unmasked child with a parental waiver on file is infected with covet and comes within six feet of my mass child then my child has to quarantine um and my child will not have any virtual education offered to them during this quarantine period is that right i mean think about that for a minute before you pass on this um i ask that you mandate mass for everyone so that universal so that's universal masking indoors for the first six weeks at minimum or for uh the first marking period keep it simple we re reevaluate and go from there depending on how the transmission looks like and also another thing

072substantial is not low substantial is not to be taken light right um just because last year's moderate is now broken down into moderate and substantial doesn't mean that we consider that these levels are just a play on words there is a reason why it was broken that way broken down that way it simply means that the moderate was too broad and that we as a community need to stay on alert when you reach that second part of what was considered moderate then anyway when the transmission level is substantial that's not a sign that we go through business as usual and wait for high to hit before we make mass mandatory so i just asked that you keep that you know universal mass for indoor for everyone at least for the first marking period thank you

073shayla quasi you may not make a public comment please unmute yourself then state your first and last name as well as your full address hi my name is shyla quasi and um my address is 60 page lane in fakesville pennsylvania i want to thank the board again um for the presentation i think it's um very important that we consider um everyone's opinions here um i just want to speak from a unique standpoint i'm a physician in the emergency department and um i have two young kids um five and seven my youngest is going to start kindergarten at oaks elementary this year um i'm fine they're not on they're not on take a break um so uh you know um there's no cure for this disease and i'm seeing lots of kids in the emergency department

074who are coming in now with covet after traveling to southern states um kids with complications doing a long covered um mommy's talking um and um you know to to think of kobe just in a vacuum in the fall is probably um not the best idea you know in the fall there are a number of other chemical diseases um that also occur and hand hygiene cohorting um masking all these things prevent uh many other respiratory illnesses as well and um you know to say that you're going to just not get covered or just only get coveted doesn't mean that you may not get one or multiple diseases at the same time we know that many kids have been out of school for a long time and they're going to be probably much more susceptible in the

075fall to many other restaurant pathogens so i think the most prudent thing to protect everyone is to look ahead think to the future and know that communicable diseases are going to be something that's part of our [Music] part of our agenda um in perpetuity and something that we have to teach our kids about um wearing a mask is um certainly not very difficult when considering the potential benefits for diseases that don't have any cure or treatment thanks again for the opportunity the cash you may now make a public comment please unmute yourself then state your first and last name as well as your full address hello everyone good evening my name is vikash agarwal i live at 500 dean drive phoenixville ta19460 uh i would like to first take the opportunity and thank uh dr

076rizzo to put such a amazing presentation together and bring out some valuable points that we have seen that we need to think through is the details on how we are planning to do all that stuff that needs to be done when we are going to put make mass mandatory versus not so i would recom my point is also in respect to 2a that we should be making mass mandatory there is a saying that with great power comes great responsibility i understand that there are health officials of the food chain who haven't made the mass mandatory which we are strongly looking at but that doesn't mean that mean that we have to follow their steps and fall in the same pitfall we have seen the neighborhood school districts which have already recommended and made mass mandatory

077i will not quote on the number of school districts or anything like that but we have seen it seen the details so far hence i would request the board to make the right decision and make the mass mandatory until vaccines are available for all kids it was mentioned that survey was a part of the puzzle looking at all the pieces of the puzzle and the factors like the public comments and uh the recommendations that are coming from the administrative staff from the nursing department everything that we as a public or as a parent who are trying to understand what is preventing the board from making the decision of making mass non-mandatory or as they recommend it again it's our kids and everybody in who would get affected we do not have an option to go

078virtual this year we only have the option of either and we do not have any details so if at all the kids get to get infected we do not have any backup plan with respect to that and we are increasing the risk by not making mass mandate uh one more point that i would like to make is uh when we drive cars right there is a probability of getting into accidents i know people were people in the board were asking about why why we have not received any recommendations from the board why are from the department of health officials and things like that why are we kind of going towards making it mandatory what i would like to quote is that when we drive on the road we do put seat belts we understand there

079is a probability of getting hit and that's why in order to make us safer or feel safer we do wear seat belts and we recommend everybody in the sitting in the car to wear seat belts despite all the all the hue and try that we have to do in order to that is how masks are if it is going to make us feel safer and secure and also reducing the risk why shouldn't mary you may not make a public comment please don't mute yourself then state your first and last name as well as your full address hi my name is mary mcdougall i'm at 7 westminster court in collegeville last week i was impressed by your ability to look at facts and to stand up for what is right rather than to be bullied into

080doing something that makes no sense please do not go back on your stance this new plan sounds to me like two weeks to stop the spread and we all know how that went there is no data to sport mask wearing and no data that mask wearing is safe are you as a school board able to provide mass for the students that have been tested both short term and long term for safe wearing up to eight hours a day five days a week are each of you willing to be held personally liable for whatever adverse effects come from forcing spring for children to wear a mask k through six are the last ones who should be masked and your plan mask them the most mandating mass because of quarantine rules is political forcing my children to

081wear a medical device not for safety but rather for politics is sickening you are proposing to mass children for reasons that have nothing to do with health that is absurd we know children are not severely affected by covet itself you've seen the numbers but they are affected by all these restrictions putting on them they are affected by having to cover their faces all day i'm tired of hearing about cases why does this matter are children dying no they have been playing sports they have been traveling hanging out with friends all summer long and they have been masculine and not one spring for a child has died from this when did we stop being able to get sick continue looking at reality as you were able to do just last week and let kids be kids

082i was in a private school last year that did not have universal masking and we were in school successively all year these kids need social interaction they need to see facial expressions especially on their teachers they have to learn social cues they need fresh air they do not need to be breathing in whatever fibers those masks are made out of they have to stop being told to be scared and they deserve to live their lives like normal children and if a parent wants to put a mask on their child they can do just that with your recommendation no one is preventing them they can put 50 on them that's the right you aren't taking that away but please stop taking away my rights don't take away my choice to do what is best for my

083children take a stand like you did last week after looking at the data stop the irrational fear that is destroying our children this will never end if everyone keeps complying to what you know isn't logical if you truly care about the children and not playing politics you will not change the recommendation it is time to end the madness before it's too late row hit for swami you may now make a public comment please unmute yourself then state your first and last name as well as your full address i apologize it looks like we lost rowhead michael krantz you may not make a public comment please submit yourself and state your first and last name as well as your full address my name is michael krantz 233 winterbury lane collegeville pa 19426 i'm speaking on agenda

084item 2a last week i heard many parents give their views on making mass optional or required the board voted to not make masks mask wearing required for k-6 grades this decision overrode the majority of elementary school parents that wanted masks required for k-6 about 63 percent a day or so later after parents were notified of this decision the school district sent out an email entitled reopening toolkit included in this email was a section called when am i a close contact at school this section clearly illustrates that someone not wearing a mask in school who turns out to be covered positive can have a negative effect on a person who was wearing a mask but was within three to six feet of the unmasked infected person this graphic shows that a person who is following the

085cdc recommendations can be prevented from going to school due to quarantine rules because of the decision of someone to not wear a mask this is not fair to that person and that person's family who are following the recommendations these rules clearly illustrate how important mask wearing is for everyone inside the school buildings so not only did the board go against the wishes of the parents it also went against the overall goal of keeping people safe and being able to consistently attend school in person i urge the board to not approve the amendment to the district's health and safety plan a staff member or student who doesn't wear a mask in school is now making a decision that can affect someone else who was following the cdc recommendation of wearing a mask indoors as an alternative

086the board should consider a recommendation put forth by superintendent rizzo that approach seems reasonable and is supported by key stakeholders the teachers and the nursing staff if the board decides to approve this change anyway then i highly recommend that the district keep track of the number of students and staff that become coveted positive who were masked versus unmasked also keep track of the number of students and staff that become designated close contacts and whether those people were designated as such due to an infected person deciding to wear a mask or not that way when this issue inevitably comes up again in a future board meeting you will see what effect your decision has had on the students and staff of the district thank you bro hit goswami you may not make a public comment please

087unmute yourself and state your first and last name as well as your full address hi this is rohit kaswami 58 hunt club drive collegeville pennsylvania first of all i want to point out someone who just now spoke the lady prior to this one the last one can i recommend folks who are attending in person not to cheer and clap there is a huge difference there people sitting in front of uh board of directors and people actually offline please do not try to create any pressure maintain silence in the meeting maintain decrement no one needs years on this topic trees uh i want to start off with thanking mr rizzo at this point from for bringing forward an option that safeguard our kids uh it's it's it's a very welcome um option he has proposed uh

088thank you thank you mr rizzo uh i also want to start off uh with the response that i got back on one of my emails from last week i got a note saying please stay involved and i encourage all community members to vote in november i just want to highlight to board and i just want to highlight to all audience we are all on same side it's not about voting one way or another it's about safety of our kids safety of our children we immediately need to reverse the last week agenda items due to following reasons and those are the facts also being stated in my email kindergarten to sixth grade student survey parent survey was ignored as part of that decision that survey came out to be 63 percent opting for vote for masking

089mandate that was ignored number one number two uh not sure if nurse recommendation or our medical staff recommendations were factored in if that was not done please go back and revisit that thank you for bringing in our nurse trish this evening action number third vaccination within kindergarten to sixth grade students is not available yet we need to keep it consistent with how it was done last year my kids are in same situation as last year nothing has changed minus virtual option has been taken away so we need to keep it consistent uh lastly i'm going to repeat one of the pointer in from my email delta virus is still in very early phases and we do not have we do not at this point have enough data to support which way one way or another

090keep plans consistent emily you may not make a public comment please unmute yourself then state your first and last name as well as your full address um hello this is emily lucier i live at seven long meadow road in rorysburg pennsylvania thank you for having me this evening so i would like to um thank the board for um making an amendment and like to speak on that for the health and safety plan um but i'd also like to request that amendment be extended for the students in k-6 my point being that those individuals are not yet vaccinated and with the delta virus there is still so much unknown and i'd really like to urge the board to consider that we need to take as many precautions as we can for our individuals for our most

091um youngest and vulnerable and with universal masking we'll have as many precautions as we can with the distancing the hand washing and then the masking and one thing that is really important is keeping students in school so if we can have that universal masking through until when as many students who wish to get vaccinated can then that would make a huge dent into the vulnerabilities that present themselves for that population i'd also like to say that with limited precautions the fewer there are then you pose those risks of losing families um ours included um there are charter schools now that many families are looking into and the more families that turn away from the district the harder that becomes upon the district um so just consider that when you're evaluating the plans you know you

092really have to consider that you need to take these precautions because families will opt against sending their children into school they will find ulterior places to put their children and if that means pulling them from the district we will joseph salazzo you may not make a public comment please only yourself then state your first and last name as well as your full address joseph salazar 44 woodley drive rory street pennsylvania uh i'll start off by thanking mr rizzo the administration nursing staff faculty for the propose they put up tonight i'm sorry the proposal they put up tonight um it gets us closer to compromise i was at the board meeting last week talked a lot about trying to find that middle ground between all of us that want um the best for our kids was

093to have them in school what i'd like to see is that if we're going to change the plan uh that was approved last week become more equitable in the distribution of the rules as currently presented i'm trying to pick up the slide the picture of the slide i took a picture of but i'm struggling to understand why k through 6 needs a medical waiver while 7 through 12 needs just a parental waiver if we're not in high i agree if we aren't high that means things are really bad we should take every precaution that we have available to us to protect the students and keep everyone in school one of the earlier parents spoke about the vaccination rates of the seventh grade and eighth grade at about 22 percent not much higher than their rate

094of zero for k through six yet their parents get the ability to make the decision that's in the best interest that they feel of their children in sending them to school so if the board could amend or look at that becoming a little more standardized i know we've talked a lot about confusion the different ways that the plan breaks down depending upon the building that you're in the time of year if you can get everyone with a parental waiver as long as it's not high i think that kind of bridges the gap the most where we can have all the parties get at least some of what we want and that is what compromise is all about thank you show one day you may not make a public comment please unmute yourself and state your

095first and last name as well as your full address hi good evening my name is sean day and my family and i live at 57 greenbrier drive phoenixville pennsylvania i'm commenting on the item number 2a etiquette is a customary code of polite behavior in society or among members of a particular group common forms of etiquette we all are familiar with here in springford are things like holding the door for someone behind you many of you probably did this coming into the meeting tonight if given the opportunity if you didn't hold the door for someone then the person behind you probably thought you were rude same please and thank you that's another common head form of etiquette something we've all been taught as soon as we could speak words and we teach this thing to our

096children and if you or your kids do not say please and thank you someone but you or your kids are buried these forms of beneficial how we treat each other and how much we value and respect others i'm sorry to interrupt i don't think that anyone in this room can hear what's being said so maybe we take that person off go to the next caller revisit that person as the next time um because i don't want to cut them off but i couldn't hear what was being said liz kaepernicker you may have a public comment please don't meet yourself then state your first and last name as well as your full address liz kepner 19 leatherwood drive i'm speaking on agenda item 2a everyone has their own opinion on masks and i'm not here to

