Special Called AHISD School Board Meeting Audio - July 20, 2020

001uh thank you all for coming uh i'd like to welcome anyone listening on our live streaming broadcast like recording in the meeting uh post a link on the district website 24 hours after communities meeting and we also post the materials that we consider as well you can find all this under the school board icon on our hsdf website anyone in the audience would like to address before tonight [Music] um so we will start tonight with citizens to be heard a couple comments on that because this is a specially called meeting uh the citizens to be heard discussions will only be on those items agenda and so we will take them in agenda item a couple other rules of the road this is kind of a process admittedly we're not allowed to interact with you we're

002not allowed to talk to you we're not allowed to do anything other than let you speak for your a lot of time um i think what i'm going to do is there might be a fuse i'll call the person to speak and then call the second person on deck so they're ready to go so they're closer up to this excuse me after this stage you can hit the mic a little quicker you'll have three minutes to speak emma is over there in the corner of the laptop she'll keep the time when there's a minute left she's going to raise a card and then she's going to have an alarm and another card to be fair to everyone will be ruthlessly kind of efficient with that three minutes i know again it's a funky process but

003to make sure that we all follow the same rules that's how we're going to that's it thank uh all for being here and we're grateful for you taking the time so uh we have a couple of agenda items and we have 3a that focus on diversity and inclusion [Music] so we'll start with 3a [Music] um states is focus groups support ways students teachers have put into work to develop the curriculum belonging is the curriculum ready to be shared with parents and community when did ahic commit themselves to embracing the principles of critical theory also known as the social justice theory reviewing our current environment through the appointments here's my concern in order to address diversity racial equity and inclusivity based off your question on page two of a letter is his name in mind that

004specific rights racist practices are inherited from our district what is the history's definition of echo this is to disrupt and existing power structure will this happen there's any consequences of creating identity groups will these identity groups no longer adhere to the principles of characteristics such as