097change yours i'm here to ask you to re-vote to keep our kids in school specifically our k-6 students who cannot be vaccinated according to the district's health and safety plan it is obvious that the only way to do this is by requiring masks i really hope the close contact chart will be shared tonight it clearly depicts that if my child decides to wear a mask they will need to quarantine along with half of the classroom if an infected classmate is not wearing a mask if all students are wearing a mask then the rest of the classroom continues to stay in school and learn the only way to keep kids in school is by requiring masks not recommending them recommending means optional and optional doesn't protect all springford students i'm sure you've noticed that montgomery county

098school boards have overwhelmingly voted to require masks for at least k through 6 most of them k through 12. our own springford parent survey shows that 63 want maths required for k-6 why administer a survey if you don't care about the results you said the survey was a piece of the puzzle all other agencies are recommending requiring masks what piece of the puzzle tells you to not require masks other than a personal opinion your new plan seems like you are trying to pull a fast one and keep us quiet for a month and then put us on a roller coaster for an endless amount of time and apparent waiver form is just another way of saying masks optional let's put aside our personal beliefs and masks and come together to protect all children and require

099masks to keep them learning in school not quarantining at home michael krashnick you may not make a public comment please don't mute yourself then state your first and last name as well as your full address my name is michael cranick 71 plymouth drive royersford pa 19468. um basically i believe that if your goal is to keep students in the school and to keep them learning then it's a simple decision they should wear masks because otherwise you're going to have mass quarantines like you see in southern states that are mask optional and it's just going to create confusion and you have no virtual so there's no help with that and also the stress it puts on them but also the stress that puts on parents that now have to quarantine with their kids for that period

100of time because kids in k-6 can't stay home alone so that requires then a parent to stay home with them so it just seems very short-sighted to not require mass when if the goal is to keep them in school mass are what can do it so please change and require mass thank you and marie holstein you might make a public comment please um mute yourself then state your first and last name as well as your full address hi good evening my name is anne marie holstein i live at 221 amanda lane phoenixville pa 19460 i want to thank you for the ability to speak tonight and i want to draw your attention to a study that was recently released by the journal of the american medical association the jama article was released on august 16

1012021 and shows i'll give you the download of just the summary that children are spreaders of cobit 19. what that means is that while many families who do not wish their children to be masked will tell you that children are mildly affected which may be true although up to 18 of new cases per day are now children and 1.9 of those cases will be children who are hospitalized what we also know is that these children with statistical significance come home bring this infection home and spread it to their family members the concern here is multifaceted it's not just that family members will also be impacted by copenhagen which may in turn cause significant or serious illness within their families but that there will be significant quarantine times i know that mr rizzo has mentioned that

102a 10-day quarantine might actually only be five for children but what we have to remember is that these children don't live alone they have other family members and as other family members are exposed these other family members will have to quarantine and in fact a child with multiple siblings according to my understanding of the quarantine rules could potentially be required to quarantine for up to four weeks and the question is what's the continuity plan for these children to be able to continue to learn the goal of everyone speaking tonight is the health and welfare of the children of the district we all want that we all want our children to be able to learn we know that learning in school is important this has been shown a simple measure to be able to do this

103is to ask children to wear masks i am asking you tonight on agenda item 2a to please revisit and make mandatory masking optional masking will not get us where we need to be it will not prevent the spread among children and families thank you nicole basketball you may not make a public comment please don't mute yourself and state your first and last name as well as your full address hi nicole vasquel 227 egypt road um i just want to say that i do appreciate the compromise that mr rizzo put forth here just the conversation that is happening um i looked at the plan and my first thought was well that is admirable but i think really complicated um and i think the complication um in the timeline that's given there might ultimately be ineffectual i

104do still believe we need universal k-12 masking um until we're in low transmission status and where all our children um are vaccinated um we see from schools in the south where we're headed if we do not have mandatory masking we're seeing in the news massive infection rates quarantines shutdowns children in the hospital children do get sick from kovid children do die from covid there's also long-term effects that we do not fully understand yet we know that mental health for our children is paramount and what impacts student mental health the most is isolation and disruption to routines not wearing a mask moreover not mandating not mandating masks is not protecting the health and well-being of staff and faculty i haven't heard them mentioned that much tonight but i know many are anxious and scared to return

105to the buildings without the most basic safety measure which is masks in place without healthy teachers working in a positive school environment where they feel truly cared for and listened to i don't think you can have a good supportive school lastly the language that we've seen before of recommend really has no teeth there wouldn't have been cheers and clapping last week if the motion was really recommending masking recommend is code for optional i'm all for choice but when it comes to public health optional just unfortunately doesn't cut it you all have a moral imperative to rise above partisan politics and protect the well-being of students staff and faculty the state and county have unfortunately left this in your hands due to complicated legal and political reasons so you need to take their recommendations as they

106were truly intended and mandate masking until we are in low county transmission thank you heather staley you may not make a public comment please don't mute yourself then state your first and last name as well as your full address hi heather staley 412 news street spring city pa i applaud you guys for trying to come up with a compromise but the compromise has some flaws in it um you know you have the fact that uh people are vaccinated and that's a magic um shot it is not there are breakthrough cases people can still spread it from that um what i'm trying to say is nothing's going to be a hundred percent um masking is not going to save everything vaccination is not going to save everything and unfortunately as someone who is on the front

107lines this is not going to go away we are going to have to learn to live with it and it is going to um ebb and flow just like the flu just like h1n1 just like people having um rsv and other things we also have to understand that at some point we have to make a choice last week you guys made a choice and then the calls and stuff came in and now it's changed what i don't understand as a parent is if you were working on this why we made a decision at all last week if we were working on something that had some other teeth to it some other things then to me it almost feels like it was a false boat last week i was happy with the vote for giving it

108back to the parents because i do think the parents should have a choice there are other things that we do to help our immunity and everything else i i do think that you know a lot of you even the ones who wear masks go out to restaurants and take it off as uh colleen said earlier i covet how does it know when we're eating or not you know we're okay when we're eating um i'm i'm frustrated with the fact that i feel like it's back and forth i wrote an email to the board you all know that um about the fact that it's it's back and forth constantly my 12 year old last week was excited about maybe seeing friends faces and now i have to explain to her that she's not um and and

109next week you know what's going to happen with the next board meeting and then from there and then from there and all the changes and when i spoke about mental health that's what i'm talking about we're confusing our children we're not giving them a cool thing how can we expect them to lead or understand how things are going if we keep changing things yes i understand delta's this week next week it's zulu whatever it's going to change is a virus but we also have to find something that's comfortable to live with that we can actually use and and understand and not be so complex i'll just give you a piece that you know even as someone who works on the front lines the hospitals are no longer telling the people on the front lines when

110we're transporting patients who has coveted or not because they can't contact trees that's a piece that i don't think some of you understand there's some of these things that i do have understanding about that you know contact tracing went away two years ago because you can't tell if you got it from wawa or if you got it from here or if you got it from there the problem is we don't know who you get we we have about 15 more minutes of the comments on zoom then we'll hold any others that are left they'll have to put their hand down and raise them again later during the second public comment section but we do have 15 minutes sharon bittner you may not make a public comment please don't mute yourself then state your first and

111last name as well as your full address sharon pitner you may not make a public comment please unmute yourself then state your first and last name as well as your full address sarah gillette you may now make a public comment please don't meet yourself and state your first and last name as well as your full address hi um my name is sarah gillette in 78 forest court roars for pa19468 um i'm asking the board to change the decision that you made last week regarding masks optional for the 2021-2022 school year the covid uh delta variant is impacting our children more than the original strand was it's causing hospitalizations admittance to icus and even the need for mechanical ventilation in children i think it would be negligent of the springford school district to bring our children

112back into a building that they know has unsafe conditions where they can't keep our children safe if you had knowledge of severe mold in the building you wouldn't bring our children back so why would it be any different when it comes to a potentially deadly virus for them i mean i know as adults if we want to take a chance that's okay but these are children so i don't want the chance to be with them we don't know the long-term effects of covet on our children i just don't want to take a chance when the best way to protect them is masking and then vaccines once they become available um i'd ask that we talk tonight about the cafeteria situation because even if we mandate masks if springford can't maintain even a three-foot minimum between

113unmasked children in the cafeteria then the masks probably don't matter in the rest of the building um so you know i would ask you know if you would want to eat in a cafeteria with hundreds of other unvaccinated unmasked people sitting you know one and a half two feet from each other um if not then i wouldn't want to force our children to tolerate those conditions either because i really do think that they're unsafe i think the goal of every parent is to keep our children safe and allow them to continue their education within the district doesn't benefit anybody if families are forced to enroll their children in charter schools as a result of springboard's negligence to keep them safe the pde advised that it cost the district roughly eight thousand dollars per child for

114each child who leaves the district this doesn't even factor in the costs to the district to re-enroll children as necessary parents could opt for charter now and then re-enroll and then opt back out and then re-enroll and all of those are additional costs and changes for the district and the teachers and all of that why would springford choose to incur those additional costs instead of putting together a plan that allows all children a safe synchronous learning environment if the springford district knows this is not safe it would be negligent to bring the children back under the current plan so i would just ask if we could please mandate masking and come up with a better plan for the cafeteria because even if it saves one child's life isn't it worth it thank you john smith

115you may not make a public comment please mute yourself then state your first and last name as well as your full address hello my name is sean smith i live at 19 marshwood drive collegeville pennsylvania first i'd like to thank the board for the opportunity to comment on this issue i appreciate the board has a difficult task ahead of them and a lot of people be upset no matter how the decision turns out i'd also like to thank um mr rizzo for presenting a compromise that takes into account the amount of community spread and we can adapt to that i don't think it's overly confusing and i do appreciate the fact that children in grades k through six have a mass mandate one last comment i'd like to say is masking isn't a personal decision

116the ability to not mask your child it impacts other people in the community so sometimes doing the right thing isn't the easy thing to do we have a reality we're facing a communicative disease passed by respiratory droplets put a mask on prevent spread thank you allison johnson you may now make a public comment please unmute yourself then state your first and last name as well as your full address hi my name is alison johnson 79 ashley drive from linksville pennsylvania 19473 i'm a new parent to the springford school district with a five-year-old son about to enter kindergarten we have a six-month-old daughter our reality is that both of our children are especially vulnerable to cover 19 given they are both unvaccinated our son has been preparing for kindergarten all summer long we've had so many

117conversations we talk about his new teacher we talk about meeting new friends taking the bus reading chapter books learning to write we talk about the importance of kindness of sharing of respect but we don't really talk about is masking and that's because he's never whined a day in his little life about wearing them he knows he has to wear them right now to keep him safe he knows that wearing a mask allows him to play and learn and do all the little things that a five-year-old wants to do and should be doing it's really that simple i ask you tonight to amend the health and safety plan by making maths required for all teachers staff and children k to 12. why k to 12. this is a no-brainer in addition to the delta variant these

118children do not have the advantage of layered mitigation they are missing a key layer and that is vaccination making mass required in addition to distancing and cleaning cleaning measures gives these children the best chance at staying healthy while staying in school six to twelve in addition to low vaccination rates of this age group in our county the reality of a delta variant is that even if vaccinated breakthrough infections are happening this population should wear masks to protect those that have not yet had the opportunity to get vaccinated like my children and so many other children who will walk through your halls please remember this age group have siblings that have not been vaccinated yet while i appreciate that you attempted a compromise i'm disappointed with the recommendation presented tonight bottom line it makes me nervous

119it's confusing it's highly caveated and quite frankly it creates the yo-yo effect that you stated you wanted to avoid one day you require masking and the next day you don't that's a failed policy right out of the gate just require masking until further notice period children need consistency parents need consistency this plan seems more focused on appeasing a fringe group with a lopsided goal of reducing the number of healthy children being quarantined as opposed to keeping them from contracting the virus to begin with the survey didn't even make these confusing caveats it was simple require it or don't period if this confusing plan is approved i will leave tonight with no real predictable way to make sure my child is safe through the school year and with the clear conclusion that my child will not

120be safe in a school that can't make up their mind about keeping children safe first and foremost let me kavitha k you may not make a public comment please unmute yourself and state your first and last name as well as your full address pennsylvania the more painting last monday has been nothing short of disappointing having said that i want to thank mr rizzo for his new recommendation masks have proven to save lives in the past and given the recent developments of montgomery county's community spread being high it is all the more necessary to mandate mass from k to 12 indoors for the safety of all universal masking is a must and it's the only way to keep the spread of this virus which is still relatively new under check i'm failing to understand the debate

121over this while so many of our neighboring school districts have meant have mandated mass for all grades the reason delta variant has been deadly in the way it spreads and i'm sure everyone is privy to the damage it continues to cause this is not the time to relax norms and let our guard down after enforcing them for such a long time after close to 18 months of asynchronous and virtual learning my son who's a second grader now was finally looking forward to go in person and it broke my heart after seeing the board vote against mandating mass i'm not sure how i'm supposed to explain this to him that he might not be in a position to attend in school in person school if this mass mandate is not in place while i can supplement

122him academically there is nothing i can do to ensure that his social needs are met nothing can replace the benefits of in-person learning and while most of the parents have clearly indicated their choice of mandating masks for safety through the survey i failed to understand the struggle in implementing it i today urge the bird to provide an acceptable solution that will keep my son and kids like him safe in an ins in school environment taking cognizance of the fact that this age group is not eligible for vaccinations yet i still have faith in human nature and i hope the board will consider mandating masks for k through 12th thank you suny lee you may now make a public comment please unmute yourself then state your first and last name as well as your full address

123hi suny lee to brentford court collegeville pa194226 i'm calling about action item 2a i want to first say we all want our children in school and we as parents can all agree that being in school is what's best for all of our kids so if that means mascot to remain in school then let's mask up i implore you to rethink re-vote on your vote last week making it mask optional particularly for our kindergarten to sixth graders let me remind you all that you voted for mass mandate for kindergarten to vi in june you knew the parent survey prior to coming into the meeting and still yet you chose mask optional for our young children who don't even have the option to get vaccinated just to be clear our children under the age of 12 do

124not have the option to be vaccinated as of today there are many pieces to this puzzle like you said parent survey nurses report substantial to high transmission rate vaccination option and now even the administrators report i agree you all shouldn't have to make this decision but here's the thing you do have to so let's stand together to have all of our kids back in school and vote mask mandate especially for kindergarten to sixth graders and similar to some of the other callers please vote consistently by voting mass mandate for at least the first quarter or when all kids have the ability to get vaccinated thank you okay yes you may now make a public comment please unmute yourself then state your first and last name as well as your full address okay yes you may

125now make a public comment please unmute yourself then state your first and last name as well as your full address hi my name is kelly sharar i'm at 23 ashford way in swanksville everyone seems to be so focused on masks or no masks my biggest concern actually through all of this is the kids that are in quarantine who have no live teacher instruction my son was in fifth grade last year and had to quarantine car excuse me quarantine twice the k through six kids cannot get vaccinated which means there will be many quarantine again this school year it's crazy to think that these elementary age kids can teach themselves the lessons on canvas last year i sent many emails to the principal and to the teachers and the teachers emailed me back and said quote

126we feel very strongly about our kids and don't want them to be on their own they went ahead and opened up their zoom rooms for my son which was absolutely amazing other kids did not have this opportunity and were at home learning on their own so my question is what is the plan for this school year with regards to kids and quarantine and no live instructions my my hope is that and i'm asking please to open the zoom rooms for these kids to make it easier on the teachers let them teach and keep the kids on mute let the kids just listen to the lessons they can save questions for later during office hours please please consider this thank you before we go any further here uh we're finishing up at this point um are

127there any remaining people okay those four are gonna have to put their hands down to the later public comment and also the person that um whose voice was muffled did that person speak or is that person still in that crowd can we put can we just hear from him before we move on because he was up already sean day you may not make a public comment please don't mute yourself then state your first and last name as well as your full address you hear me yes i think i think i can hear you all right thank you you have my time back um i'll ask my wife to mute her camera as well all right etiquette is a customary code of polite behavior in society or among members of a particular group common forms of

128etiquette we're all familiar with here in spring four are things like holding the door behind you or for someone behind you many of you probably did this coming into the meeting tonight if given the opportunity and if you did not do it the person behind you thought you were rude saying please and thank you is another form of etiquette something we've all been taught to do since we could speak we do it for the do the same thing for our children and if you or your kids do not say please or thank you someone thinks that you or your kids are rude these forms of etiquette show how we treat each other and how we value and respect others there are other forms of etiquette that go beyond just being nice and courteous of others

129things like washing your hands after being using the bathroom or coughing or sneezing into a tissue or elbow are common forms of etiquette doing these things are not only nice and courteous to others but they actually help prevent illness by not spreading our germs onto others nobody's advocating that we break those traditional norms of preventing germs spread by not blowing our nose or coughing or sneezing into our elbows but with this all said if it's so ingrained in our society that we wash our hands after we use the bathroom or we sneeze or cough into a tissue or elbow why are why are we debating the use of masking in our schools covet is spread from just breathing and talking so our etiquette has to adjust beyond washing hands and coughing season into a tissue

130or elbow delta variant makes wearing a mask a form of etiquette wearing a damascus polite behavior wearing a mask shows that you value the students teachers and staff if you send your kids to school without a mask you're frankly being rude and you should keep your kids away from from my kids thank you okay we're gonna wrap up the comments on zoom at that point and we're gonna go in person now um as i said as a reminder when you come up to the mic announce your name and your address talk for your three minutes then take the clipboard and move aside put your information down so the next person behind you can start while you're recording that information mr olsen roland olsen 7-11 sauerwood lane um for starters at this point i asked does

131anybody have any questions about what's going on tonight in the plan i do can you pull that can you pull that mic up so we can all hear it yeah sure so uh i guess i'm not alone in having a few questions um there should be no vote tonight i mean thousands of students and parents are going to wake up tomorrow to a significant surprise this presentation should have been part of the agenda materials that were posted online uh i don't if you thought you were getting emails last week you're gonna get a lot more this upcoming week if you hold a vote why were we not allowed to uh to view this beforehand further we have no opportunity to ask mr rizzo or the board any questions related to this so how is this

132even a subject of debate i don't have the whole thing memorized i mean this is the first time i've seen it i don't know if you guys have seen it already but quarantines were mentioned were updated uh the vaccine was included in the plan uh you know when the the thresholds have changed if people have questions it doesn't matter whether you're wearing a mask or not wearing a mask this should not be a voted on agenda item tonight that's for starters second is for those people who are asking hey why aren't you listening to the survey results yeah have you been around for the last 15 months there has been one survey that they've listened to okay so let's get that out of the way uh i'm an open book as it relates to data

133and i'm an intense researcher i don't care what anybody says i want the core data so if meths are going to work somebody show me the cdc data showing that masked work mr rizzo just got up here and said there's no efficacy proven that mass work so so why are we wearing them okay as soon as the cdc hey keep it down as soon as the cdc comes out with uh the data that says mask wearing is going to protect our kids from from covet 19 yeah included in the in the plan but don't use your feelings to say that that's scientific data none exists zero so what i will stand around i'll stand over there and anybody who has the scientific data that proves that mass work you can't find me i will look

134at the data that you show me and that goes for board members because i've sat here for 15 months you know i wanted to watch the little league world series today but i couldn't because i was worried what was gonna happen that one item on the on the agenda i didn't know what it was frankly i'm sorry i showed up i stood here for the last hour so i could be first would it be fair to say at this point given mr rizzo just said that mass there's no proven data for mass to be effective that we've just argued about something for two hours they thought there's no effectiveness he just said it in a presentation did nobody hear it okay i'm sorry mr olsen like do you have to interrupt two briefly please could

135you restart the 250. restart the whole and this goes just for everybody when you're coming up please make comments to the board right we're not going to rally the audience we're going to make comments to the board and i also ask you can hold your posters up during your turn to speak but not behind every speaker that comes out to that podium so that's that's the way it is so if you're in line then then you get in line otherwise please take a seat got it uh so mary mcdougall panthers daily repeta daniel's 12-11 meadowview lane montclair quarantine if one is unmasked or unvaccinated please hear me loud i would like to give another spin to this whole health and safety mess section 2a doesn't us maine media report these days that the hospitals are

136running out of bed due to the delta variant among the unvaccinated but does he tell cdc's definition of unvaccinated if anyone is vaccinated on june 1st and then gets the second shot six weeks later we'll still be considered unvaccinated until two weeks after the second shot which is august 1st so if that person gets sick anytime between june 1st and august 1st due to the delta variant of course the unvaccinated are blamed for the spread wh european advisory group of experts in immunization former vice president professor christian perron last week said that all vaccinated people must quarantine over the winter months or risk serious illness confirming the rapidly deteriorating situation in israel and the uk this infectious disease experts stated vaccinated people should be put in quarantine and should be isolated from the society he

137went on to say unvaccinated people are not dangerous vaccinated people are dangerous for others it's proven in israel now i'm in contra contact with many physicians in israel they are having big problems severe cases in the hospitals are among vaccinated people and in uk also another doctor in israel kobe have on channel 13 news said the effectiveness of vaccine is declining and disappearing in fact 95 of that means almost 100 seriously ill patients are vaccinated i'm sorry for all this scary news but the good news is that before a booster shot which will be definitely pushed very soon are you speaking to an agenda yes what is specific to 2a i mean this is not an issue no you're not talking about okay so you're taking my time so can i get my time when

138i answer you and focus your comment on the action this is about masked jax because of kobe and uh quarantine all related one still has time to verify this information on the site such as the highwire.com thank you michael of oginski 2005 will overdrive last monday six members of this board voted their commitment to align to the recommendations of the cdc department of health and the office of public health if any of these agencies in their expert medical and scientific opinion and based on the data believed should be mandated they would have mandated them as they have done in the past period end of story let's call it spay to spade the approach on quarantine is just an end run to bait you into one of your kids in school and therefore requiring the mass

139when i read tonight's agenda clearly says the board of school directors it does not say the board of health directors the springford administration with all due respect has educational backgrounds not relevant legal or scientific expertise this is clear in the recommendation which is exactly the opposite of what the data says the younger children are the lower they are at risk that's the cdc data it's linear they're younger low risk younger if you change your vote from seven days ago why what facts have changed in the last week are you responding to the mob who suffer from this vast psychosis all of the clinically significant symptoms are visibly present let me give you just one example quoting board member wright from last monday night quote i don't even care if masks actually work or not as

140long as they make families feel safe when someone is willing to ignore whether or not masks work or not when voting on policies that are literally based on whether masks work or not that's an indication of mass mass mass psychosis politics or both in a great school district the springfield is there's no place for either hospitalizations and deaths not cases are the historical and appropriate measure of risk during a pandemic we know the ptr test is inaccurate that is exactly why the fda has announced they're revoking the peace emergency ethos or the authorization at the end of the year how can you base a mass policy on a test that is going to be revoked due to inaccurate results do you even know when the last death occurred in montgomery county how many deaths occurred

141in montgomery county in the last two months the age of the people who died think about that for a minute if you cannot answer those questions you do not understand the data well enough upon which to base your vote if you do vote for any policy that mandates mass you are voting to place a medical device on our students you are stating that the reason for doing this is to reduce covet infection by the fda legal definition that constitutes medical device and according to the fda that requires informed consent which requires you to provide a written understanding of the risks and benefits and offer reasonable alternatives and this consent cannot be under coercion you're waiting into very dangerous legal territory which i'm sure mr fitzgerald has advised you by mandating masks in excess of what

142the cdc op agents and doh recommend are you willing to accept the liabilities for these actions ultimately health and signs are at issue here not education not emotion and not feelings most schools in europe are not masking you tell me masks work here but not there and hawaii you want to see the data look at the data 98 mask and they're with their hospitalizations are up 854 hey good evening charles battle 2606 noble way this is my first meeting i thought it was more interactive i'm not afraid of my kids getting coveted i'm afraid of them being taught that white people hate them and are oppressing them so i wanted to make sure we're not doing critical race theory in the district okay that is that is not an agenda item and i can send

143it you know i just didn't serve certain that's not everything because this public comment is specifically on agenda items okay so that comment which you're you know free to talk about that would be later in the meeting in the second public comment correct mr fitzgerald that would be a non-agenda and i find it ironic that we're all sharing the pain that may be appropriate good evening kenneth kalisek 213 cherokee circle reutersburg pennsylvania i see you leaning in it's because i haven't asked them okay and not not everyone is using the same pen some of us do follow the cdc guidelines mr rizzo hit the nail right on the head at the beginning of his presentation this is about our kids their health and keeping them in school my kids both homeschooled last year the entire

144year and did cyber they were both very excited to be coming back this year but only if we can do so safely if we go with a plan that doesn't require mandatory masking we're going to end up with these quarantine periods again i have friends last year whose kids were quarantined multiple times disrupting their lives disrupting their kids lives disrupting their education disrupting this teaching having to come back after being quarantined for four or five days and trying to get back in place with what you missed unfortunately being able to do things just on canvas doesn't work the kids need to have live instruction i thank god last year that the school offered that for my kids through the cyber program additionally code is going to happen uh i'm not sure if everyone here is

145aware there was already one covenant incident this school year at the cheer camp that happened on august 8th and 9th the spring forage fear camp at that camp one cheerleader unmasked contracted coveted and showed symptoms the second day of the cheerleading camp that evening after it was over when that was over multiple children kindergartners first graders all had to quarantine or be tested my daughter had to go be tested i stood there and watched as she uncomfortably shoved that needle up her nose this wall and cried about it that's what we're subjecting our children to if we don't go the masking policy we're allowing other people to make choices for our children because when you send your kid to school without a mask you're making the decision from me who sends my kid to school

146with a mask sir please additionally under the same policy that i was sent by the school this week we're going to have to quarantine every kid that comes into contact with someone who's positive if that person doesn't have a mask on how many kids per class is that going to be how many kids is that who's going to be quarantined whether they're positive or not they're still going to have to be quarantined and they're going to miss school and as mr rizzo said that's what we don't want thank you very much where are they okay we're moving on we're moving on hello uh tony patrick fourteen laura lee nukes sorry i just want to apologize first for like i did not really mean for you to die at my last you know approach here and

147today i'm sticking to a script so with the dr mccullough's take control your health here there's why masks are charades the stories at a glance from the international or the irrational and unscientific narrative about mass war is the centering of truthful and factual information by tech platforms youtube recently banned a video by senator rand paul who is a medical doctor in which he stated that math don't work in 2020 email opt-in via freedom information act doctor falchi stated the typical mass you buy in the drugstore is not really effective in keeping out virus which is small enough to pass through that material february the uk authorities published guidance discouraging the use of masks even for healthcare workers in residential care facilities as there's no evidence that they prevent viral spread random controlled trials have long

148been regarded as the gold standard in medical research yet rcts are now ignored when it comes to mass wearing of the 14 rcts that have been tested the effectiveness of masking preventing the transmission of respiratory viruses 11 suggests mass for either useless or counterproductive the remaining three suggest mass may be useful but not to a substantially significant degree so i went further back in his his uh notes hand washing beats mass and max plus hand washing combo so the study founded by the cdc added hand washing to the mix to see if mass wearing would work better in combination with hand hygiene one group was instructed on the use of hand hydrating only a second group using both hand washing and facemask and the third group did not while the mass plus hand washing group

149fared statistically better than the control group one measure the hand washing only group beat the control group to a statistically significant degree in two measures this suggests hand washing alone was actually the most effective measure according to the authors so no additional benefit was observed when face masteries was added to hand hygiene comparison and hand hygiene work the notion that hand washing alone beats even the combination of dan washington mass wearing gained support in a 2011 study which discovered that among those who washed their hands and were face masks the secondary attack rate of influenza like illness was doubled at the control group which did nothing so multivariate analysis showed the same thing leading the authors to conclude that the relative to the control group the odds of infection among those who are masked and

150washing their hands okay thank you gary wheaton 31 beach court college phil pa19426 sent the board a very detailed email today i'd like to change the discussion here the math don't work my third grader got coded last year brought it home to me it don't work unless you come up with a mask standard if you're going to put them in place it's gonna be an n95 a k95 or they have new zinc masks that are very effective so a lot of the mass of the folks who are in this room they're not effective okay it's like throwing marbles at a chain-link fence okay so the delta variants here the gamma's in brazil the beta's in south africa they predict in 2022 that they're going to come together and this thing's going to get worse if

151you want kids to wear masks they have to have a standard look at the cdc data we are 18 months in this thing the state the local and the federal government can't get there you know what together it's insulting choose masks that have two more layers of washable breathable fabric completely cover your nose and mouth it's snuggly against your side of your face you know the gaps have a nose wire how many kids have masked it in those wires i bet it's probably a very small percentage they do recommend n95 to be a priority best for healthcare workers that's why i'm suggesting you look at alternatives you have to have a math standard and then they tell you how to wear them kids aren't going to wash their hands before they put them on how

152to store them when they're dirty put them in a plastic bag kids don't put them in plastic bags when they wear them especially k-6 when they're if they're not dirty put them in a paper bag do we still paper bags at home i'm not sure if i have any paper bags there's a lot of research out there that says that the n95 and k95 is preferable so i'm saying that if you guys make kids wear masks i'm not debating that right now because there's enough you know the ascension among that amongst that you're going to give kids a false sense of security that's the bottom line i clicked and by the way congratulations uh doctor visa bladed on your promotion i declare your office today so i reached out to josh reese's office today and

153we hear back from him i'm sure we can find some funding somewhere in this six trillion dollar whatever budget we're gonna we're gonna you know send through the federal government we're getting funds somewhere so let's figure it out otherwise it's a false sense of security it's cosmetic and it does not work thank you phoenixville pennsylvania um i said last week that the cdc does not follow its own biosafety guidelines it clearly says in their own buyer safety manual that masks don't work we had enough people here who said that okay they do provide a false sense of security there's really no data that shows they do work but there's plenty of data that shows that they don't and if you go to the covent tracking project as i said last week 1.8 across the entire

15450 states people who get infected with covet die however if you look at it state by state the states that had the most critical lockdown measures in mass mandates michigan 2.3 percent new york 2.5 percent pennsylvania 2.7 new jersey 2.9 all had higher death rates than the national average you look at florida and texas where oh my god we have all these cases the percentage of death was only 1.7 in florida and only 1.64 in texas so that masks aren't doing anything okay a comparison outside of the united states if we look at sweden which is the only country in the world that just said back with it we're not doing anything we're going to carry on we're going to have it their death percentage through the whole code it was 1.6 and it's now

155in delta down to 1.3 because they have established the hurt immunity by having people out there by having people get exposed to this thing okay we have an irrational fear of this coven flu seasonal flu killed 500 school-aged children in 2018 to 2019 in the united states that's more than coed has killed since we've known about covet but i don't see the school board going to mandate mass during flu season seasonal flu is never going to go away it's always going to be here when kids get flu they stay home when parents get flu they stay home we need to do the same things with covid and if the quarantine measures are not in sync we need to address those we need to look at those a little bit more and maybe fix those the

156last thing i would like to say about all these irrational fears is that you know we treat this thing like it's the monster under the bed like it's the boogeyman in the closet and for those that are that scared of it stay home you don't have to come out but school board please let those who want to get on with life return to a normal life thank you i always got to follow a tall guy um justin baird 67 knife road and limerick uh you can really tell the wheels are coming off when an introverted software developer actually comes out to one of these all right so yeah i'm good all right so okay we're no nobody's going to call out from either side nobody's going to call out from either side or we will

157end public comment okay then i will address that but we're not gonna have that coming from the audience or we'll end public comment here all right uh so i'm not gonna stand here and read your statistics because everyone knows that 78.59 percent of statistics are made up on the spot i've watched nearly every school board meeting since the pandemic started and i acknowledge you guys have gone through a lot of grief for the position that you guys volunteered for including have a protest outside of one of your houses which is ridiculous in my opinion um i think the level had among us realized that you did not volunteer for heading the school during a pandemic but here we are you've been entrusted with the job of providing all of our children a safe place to

158learn and grow into productive members of society now keep in mind that the governor is not respond directly responsible for the safety of our kids in springford the department of health is not directly responsible for the safety of our kids in springfield u9r you're you're our local government body so i realize that this is a really incredibly complex problem with a lot of opinions on pretty much every side and it's very intimidating being up here i don't know how you guys do it um but luckily this can kind of be boiled down to one very simple logical question and we all know how much we love simple questions here so the question is do you believe that maps are effective to any degree at all in stopping the spread of covid within the school no

159other information statistics personal beliefs or arguments even those presented by an incredibly handsome bald guy like myself i really matter if you believe that wearing a mask provides any increased protection at all then you should require them to be worn in school to protect our children to the safest possible degree please i beg you to do the job that you promise to do when you're elected and protect our kids thank you come on hi oh can you hear me hi um my name is sonna manola and i am going to be a senior this year at springford so i'm one of the students that whose future you guys are deciding right now um a little about me is i actually have uh underlying health conditions so i was a virtual student all last year and

160miss ritter said something really important at the beginning of this meeting about how important it is for students to be in school for social emotional and academic learning um i've been here at springboard since i was six from kindergarten now folks i love school i love coming in and some people have the choice to wear a mask and not and have the choice to wear a mask but some people don't have a choice i i want the choice to come to school i want to come to school i want to be a student i want to see people i want to have connections with my teachers i want to learn and unfortunately if you guys don't make masks mandatory there's no virtual option for me i'm i'm not willing to reverse my education and go

161take cyber school at springford i don't want to do that furthermore vaccination is also not a requirement for all students the least you guys can do is ask students for the sake of students like me and other people to just put a cloth on your face it doesn't hurt it doesn't hurt anybody more than getting sick with and ending up in a hospital you guys are responsible for the safety and that's just some students but for all students and it's true and i'm not saying that wearing a mask is not difficult for people i'm sure it is but sometimes doing the difficult thing is the right thing because you guys are accountable for all of us not just some of us and i you guys won't be attending schools parents you guys won't be in

162the crowded hallways i will other students will so i i genuinely just hope that you guys make masking mandatory for the sake of students and the other thing i i wanted to say i i have a minute remaining but i was sitting in the back and i'm actually appalled at some of the behavior of the parents here you guys are here talking about the safety of us but when a doctor on zoom says that children are ending up in an ed you snicker about it why are people like that having a decision about my safety i'm here to speak up for myself i i've not been out that much i was not even in school i came to return my books but i'm here to speak up because that's how important this is for me

163so i really hope you consider that thank you hi uh my name is arshad manula i'm sana's dad thank you for the opportunity to speak here this is my first meeting that i've attended and i come here really for my daughter all the students who are in the same boat as her i have two older children my wife and i who are alums of the springford school district all three of my kids started off at oaks elementary one's now in med school the other one's in college and sun is the last one to go through here and i have to tell you something you know myself and all parents you know when we are bringing up our kids we every morning we walk our kids to the school bus and we entrust their safety to

164total strangers right think about that we all do this from the moment they leave home to the time they come back we're trusting total strangers that our kids are going to be well educated but and and like this is a tremendous school district and the other more important than that we entrust their safety to you guys right to all the staff and what i want to say is the of all the issues that you all debate and all the important decisions you make the two most important the obvious ones have to do with the education and the safety of our kids and this is this debate is not about politics it's not about masking masks this or that it's really about keeping all of our kids safe right we can't afford one single student getting

165sick and ending up in the hospital or something worse right i uh professionally infectious disease and vaccines are my life's work i'm responsible if you've taken the flu vaccine i'm probably responsible for the development and approval of those i'm going to tell you something the data i saw up there if you're using community transmission what's happening in the local area as the benchmark we may be heading for some trouble you're going to be looking at transmission within a school environment you have children at close quarters a perfect breeding ground for the virus and anything we can do to keep them safe even if it's a mask that prevents transmission to a tiny to some degree we need to keep in mind one last comment i know my time is done we're at three minutes sir

166okay thank you hi everyone my name is karen weingarten at six dorothy circle and rory's ford so i wanted to talk a little bit about why we're hung up on the recommendation the word recommendation instead of require when i'm looking at this list of all of the schools all the school districts in montgomery county as well as a couple surrounding ojr and phoenixville i just want to let you know where everybody stands on this and i think some of you may already do k through 12 requires masking at ojr phoenixville abington boyertown colonial hacker of horsham jenkintown lower marion matthackton town perk valley pottstown springfield upper dublin upper marion upper moorland and supposedly wissa hicken will be switching from k-6 required to 12 required within the next day k through six required lower moorland north

167penn and like i said at the moment wissa hicken the only schools in montgomery county translating recommended as optional are potts grove soderton springford and upper perk that's it the majority of those school districts were able to translate the cdc the american academy of pediatric recommendations into a requirement making sure those students are safe and that's why i'm not understanding why we are hung up on the recommendation last week we were told hey reach out to the county reach out to the state reach out to the government anyone you can to see what they can do and guess what they said well everybody else is able to figure this out your board should be able to do it so everyone else was able to figure this out except for four districts in all of montgomery

168county and the surrounding areas i'm telling you it's right here they all have it down potts grove soderton springford and upper perk are the only ones that don't have a mask requirement and i appreciate everything that was presented today and i think that is moving in the right direction but compared to everything else in montgomery county i don't think it's good enough thank you hello my name is brian jacobsack i live at 1808 prince court in royersford i'm here today express my utter disbelief disgust and disappointment and the final decision that was made by the school board on 8 16 it's a sad state of affairs when my local hair salon has the intelligence courage and moral aptitude to adopt a required mass policy in the light of cdc and montgomery county recommendations but my

169children's school board does not i was comforted at the start of the summer knowing that the school board had made the right call in anticipation for the forthcoming school year and i was even interested in my opinion by way of a mass policy survey yet remarkably the course of action was reversed in order to pander to a minority of k-6 parents with the loudest voices independent of the 62 percent of parents who had expressed that they would want mask requirements for k-6 to keep their unvaccinated children safe indoors further personally i struggle to understand how the present decision helps support parents of children with special needs like my children we have a legally binding iep that states that our children should be afforded the opportunity to participate in a normal classroom setting 80 percent of

170the time for my children who have high functioning autism in-person social interaction is critical to their overall success i felt good at the start of the summer understanding my boys would not have to navigate the potential socially challenging situation of mass verse unmasked children as every child would have the same expectations and requirements that has now been taken away by the decision you have made it is unfair to expect me or any other family in similar situations to have to enroll our children in a cyber classroom environment contra to what their iep and their best interests also as school board members the polite way to cough is into your arm not into your hand i'm short so um hi my name is maria cagliola and i'm at 148 oak creek drive in royersford pennsylvania if

171you can't hear me please let me know i won't i'm first of all i want to say i'm speaking on identity way and second of all i will say in advance that's a good compromise dr rizzo right so i think it's a great start um the one thing i do want to say is i won't go into all the data the science and the stories of countless schools that did not mandate the mask and are quarantined in closing instead i come here tonight looking for compromise a very reasonable request around mandating mass for cases k-6 similar last year when i and several parents came to you asking for a hybrid with the same intention to bring our children back to school safely and together i truly feel as so many of the other parents do

172that we shared what was right for our families within that survey over 60 percent of our parents advocated for mass for their children in grades k through 6. i ask you to think about the impact of not listening to those parents now at this moment and when you need future insights they will be jaded and unsure if their voice matters that is exactly how i feel and so many other parents feel at this moment sorry i ask you to make sure tonight that those voices are hurt and consider the downstream impacts to not adjusting the decision they include forcing parents out of the district into charter schools as they try to find other educational programs that will protect their children this essentially negatively impacts our taxes going forward and means less money for our schools

173and for our services for our families forcing parents to be separated from other springboard families our villages are cr such as hybrid or mandating masks essentially handcuffs our parents and separates them from the families they have been staying safe with when they need their villages most causing parents to now challenge everything on both sides freedom for mass on one side freedom from mouth guards or dress code where does it end causing again like the other first two further division like my daughter we know some families in the district don't believe in coped they think it's caused by the 5g as we heard last week this means they are not taking precautions and make no mistake they will bring those germs to our school and share them with their friends which is essentially why we will

174be bringing back quarantines and closing which no parent wants like i said in the beginning i consider myself a person with compromise and less compromise in our life and this is no different this is not a one-size-fits-all allowing mass to be optimal for the kids in the overflow population i could understand but for the under 12 this is where compromise health and empathy for this age group needs to be exercised and corrected and correct to mandate masks from at a minimum k through six okay thank you fit three minutes thank you stacy solazzo 44 woodley drive for his work i don't deny the difficulties anyone here struggling with regarding decisions you have to make but absent any significant changes in guys from the cdc state and our local level the school board is putting an

175item on the agenda again within a week's time to reopen discussions just last week you deliberated voted and approved said item you should allow the community to process and adjust prior to the start of a new school year not this constant back and forth that creates so much stress anxiety within our community we struggled with the board and administration for over a year deliberating about a plan and here we are now where you just approved the health and safety plan last week and are now bringing it back yet again for another round of discussions now it appears we are making the same mistake again nothing has changed to warrant this the cdc hasn't changed their guidance the department of health hasn't changed their guidance and the montgomery county office of public health also has not

176changed their guidance the only thing that has changed is a week's worth of feedback from the community you need to base your decisions on logic data and facts not feelings but some based on last week's comments that unquote i'm not so concerned if mass are effective or not but my concern is how my students and their families feel about that and if they feel that they are safer and willing to come in then that's what's important what about those parents that know based on three marking periods of feedback from their children that a mass disrupts their learning do they no longer have a voice what about those that have come home and said that they aren't getting mass breaks and it's hard to breathe during the day when they're wearing masks six hours every day

177for the parents survey almost 40 of those parents are now losing their choice if you make any changes that are going to mandate a mask you are now pitting parents against each other those that don't have masks and those that do you are causing unrest for parents and students this inability to make a decision and stick with it is hurting the school community this wavering is now making students scared we've all been out and about all summer without masks seeing friends socializing going on vacations participating and attending sporting events but now with school starting next week you want to make more changes and put into place an illogical mandate that even the state and county isn't willing to do you're putting a fear into students and parents that kids are going to come to school

178and get sick the only reason we could possibly be talking about this again tonight is due to board members requesting a change yet again just last week at montgomery county board meeting on august 19th val r kush opened the meeting with a coveted update which included a slide showing the number of cases on that slide was the incidence rate for the previous weeks of july 30 to august 5th and then august 6th and 12th it was 55.7 for 100 000 and 68.2 per hundred thousand if you then look at the cdc chart that would fall into substantial but then if you go back to our slide and look at the column to the immediate right with the positivity rate which is 4.2 and 4.3 go back to the cdc chart that's under five percent okay

179we're at three minutes thank you hello well demonstrate 136 with court collegeville we as the community need to decide who are we protecting by asking or mandating our kids to wear a mask are we trying to protect all of the adults here who have an option to get a vaccine believe it or not that should be your choice are we trying to protect kids from the virus that poses as close to zero risk as possible to get we are also many times here heard that parents saying that we should mandate k-6 masquerading because they're not eligible for vaccine those kids most likely do not need those vaccines to begin with that virus no matter what study or statistics you look at those kids are not at risk from this virus at all period so they

180don't need to wear that mask because they are not at risk to get sick seriously or die most of the kids we have some kids who died from covert that that was listed as one of the reasons from death covey most of those kids they had serious underlying conditions so somebody before me mentioned the country of sweden my sister lives there for many years she said that not a single business was closed not a single school was closed for a day nobody never ever in any place mandated a mask people who were sick stayed home kids who were sick stay home and yet with those all more restrictions in place the recovery numbers are much better than united states and just to remind you sweden is the country that has the same quality of life

181as us and the same health care index as united states so we we can compare us to that country as well there are called numbers but zero restrictions are better than ours so mask shutdowns restrictions at least the ones that we have here they didn't work and don't make a difference maybe if they even make things worse my lawyer lost entire year of school because one week she was waking up every night having nightmares and i've been afraid that covet will come in at night and will kill us all will kill our grandparents my parents her parents her sister we pulled her from school she did learning remote remotely not the best option so i please ask you stick to your guns and keep the last week vote in place don't change anything recommendation is

182recommendation for those who do not know english well enough recommending a mask and making it optional are two different statements if you recommend it you are going along with all the experts you are doing exactly what the experts experts on all levels federal state county all of them agreed on recommend mask and what's that's exactly what you want to do people who are saying this are the same thing that's optional you know agreement that's a different thing thank you uh duck stick office 212 one on street spring city pa remember the movie dead boat society all the students had to stand up on robin williams desk to get a different perspective to look around the classroom everyone here on both sides of this issue needs to do this to understand where everyone is coming from

183and to see the world from a different point of view my reason for being here tonight and speaking tonight is simple i love my children and i love my neighbors i love my community and i love my country now let's put the odds of dying from covenant into perspective you have a 1 in 92 chance of dying criminally opioid overdose or odds the odds of dying in a motor vehicle crash are 107. the odds of dying from being struck by lightning is a 138 849. the odds of dying from code for children is one in five hundred thousand the odds of children ages five to fourteen k through six is one in two point four million so my suggestion for the health and safety plan is to throw it out last optional if you're sick

184stay home wash your hands i think we should address obesity since that's a big issue that's the larger issue in this country it leads to heart disease obesity since 1998 has doubled in children and adults from 20 now for kids and 40 for adults with that i think we should double kids recesses i think we should increase physical activity i'm sorry but you're kind of off off topic okay well it's along the health and safety data plan we're talking about the the mask which is included in the health and safety decline or selfie safety plan specifically the item that's on the agenda last week he followed the guidelines from the cdc and montgomery county board of health specifically united states recommend universal masking according to the disease and prevention i'm sorry disease prevention and control

185of 1955 section 3 a and b the responsibility of disease prevention and control is specifically stated as under the secretary of health local board of health or department of health including disease control in public and private schools as you're aware there's no state of emergency there is no mass mandate by the board of health and you have no legal authority to mandate them as specified in the aforementioned law only the local board of health does and that is actually for a very limited amount of time i want to read you a tweet from thomas soule it's hard to imagine a more stupid or more dangerous way of making decisions than putting those decisions in the hands of people who pay no price for being wrong as a parent the health and safety of my child

186and my children is my responsibility and my responsibility alone i'm the one who makes the decisions for them not you we as parents have evaluated the risk and have the right and authority to make the decision for our children we have the most to lose as parents if we are wrong that is why it is our responsibility i'm not challenging your authority i'm denying it completely thomas jefferson said when tyranny becomes law rebellion becomes duty thank you have a good night johnny on truck 12 edmonds drive rares for pa um i want to start tonight by thanking mr rizzo for his very excuse me please put the posters down when it's not your turn thank you yeah i want to thank mr rizzo for his very clear presentation it's a shame that the board did

187not allow him to present clearly last week and rather asked him to verbally update on our survey for 18 months many members of our community have acted responsibly during this pandemic we aired on the side of caution because this is a novel virus we stayed home we messed up we got the vaccine as soon as we could we did this because experts who dedicate their entire life's work to it told us this was the way to get our lives back when we learned that outdoor activities were relatively safe we supported that when we learned that universal masking as a behavior reduces transmission we supported indoor activities with universal masking when we learned that vaccines eliminate most almost all of the worst outcomes we went out and got the shot that's what rational people do i

188too am tired of the authorities privatizing every decision in this pandemic but it has still not stopped me from making the right choice i find it comical that mr bello spent five minutes questioning mr fitzgerald about mandates considering last year he openly and eagerly urged citizens to violate the governor's order when restaurants were closed i'm tired of having to spend money on medical grade masks and taking them everywhere and wearing them but i still do it i do it because it may save a life around me i do it because it may save someone from months or years of long driving and because at worst it's a minor convenience i got the shot and so will my son as soon as he's eligible for it tired or not all of you have a duty to

189protect all of our children even if others around you won't that is your job you have a legal duty under pennsylvania law to provide an appropriate education in a manner that protects all children's health and safety if you are tired and you don't like that anymore i keep hearing that you have a choice to resign we're not calling out from the audience thank you go ahead teresa westwood 70 plymouth drive royers for pa first thank you for the opportunity to speak this evening i'd like to speak to agenda item 2a i want to say thank you to mr rizzo and for the board for preparing a revised help and safety plan for all of us to react to i appreciated you listening to some of the comments from some of the parents last week so

190thank you for that i come in front of you again this week to ask you to require maths for k-12 students and staff and at a minimum k-6 students and staff many of our neighboring districts as we've already said are requiring this including phoenixville norristown pv netfacton and omj roberts as a chair in the parent survey last week over 60 percent of parents want required masking for k-6 by requiring mass and other prevention strategies until such a time when case counts draw and or vaccine becomes available for younger school-aged children we can maximize the chances that schools stay open and more students stay in school we are all in this together and i think many of us have a similar goal to keep our children and staff safe and to keep our schools open that

191said i hope you'll reconsider your decision you made last week and vote for required masking with the exception of legitimate reasons such as medical thank you uh nick decarlo 227 canal street phoenix hill um i'm not going to get into any kind of studies or surveys or anything like that uh that ship sailed ever you know the study that i see is different than everybody else and that's you know that's okay i appreciate everybody's opinion uh thank you the board members members for hearing everybody's opinion um really i just want to share an email that my wife uh sent she can't be here tonight but she sent to the board earlier this week uh you know we got some responses but thank you for that it was good to see that's it i just want

192to share that my name is karin de carlo i'm the mother of a first grade student at oaks elementary i'm also a registered nurse that has been seeing cova patients and since the beginning of the pandemic purpose of this email is to express my concern over the decision not to mandate masking for students and teachers we have a student in first grade but previously with that majority 60 of elementary school parents voted to require mass for k-6 if the school school board still decided to only make the masking recommended instead of required the school board should be speaking on behalf of the parents students and teachers quite honestly i'm not even sure why you surveyed the parents if you're going to decide against the wishes anyway i don't understand the logic after reading about the

193decision i had a discussion with the situation with one of my colleagues and professor of clinical medicine division of infectious diseases she was so dumbfounded and confused by this decision that she took the time out of her busy day to draft the letter draft the attached letter i won't get into that i ask you to review the letter and seriously consider her position the letter is based on factual quantitative data not opinions of parents who may or may not believe that the pair may or may not believe the pain pandemic is real or who claim that the act of wearing a simple cotton mask has caused their child mental or emotional distress i guess that you reconsider the vote and reverse the decision in order to mandate mass square at least throwing times of elevate

194elevated transition transmission rates also please ask yourself this question how will you feel if the unthinkable happens to just one single child and that child's coveted infection is contract trace back to a non-mask working student while in your school building would you feel as if you could have done more to protect that child from infection i would hope so if you if i were in your shoes i would want to take every precaution to protect the health and well-being of spring forge students and teachers thank you hi go ahead um please state your name and address and i'm talking about item on the agenda just pull that mic down towards you a little bit all right three christine pizzano 342 south midnight road in collegeville so i didn't plan on speaking so i'm kind of

195just going from the hip i do have a lot of you know things that i wrote down at important points but some of them you know can be summed up a lot of other people already did say them everyone wants to say it's not political and it's not personal but i feel like it's all i hear is someone's horror story or someone's upset or safety people are yelling at people about killing kids and billing people i mean you want to say it's not political it's not personal and no offense i understand that you didn't like the date thing earlier but like we had to sit here for 10 minutes and listen to how it made you feel but like it's not supposed to be political or personal so it's like i don't understand why we're

196just not sticking to facts and real things and can logically speak about them i said no offense like i mean you know it will but i'm just being honest like i came here to a school board meeting to talk about a myth mandate for my kid like not worry about if you're upset about a date you know i just didn't feel like it on subject a lot of this didn't stay on subject but some of it did there was one person that was unmasked that mentioned that there is zero zero standard for the mask that all of our kids and everyone screaming about to wear there is nothing that says a two for five target cotton t-shirt shaped like emmaus is gonna do anything beneficial for our kids and who knows if in the long

197run it won't be detrimental i'm not saying cove is not real i'm not saying it's not serious i'm not saying we shouldn't take health and precaution issues but every person mask and on this came up here and put their hands all over this podium they touched them like i at least saw one of them just in fact her hand and these are adults somebody took their mask off and laid it right on top we're talking about adults like right here in a safety meeting like how do we expect kids to regularly change out their mix to know where to put them to know that if they get filled up with saliva because my kid that's going into kindergarten is fine do you think like there's not going to be all kind of stuff in there

198and food and you know why isn't anyone that's screaming about the safety of our kids worried about anything else than a cotton t-shirt nobody's worried about hey what about timely hand washing hey what about everyone bring in child safe wipes so that kids wipe down their own stuff hey why don't we talk to everyone and put up signs everywhere i mean i don't know if you're doing this but i'm just saying everyone is yelling i'm sure you are but i'm just trying to make the point that everyone is arguing and being political and being personal threatening to take their kids out of school and they're putting them somewhere else and no one's worried about just general sanitation a cotton t-shirt over your face is could be detrimental you don't know that and it's not beneficial

199we do know that so i don't want myself okay we'll have one more one more speaker and then we have to cut it there at that point hello uh mary jo mcnamara 187 abbey drive reutersburg pennsylvania thank you mr rizzo for listening to both sides for trying to present something to have you know some kind of a compromise however the data didn't present itself with your presentation tonight cdc the state the county your own words last week can't really get their numbers together can't really show their substantial moderate high stuff i'm sure it will come in a couple of weeks that's great but for now it's not there so i'm going to give some numbers the number zero i'm gonna say it again the number zero in brook elementary in evans elementary in oaks elementary

200limbic elementary roseville elementary upper providence eighth grade center ninth grade center and the senior high school the number zero students admitted into the hospital students dying from this pandemic in our district the number zero um if you look at the montgomery county dashboard as of today the number of patients hospitalized in the county is 96 adults that's 96 and a population of 830 thousand which comes out to point zero zero zero one two percent there is not a single pediatric icu bed being used in montgomery county right now today so there's some numbers um i'll also give you one additional number children ages 0 to 18 died from the flu in 2017 and 18. i know the veterinarian gave a number for 18 19 i think or 16 17. so those are numbers we're not

201talking about the flu people get sick i get sick you get sick stay home when we get sick i know that it's a more significant disease for illness not disease illness i know that it takes a few days to recover i've had it in my family in my immediate family it's affected us everybody gets sick what i don't know why we're considering cases you know it's the antibodies and hurt immunities that work in foreign countries you can see that right those numbers have been gone over masking is a feel-good measure it was witnessed by board member wright last week and i'm going to quote i think other people have i don't even care if max actually work or not as long as they make families feel safe i don't want a representative like that voting

202for what my child gets to do that that's inappropriate she should abstain from her voting right um okay three minutes oh no i had a really good closing paragraph thank you everybody okay so with that um thank you all for your level comment we are going to move on to our action item and then after the action item we're going to take a five minute recess prior to resuming the rest of the meeting i understand that there were people in line but i also did say an hour on zoom and an hour in person and that the comments then could resume during the normal not normal but during the public comment at the end so is there a motion for action item a2a a motion to approve an amendment to the springford area school districts

203helping safety land consistent with the recommendations of the administration as presented this evening by mr russo is there a motion i would like to make a motion to approve required masking from k to six for the first marking period i would like to adjust it to understand that mrs fazzini wants to amend the motion that's on the table there's no motion on the table i would like to make a motion so there's a motion that's been made by ms fazzini in response to your request for a motion so we'll have to see if there's a second to either of the motions okay is there a second for mrs fazzini's motion i second it okay any questions or comments let's just be clear then what what this what this would be as i understand it you're

204seeking a mask required k through six which essentially goes back to the original health and safety plan is that my understanding that's correct does that include the um tiered approach after that that mr rizzo presented earlier regarding springford numbers i thought the tiered approach was actually part of the original plan also but that was it no so it's your only change here instead of going through september 24th to go to the first through the first quarter or are you eliminating that other approach also it's here at a bridge yes what's this required first quarter so k to six required first quarter but with the tiered approach so your only change to the proposal would be the timing of september 24th to the first quarter correct and we have a second for that so are there

205any other questions or comments uh mr wizard i want to make sure you understand what the the proposal is just so and maybe we should restate it again just kind of lingo here let's let's make sure we understand so so my understanding is that we've made a motion to essentially do what i suggested with the exception that we're going to the end of the first quarter instead of september 24th with that first tier yeah okay mr solicitor would based on the way the action time is written and based on what we've heard from nurse smith via mr rizzo the teachers union should that be amended because right now it just says administration well yeah i mean the action item would would not be what is on on paper it would be what was brought forward

206by miss fizzini which was effectively the the proposed plan with the one modification being an extension of the mandatory mask k-6 through the end of the first marking period so it would not necessarily be an official administrative recommendation it would be a a modified board motion that that amends the that recommendation but i understand the motion and we will it'll reflect accordingly on the on the on the minutes i interested one question um is that mrs fazzini is is that kind of using the same qualifiers that that were there previously which was unless the vaccine were to be or or there was a significant change or is it going to just be through the straight through the first marketing period just for clarification i think straight through the first marking period and then we can

207revisit it at that point mr zinnia that's just k-6 correct correct okay you're going to give me you're giving me a look right now again her modification is specific k through six to be mandated through the end of the first marking period everything else as i understand your motion is consistent with the recommendation you brought forward tonight well that first phase is okay twelve phase in the highest in the highest right correct and that would be unchanged okay i didn't want to change that good just think so we're effectively changing the date of the motion is what we're doing instead of september 27th we're saying the end of the first quarter whatever yeah that that becomes that's what i'm hearing yes what is the date this is the end of the first quarter november so

208it's got to be somewhere around november 6th we don't take comments from the audience at this point we don't take comments we don't take comments from the audience i'll just say it five times we do not take comments from the audience at this point we are sitting here deliberating on the motion that's on the table i understand that the ballpark would be later october early november so one more time let's clarify it before we take a vote okay so the motion would be our mandated k-6 until the end of the first quarter seven to 12 would be recommended unless we go into the high range in springford specifically is that correct yeah i mean i'm just overs maybe i'm oversimplifying it it's simply going to be everything we heard tonight is it would be adopted

209except the extension for k-6 would would not end on september 24th it would continue on to the end of the market period and mr rizzo can you get behind that as an administrator as our superintendent yeah i mean can we have a vote please i mean we just we're just kicking this thing around i mean i i believe we've had um our presentation fired by our superintendent and and that's not what he presented so by asking him if he could get behind it to me is misleading we already we've already had his presentation we have but at that time that wasn't proposed as as an option or discussed at that time so if mr rizzo can't support it i'm not sure that i can if mr rizzo can support it has it is it something

210that you've even considered okay so to your question can i support i mean i can support i don't i don't know that it's necessary the reason why it's picked september 24th was so we can follow and track the data so if you take it to the end of the quarter then we can take at the end of the quarter which i believe is november 5th i've got if you received a few texts um if you want to take it out that far you can take it out that far again for me it was about monitoring the data and seeing where things go yeah when i mean i got a comment i mean it sounds like you know two weeks to flatten the curve an hour a year and a half later i mean i i

211really like what mr rizzle put forward i was willing to get behind that because at least it's monitoring the data we have plans and options in place i was willing to do that but now we're just arbitrarily saying i don't agree with that day so i want to go to the end of the quarter so i mean again i agree with mr shaffer i mean mr rizzo put forward a recommendation he talked with the nurses you talked about he did everything that we would ask everything that was put on everything and then we're just throwing out an arbitrary date i mean he gave his reasoning his reasoning was is because he was told by the county that the the this delta variant is going to spike they believe it's going to go down that's what

212he was right mr rizzo wrong you're correct so i could get the i'm you know there's a lot of things i just don't agree with but i'm not going to get into that right now um but i was willing to at least go and compromise and take that step forward and say all right i'm willing to go that far let's look at the data let's follow what's going on let's see if there's a variant drop and what and where we go from there and if we have to if it makes sense or what the data doesn't support what we're thinking it's arbitrarily it's automatically going to continue on anyway well i mean i i think i i would love k to 12 required and i'm willing to compromise also i feel as though it's not

213about the number of kids who are a mortality rate which i i hate to bring up but or how many kids are in the hospital i feel that my main goal has always been to keep students in person in school five days a week and i think our best success last year doing that was using layered mitigation safety mitigation and our biggest tool was masking it's one of the most effective tools in layered medication and to take that off the table especially for k to six who do transmit it um and then we're gonna have quarantines and we're going to be out of school and we have these consequences that we have to deal with staffing might become an issue quarantining kids might become an issue we have lost learning and those are the consequences

214that we have to take responsibility for and i want those kids in school and i think that this is a compromise to see how it goes if if after i don't have any problem we can revisit this if we're keeping them successfully in school we're winning the battle if we're not i mean if seven to 12 starts transmitting and they're unmasked and we see that we have issues we're gonna have to revisit that that's just the way i think it is if you look at the schools that have opened unmasked they are having breakthrough to the vaccinated and the unvaccinated transmission there's transmission going on and a lot of them are shut down and go have gone to virtual go on to hybrid or have a large number of quarantines that that's fact all right

215do we have any other comments on the motion as it stands i do have one comment to say that in no way did i mean to put mr rizzo in an awkward spot there so i apologize for that it was really coming from i don't want to overlook the importance and the impact of administration in this and that that's that's what it was going forward are there any more questions or comments go ahead based on mrs last statement i'm confused worship where the motion is now or what emotion hasn't changed it's k-6 required masking as presented by mr rizzo but till the first marking period okay are we ready to move forward with the vote or are there comments or questions so i just just one comment it seems arbitrary i get it no more

216arbitrary than september 27th um it's a date um so let me finish let me finish i deserve the respect as well but i also do think that we have 63 plus percent of our k-6 families have indicated that they prefer masking be mandatory we need to hear that we need to respond to that our nurses have indicated that it is safer it is better for our students it certainly will keep our children in school certainly our case k-6 students did it last year um and and of course if there are significant changes to the numbers whether it be within our footprint or otherwise it's something that would be reevaluated we will do that i think for anything um you know if we start seeing that we have healthy students being quarantined at obscene numbers in

217our seven through 12 we're going to have to take action and we're going to have to evaluate that um but i i don't think it's fair to our families to say you know four weeks and then we don't know then it's just going to be a harry kerry figure it out i just don't think that's fair okay any other questions or comments let's take a vote all in favor say i no no so we're going to have to do roll call or did we did we have enough i'd like to take a roll call in this important matter to be sure so uh mrs earl no this is sullivan it's my understanding that it makes it clear to those voting when it stated that if you vote yes this is what you're intending if you're

218voting no this is what you're attending for the outcome i was just informed of this last week with that help out to make it very very clear to everyone voting what your vote means i i think we all understand i think we all understand tom don't laugh at me that has been the way we do it from the beginning so nothing has changed in respect to the way we vote so yes if you say yes you are in agreement if you say no you are not so at this point i i ask for you to cast your vote yes mr fellow no mr jackson i'm sorry dr right yes mr schaefer no i'm a nil again so mr fitzgerald that was just that was an amendment to the original agenda item so there has been

219no action on the original agenda item which was presented a motion to approve the amendment as presented by mr rizzo it's not an amendment it's just the presentation as as it was presented tonight it's the original motion that's on that's on the agenda tonight it's it's just the only the only difference from what well it's the amendment to the health and safety plan but it's not an amendment to this action so we go back to just what was recommended tonight so many emotions and amendments okay so we're just going back is there a motion to approve the presentation for what was presented by mr rizzo for the amendment to the ages health and safety plan is there a motion for that which all it does is the same plan that was just presented but keeps

220the date of september 24th so we don't have a motion i'm so moved so are there questions or comments about this any further questions or comments about this plan yes go ahead so what's on the table right now is as mr rizzo presented correct as is chances no changes no changes okay any other questions or comments all in favor of this plan to say i i i any any opposed this motion passes we're going to take a five minute recess um that and there are some adjustments that are being made to the agenda this evening so we are going to postpone our second presentation by mr rizzo tonight on the administration restructure proposal we're going to postpone that september meeting i also ask for you to hold the board and committee reports until the september

221meeting and regarding public comments at the close of the meeting i'm going to cap it at one half hour take 15 minutes from people on zoom and 15 minutes for people in the house and ask you to restrict your comments to anything other than masking at that point so with that um dr mary if you want to go ahead and present on the summers ram program we'd like to hear from you thank you sure thank you i'm very proud to share a brief update on the summer rams program with me today is sarah toback who is instrumental in this program as the five to eight coordinator i'd first like to thank the board for supporting this program in april at that time i presented the program with a proposed budget with the funding come from

222essers not only did we stay within the projected budget but i want to share with you some successes as well as lessons learned for improvement you can just point me ahead just asking so as we get caught up i'm just going to continue if that's okay as you recall we offered three options this summer we offered a fully um asynchronous option virtual options and an in-person options we certainly know the challenges of last year and um not only did our staff do a fantastic job getting through the last um last full year with a lot on their plate ending the year tired i have to give a huge shout out to our staff because they really stepped up and came through during the summer throughout the year we had 83 staff members participate 69 teachers

223three nurses two summer rams coordinators three building level supports four curriculum department staff and two resource officers supported our programs we offered three sessions as you know um session one we offered 14 in-person sessions we offered 35 virtual sessions for session two we offered 18 in-person sessions and 36 36 virtual sessions and for session three we offered 16 in person and 25 virtual our enrollment was amazing um we did anticipate lower enrollment for grades five to eight that was something that we knew coming in but we were also able to offer um again the math in person ela in person virtual both math and ela with a total number that you see here this is representing the seats there were students who took advantage of all three sessions and what's great is that the grades

2245-8 level we did not have to turn away any students if a student wanted an in-person session or virtual they were able to get a seat there so total enrollment seats we offered 81 in person and 172 virtual grades of four uh grade k to four is really where enrollment um expanded and boomed um if you recall we actually added on additional sections for kindergarten first and second grade after the enrollment process um it closed within i believe seven minutes for some of our younger grades so we were able to make some last minute changes and add on some additional kindergarten and first and second grade class our total enrollment here again represents the total seats we do have students who took advantage of all three sessions we had 376 in-person seats and 400 and

225i'm sorry 546 virtual seats so the total scope and impact of the program we were able to offer 457 in-person options and 718 virtual options for students so certainly we're reflecting back now at this point looking at what worked and what didn't and looking forward to possibly offering this again in the future certainly some of our glows are our staffing and our enrollment we really surpassed our expectations and our teachers were on really on board big time we were able to offer a lot of small group instruction and individualized attention for students who really need it as you recall we used the i ready program this year which was a new platform for us we received a lot of positive feedback from our teachers regarding that platform and not only do we have a lot

226of success using that but it's not all the time that we get to kind of preview a program such as i ready before actually adopting it what we really liked is the ability to assign specific content based on student needs we had an individualized learning path for students who needed it and there was also a teacher toolkit with digital content and lesson plans there were some challenges with iready that we were working through as well i'm trying to improve that for example some students didn't complete the assessment until the end of may we didn't have as much data and long-term data as we would like for this um we are continuing to explore options with iready as a resource in fact i'm hoping to share it with you this upcoming month with some of our

227more specific successes with iready and potentially some plans that we could use already moving into the future for the for the upcoming school year to help address student learning loss it is one of those resources that appear on the pde resource center and it's something that we could potentially use for ester funding in the future to help support that so it's something i look forward to talking to a little bit more at that curriculum committee in reference to some of our grow areas we do need to look at improving the registration process it ended up being a little clunky we had a lot of changes that our coordinators really worked through to make sure that we can get all the students where they needed to be we did get some feedback that we can improve

228communication especially early on by the time we were offering research so if we are considering this in the future we want to be able to communicate earlier to our families so that they can make plans also considering limiting our enrollment to our highest need students this is not a priority for us going into this past year because we knew that that term need for our families meant very different things we wanted our families to be able to determine what their need was so um we had a wide range of academic needs social emotional needs students who hadn't been in school for a while or in person getting the opportunity to get made it again was really a great um great opportunity and finally one of our grow areas is really making sure that with the

229diagnostic assessment with i ready we know it was a challenge doing it at home um so that would be something that we would look forward to changing in the future with that i'm going to turn it to sarah toback just to share a little bit of the student experiences of the program hello good evening i would invite you to look at the screen to see um in our students words some things that they certainly got from the program um at the end of each session i had the students grades five through eight reflect on their experience um because for me it's not enough that they just reviewed ring and math but i want them themselves to look back on their learning experience and see really where they improved and what they are capable of doing

230even in such a short amount of time so for my in-person students you'll see in the next picture a lovely picture of me with rowdy ram and our in-person students wrote on individual cards where they felt they improved and on the previous slide the virtual students wrote things on a padlet so they could see what themselves and their fellow classmates improved upon in just a short two week time one thing that i really like about this is how specific a lot of students were because due to ireti and its ability to allow teachers to differentiate easily students needs were definitely met here so not only the students just get better at reading but they got better at reading with purpose they got better at reading and finding a point of view of character diagnostic and

231so on so i think that is something to really take from this one just student growth and to how they were actually able to pinpoint exactly where they improved and made up learning losses due to the pandemic thank you so with that um i just have a few uh bits of data to share we did send out a survey to our teachers just reflecting on the experience and reflecting on i ready again i'm going to share that at curriculum committee coming up but for our families i really consider this to be a great win 91 of those who participated in person strongly agree that this the sessions helped address their learning gaps and 96 agree or strongly agree that their child enjoyed participating which is really spectacular for a summer program for the virtual feedback

232we saw something very similar with 93 percent agreeing or strongly agreeing that they close the learning gaps and 97 agreed or strongly agreed that their children liked participating um we did also ask um whether or not it met their expectations and we did see that 95 of in person met their expectations and 89 of virtual so what's next um we are continuing to evaluate i ready again that's something i shared in the beginning and i'm looking forward to bringing more information specifically about i ready to curriculum committee there were a lot of strengths of the program that we want to maybe look at continuing and seeing if we can go on throughout the year i am in process of really negotiating with the publisher as much as possible because it is a very costly program

233but we did see a lot of successes with that and um with that too looking at um future discussions as to whether or not we would plan this again for next summer one of the major changes we would want to do is plan early again our family some of the feedback is that it was a little bit too late in the end and they had already made plans camp so forth so if we were going to do this program again next year we would want to plan early and get that communication out early any questions kelly um so in your assessment it was a success it was it was it was a great opportunity to get that individual attention did it close every single student learning gap of course not but i think it provided

234targeted instruction for at least some i mean i agree with the parents that it you know was kind of planned later but again we didn't know um but this was all paid this year was paid by the asset money correct so um the endless bucket of ester money if we want to plan and try to do this again next year this would have to be fun to buy springboard correct not necessarily um with yester money we have about 900 000 i'm looking at jim to make sure i'm correct um that is earmarked for um specifically for learning loss and it has to be used for learning loss so one of my thoughts is to maybe pull in are you ready throughout the year and that can go towards that bucket or if we continue this

235program next year as well that could also come from that bucket but we have a lot of red tape with what the learning loss is considered under the esser fund but i think it would qualify but we also that's also say 900 000 that's allocated for social emotional no is that different so that's that million dollars is separate from this okay so then you still have a 900 000 that we could use for next year for for learning loss correct okay great we start with 900 000. this came out of that first bucket so we would have the remainder of that which would be about six hundred thousand right okay great thank you dr murray thank you by the way and for all the um teachers that participated so i was just unable to follow

236like student-wise and you were talking there were three sessions right yeah and there were varying numbers but do we know like just from an impact standpoint like how many individual students that this uh really translated into or what we're doing yet but we need to dig in to get that that's part of that registration process that became very clunky because we had about 625 families and then we had to go through each of the individual rosters so we can get that but it's going to take us a little more time to dig to see how many individual students not just seats the seats were a little bit cleaner and easier to get okay thanks great thank you thank you dr mary thank you for all of your hard work on that and we'll look for

237more information as we get closer to the end of the school year that we're just starting so thank you for that okay so now we're going to move right down um student reps mrs melton and mr fitzgerald are you good to move all right so then we're going to move to the minutes ambi is there a motion second questions or comments one favor say aye aye any opposed that motion carries personnel a through p is there a motion second questions or comments brief comments just uh would like to watch there's a lot of great educators that this district's losing via retirement or other means and i would just like to thank them for their service and i just wanted to acknowledge that briefly thanks mr schafer and i will say that lisa and her department

238has been working very hard to get all of our positions filled so thank you for those heroic efforts i also want to welcome colleen slavin uh in advance one of our administrators now seventh grade center um so we welcome her to our all right thank you oh in favor of a through key then say aye and the opposed that motion carries finance a through j is there a motion questions or comments all in favor say aye aye any of those that motion carries property a motion questions or comments all in favor say aye aye aye any opposed no that motion carries programming and curriculum a through d two moves second questions or comments all in favor say aye aye any opposed a motion carries conferences and workshops a through f second questions or comments on

239favor say aye aye any opposed mr jackson i'm sorry did you say no okay that motion still does carry other business a through f is there a motion second questions or comments all in favor say aye aye [Applause] any opposed motion carries any board comment yeah just a couple of comments real quick um a lot of information was presented this evening um from you know a lot of parents and that which was good but a couple things that i think we still need to figure out which we don't get direction from is what if kids had coveted um and they and they they're not they're not wearing a mask for instance do they still need to warranty i don't think we've that questions ever been answered by the county in your quarantine i might have

240missed it um you know the it was mentioned before several times that uh or that sometimes was brought up about you know kids with special ed uh with ieps and you know we'll argue service to the demonstrators so you don't have to answer our names to see anything but here's what especially kids with ieps if they have to quarantine how older service is going to be addressed um and and maybe something that you can present to the board or at least put you know have a position statement by the district that's readily available for parents because that's that's a great question um that was also mentioned which is 100 accurate about mass standards i think that that's something that we should look at and have available um because as i listen to parents get up

241this evening that we're wearing masks and you know some of them aren't even actually wearing the mask properly and if parents aren't wearing a mask properly how do we expect our students or our kids to wear them properly we need to make it reassure because what i'm concerned about is what happens with quarantine or contact tracing how do we know if a kid's actually wearing their mask just because it wasn't pulled down over their nose or over their mouth for a long period of time i mean these are all the things that the county didn't really address when they came out with the quarantining contact tracing um but we all know that uh the teachers spend a portion of their day making sure that the students are wearing their mask properly so from a quarantining

242standpoint or contact racing standpoint we really don't know if a student that was affected if they if they're actually wearing their mats properly the entire day um it was suggested about that 95 and kn 95 those statements were actually accurate um and it's something that we should be looking at as a district that you know is that something that we can make available maybe we work with our another government state government or federal government for funding to make the have these masks available for our students to wear um instead of as one parent mentioned about you know the t-shirt that's tied around their face or whatever it may be i mean so there's there was a lot of validity that was that was brought up this evening and we you know these are things that

243we should look at but mass standards touch the mask this is all plays a very important role into requiring or talking about masking in in the district um that we do and i just want to reiterate that we do meet all the social distancing in the cafeterias during lunch is that correct yes that's correct okay and then um you did bring up about the quarantining or social justice of a student is out anywhere between three to ten days whatever whatever period of time i brought this up i asked this before i asked this last year uh during the school year as we're ending the school year i do have a concern about learning loss with students if they have the quarantine um not having access to being be able to and i like somebody make

244the recommendation of at least possibly opening up a zoom room that the the teachers not necessarily virtual teaching but at least that their the student could still listen or participate not necessarily i'm not going to get that right maybe not necessarily participate in the class but maybe open up a zoom room where they can at least listen and see the lesson being taught i just don't i'm and um i understand what we're you know when mr was talking about keeping the kids at school that virtual had its limitations and negative negative impacts on students but on the flip side asynchronous learning for three to five days as well could have a negative impact on their learning so it's something to think about uh and i don't know i just want to make clarify that we're

245not as a school district the department there's two department of health in pennsylvania there's one at the state there's one at the economy they are ultimately responsible for the health and well-being of all the residents within the state of pennsylvania it's it's no matter what it's still that we're pushed down to the districts where they put us and and you know to make these decisions was uh somebody used the word dialection of duty multiple times on that's what to me it was dereliction of duty by both the state department of health and the county department of health and of this as far as the state representatives or somebody mentioned one of them that uh sent out a letter that same letter that was sent to the school boards was sent to the media so this

246was just a political stunt had no it had no impact on what's i mean the only reason it was political stuff and just like with the letter that we got today from another uh representative the only state representative that i could say that reached out to me and i as i heard colleen said was representative cerisi who actually said what can i do to help he was the only one i don't need to be lectured by senator muthern i don't need to be lectured by uh representative webster and i don't need to listen to representative schusterman telling parents but we can't decide what to do with the state so the school boards have to representative cerrito was the only representative at least contacted i don't know who else he contacted the board but he at

247least huh so he reached out to multiple board members and he he specifically said what can i do he didn't reach out to me a few people lecturing me that i will not listen to what they're lecturing in a political position right you did not reach out to maybe we can contact those representatives now and seem to be willing to support funding for some kid i have no reminder i think that's a good thing i mean there's a good example they want to help funding of k k n95s or n95 mask that we could have available for students so they are properly masked uh and we could set up standards we could actually demonstrate the proper use of the mask in the schools i miss right i'm i'm sorry that mr seriously representative cersei didn't

248reach out to but i didn't say he reached out to all board members i said he specifically did reach out to me and apparently some other board members i was just clarifying that he did not reach out to me hey are there any other word comments this evening aside from everything else we've spoken about tonight um like the board to consider taking the zoom that we use for committee meetings and these two have those in operation it is a big impact on our local staff to put those productions in place and for the last couple of months i can speak for property and finance it's one or two people on those calls you know i think we need to look at the impact that it's having on the staff to put those productions in place

249it's a lot for not having people on those polls mr fitzgerald were you going to uh look into how we first started to use zoom during the pandemic and what um procedures if any of you would need to follow to stop using zoom yes i i the question was presented earlier to me um i will need to look to see how we uh set this this process up back at that first meeting i think in late march of 2020 um if that was simply done where we just started a meeting zoom and and we were off and i think we can do it fairly easily if there was a motion passed at the time i'll need to see how what limits were put on it bottom line i'll get that direction to you it may

250be simply as easy as as the board saying we're ready just to move back to regular board policy i think that what mr jackson is referring to is making uh motion or making a recommendation to just eliminate zoom for committee meetings not uh that proliferated if you would independent of what the board did so i i think that can be done right that can be done just simply by the board support of that well i i support john there's a lot of effort that goes into the entire setup for most times there's nobody no one on right so i i support that are you still going to get us the information though on the board on what the board did for its regular board meetings and workshops absolutely and i i should know this because

251it's my third term um for board members that would like to be will there be like a dial-in option to be able to listen to what goes on in community meetings i think there used to be or because i'm by the way i appreciate that i think that zoom you know was needed and i'm not sure that it's needed now so it seems like um a burden and um so i just want to because there are there are times um i travel a fair amount for work so that i do appreciate the the option of dialing in or gaining access to participating without being there well we used to just have the conference calls uh conference bridge set up if somebody couldn't if a board member couldn't attend a meeting uh and we should just

252have a conference bridge but that was just simple but i mean not it takes a couple you know but for rich or whoever to do the entire setup resume for a committee meeting for one person or sometimes nobody most times nobody it's just so i i support research i i support that recommendation my only suggestion with the committee meetings we may want to just simply advertise that it's going to be just now in-person meetings exclusively i do believe when i worked with tony ann on the advertisements it it noted the zoom option so we're gonna we might just need to re-advertise the committee meetings if we're all gonna give that direction correct correct if that's the so if that's the will report seems like it's coming this way um what is it what is this

253all process there for committee meetings i'm comfortable i i think similarly you know my experiences there's very few of any um folks who attend the committee meetings outside of board members um there may be a one or two but very very very i agree okay so i disagree with the majority of the four degrees so we'll get rid of them for committee meetings okay any other word comment if not we're going to move on to the last segment of public to be heard and i will reiterate that we are finished discussing math so if it's a topic other than masks other than masking that you wish to discuss there will be 15 minutes in person and then 15 minutes on the zoom and we will call it there diversity and inclusion doesn't it sound wonderful

254so does let's redistribute the wealth among the people so that there is no rich nor poor under this ideology the young and brave men fought and died for north korea 70 years ago look at the country now it's majority citizens are poverty statement where their government enjoys the wealth it's counterpart country south korea boasts 12th largest gdp in the world how about east germany their socialist policies led to economic stagnation political oppression and widespread dissatisfaction among the people of east germany which led to german reunification in 1990. you and i are the witnesses of such history with our very own eyes how about china it's doing pretty well economically one might say but i know this if its citizen speaks against ccp you can possibly disappear how about living in such a place by the

255way ccp has enough information on every u.s adult to use it against us no of course that's not true that's a conspiracy theory one might add amanda when i get an award-winning manager at starbucks decided to quit in this past june over this wonderful equity culture that led to bullying and division my point is how much innocent and well intended this ebi movement is the end is division hate and racism as history has already told us let's talk about raising color i am asian and have yellow skin color if anyone does not like me or even bullies me is that person a racist years ago a stranger in a passing card gave me a cheap eye i refused to feel sorry for myself but did feel sorry for that woman as a young girl as

256i was at the time i live in great america where there is least racism and where every minor group is protected under civil rights my husband is black and we have one giant legend looking like son when he was about three years of age a four-year-old precautious girl asked me where his mom was when i was right in front of them now is that child being a racist my black husband is a gentleman and is well liked and respected by everyone including his all-white colleagues he tells me that his white colleagues trash talk about hispanics other blacks and even whites from my husband this is not about racism but about human sinfulness and i agree the fruit of the spirit is love joy peace long suffering gentleness goodness faith meekness temperance against such there is

257no law thank you thank you if anyone else is seating abby deardorff 704 colin court and royersford um thank you rebecca for kind of giving me an opening to what i wanted to say here tonight um it's been a pleasure and an honor that several students have reached out to me along with their families about their experiences here at springford with school board meetings with edi and all of the above and i wanted to tonight as a parent as a community member apologized to sana who spoke tonight as a student because when i met her in the hallway to say hello to her and her father she told me that there was remarks being made to her to go back to where she came from in this room while she was speaking about her experience

258here at springboard so you cannot sit here and tell me that edi crt whatever you want to call it is something that i'm bringing to the district and causing problems with when it happened right here in this room tonight right here in this room and it happened last week too when ali bel-air spoke they were snickering their comments being made by adults to children with the bravery to come here and speak to you and the community about their experiences so don't tell me this is something new and something that doesn't exist because it's here you approved your edi policy unanimously last year there was never an issue over it there was no conversation there was no facebook post no backward comments it's happening here it happened here tonight i apologize to ali and sana it

259takes great bravery to come speak here i know there's parents that don't feel comfortable speaking here the parents won't feel comfortable speaking on zoom and that have thanked those of us that do have that bravery and courage and whatever to come out and do it and those are the voices the students voices are what should be elevated they are the ones having this experience not you not me none of us are there the way that these students are and to disrespect them to their faces while they have that bravery and courage it's disgusting and so for that i apologize and i promise to be a voice to everyone thank you [Music] if something happens someone needs to bring it to the board hello abby i'm okay i'm just i'm trying to talk to everybody if

260something happens in here and no one tells us i'm we're hearing about this now right something happened last week we're hearing about it now yeah i'm not talking to you i'm talking to everybody because we hear that supreme court has these issues and spring force no different than the world as a whole there are issues but if the issues are not brought forth to the board how can we act on i agree something happened last week we hear about it 12 o'clock a week later something happened hold on just i'll look at her last 44 seconds just because she did that good guy i agree with you 100 but the contentious air is not comfortable for people okay so like that is on them but i as an adult who was informed that this happened

261is apologizing to her publicly in front of all of us who are adults educators and professionals and allow it to sit here and happen so i'm apologizing to her with my 25 seconds i'm just surprised her father would reach out to mr rizzo while he was here i'm just i'm just trying to understand so in the middle of the meeting you want a parent when there's very rules there's people yelling and and and snickering at everything and then as someone who has never come to meeting never spoke before they're gonna walk up to mr rizzo and say what is this going on like what is tolerated okay well let's close this this comment and let's move on to the next one mr jackson i'm gonna just respond to you uh the student did approach me

262today uh that that based on today's occurrence um before she left she shared with me some of her concerns of course certain things were happening in the audience that are certainly out of ear shop for us and i asked her to please reach out to mr rizzo and i also shared what she had shared with me with mr rizzo it was not an appropriate time to share it at the board level as we were in the process of various deliberations would prefer the student is not here um and to i would let's let's see let's allow whatever occurred to occur on the student administration level it's really not something that we should be discussing publicly all right thank you and then we'll move on please this is my first meeting um let me ask you

263just to speak into the mic please sorry you can move it up if it's yeah and then if you could state your name and address please thank you melissa short uh address 260 washington street warriors4pa um i wasn't going to speak tonight this was my first time coming here but i kind of just want to make a more positive comment and say thank you all for what you do me and my family moved up here in 2019. it's been a tough year but i've always been taught to be very positive and move forward in spite of my environment in spite of who i come in contact with in any situation and actually tonight sitting here there was just so much like just hate and just the vibe and the rudeness and just like you're everybody's

264adults in here and i have a 15 a 13 year old and a one-year-old and my husband is caucasian and i i don't know i just was never raised to ever you know and i i have a grandmom that grew up in birmingham alabama so again being african-american all this stuff is always put in your face and always throwing in your face and if you don't react to it then you don't care about it but i say all that to say i do i would like to see maybe some more um diversity and i'm not going to come up here and yell and scream about it i want to be more proactive and say you know as a parent and having my kids come here and how can i help um which you don't hear

265that a lot people just come up here and you know complain and yell and uh but it's like okay we have an issue what can i do to help how can i help and and be positive about it like it's ridiculous these grown people appear yelling and screaming and asking people to die like calm down like i need you all to calm down and really focus on what the issue is um people are dying i have asthma i wear my mask i've had pneumonia three times i haven't gotten vaccine yet but that's my business and i'll decide when i want to do that when i want to do that um but again with everything going on i just feel like people just need to calm down and just remember um just to be and i

266don't mean to sound adolescence but just be kinder i don't know it's just crazy um you know it's my first meeting and i do plan to come to more because my kids go here and i want to be active and i want to get to know everybody and me and my husband are very peaceful people um so you know any ideas as far as like how are we going to help our students with everything that's going on help them um you know just different things like i don't know at work you have wellness programs i don't know if there's something here that you guys are considering to help the students maybe get through situations but just things like that i just wanted to say thank you and i'm here to help as a parent so

267thanks thank you okay um so i just wanted to understand what lip service this school board was going through because in the beginning of the meeting we sit here and we say first thing is the pledge of allegiance and i just want to say is this related to the to the mass king issue no what does it relate to it's the pledge of allegiance that has nothing to do with me i'm sorry and what's your what's your comment i'm making my comment so we got up here and we talked about we we said the pledge of allegiance right each of us we stood up we put our hand on our hearts and we said the pledge of allegiance so i want to say that the definition of liberty i don't know of how much clarity

268you guys have about that but it's the quality of state of being free and the power to do as one pleases freedom from physical restraint and freedom from arbitrary and despotic control so i'm just wanting to let you know like is that just lip service and someone someone else in the audience had given that to me and he asked me to present that to you thank you i would like to make a small comment about the the way they do this we did a survey and maybe going forward we can make a small adjustment uh i give you an example i have k one the daughter goes we'll we should go to the fourth grade and my younger one uh will be a kindergarten student in the survey i was able to determine what kids

269in uh grades 7 to 12 will be wearing or not very i believe that's not very fair for me to make a decision for you know for the building that my kids will not go to and it goes another way as well so they started they imagined probably many parents who have just kid in the high school completely separate building from this from the from the brooklyn where my kids will go somehow they were able to vote you either when you know on a survey if my kids should wear masks be mandated required you know optional and any of that so maybe going forward we can only you know make it possible if i believe it should not be that hard i work in nit and your team probably sophisticated enough to you know make

270somebody you know to apply policies and be able to make parents to vote only for the policy that will affect their kids and not somebody else's also i didn't read on the other items on the agenda as far as you know race and what educate and what not teach our kids my lesson and the brothel that i've learned by you know immigrating to this country and raising two kids here my kids we live in very diverse neighborhoods they go to the karate class and it's like representative on any race or combination of race as possible in their classes this thing goes into my development i live in particular woods no not one time i've heard that my kids were in disagreement like or not did not like someone because of their race or income level

271with their parents it didn't come up once so we should maybe we should take a lesson from our kids how to behave in situations like they have to just be human and take you know for whatever you are if you're a jerk no matter what race you are you're a jerk and you should call it that if you if i like you no matter what race you are i like you and we will be we'll be friends maybe we should teach take a lesson from our kids and not tell them how to behave they're already doing fine their own let's not screw up their minds with some nonsense and just you know put what other thoughts faulty thoughts into their heads perfectly fine hats thank you do we have any on the zoo all right

272go ahead eric kim anderson you may not make a public comment please don't mute yourself then state your first and last name as well as your full address hi kim anderson 123 patriot tribe um colleen i'm not sure if you were saying we cannot state uh com public comment like this time unmasked is that what your statement was earlier i'm a little bit confused uh yes yes it was at this time um i'm i'm going to continue okay i'm going to continue and cut me off i did not speak earlier um but you guys made a very major change in your vote tonight from one week ago and this is the open public comment that's not related to agenda items so i i do feel it's you know my opportunity to make a quick statement

273i will try to keep it brief um i do want to you know express my disappointment in tonight's change of vote nothing changed except public pressure in the last week um you guys a couple of you made very you know major statements about where your positions were and nothing's changed from those agencies require recommending not requiring my 12 year old did not thank me initially upon my return home after my um commentary and your 5-4 vote to recommend not require but an hour and a half later he came down unsolicited hugged me and said thank you mom when you have a 12 year old going through what a lot of 12 year old boys are going through believe me that is something you just rarely expect and you have to um really take into consideration

274what it took for him to come down and do that um dr wright's comments last um meeting i i posted about this and i think many have conveyed it um tonight but the fact that we were voting about masks and she just wasn't really all that concerned about their efficacy or not but how people feel about them was inappropriate and i don't feel like i think she should have recused herself from the vote ms sullivan i do have to make comments to you as well because last week you were very adamant on your stand on um that motion and you then asked you said no and then you asked to have it read before the vote it was read you still were confused on the vote um everybody in the audience knew exactly what you

275were voting on but you i don't nobody understood that luckily the vote was still five to four however that win was a one-week win we didn't even get to day one so it was very short-lived i wish some of you guys could come and explain to my 12 year old now the change in this vote because i i don't want to do it um mass efficacy doesn't seem to be a of any concern go to the old navy website and read what their description is about the masks because that's where most of our students are getting their masks from i'm not going to read it you can all go look it up my comments last week i did ask to allow teachers to unmask formalize an indoor mass break policy none of this has come

276up none of it other school districts and districts in our country have spent a lot of time in their school board meetings discussing this and adding it to the motion does not even come up here that's a shame hey do we have any other comments on zoom not mask related liz kepner you may not make a public comment please don't meet yourself and state your first and last name as well as your full address yes this is liz kepner 19 leatherwood drive collegeville i am calling in to make a request that the number of students who are forced to quarantine is included on the school district dashboard so that there's transparency among the community about how many families are actually being affected by this and affected by the decisions of someone else not wearing a

277mask thank you do we have any other aaron at this point there are no further public motions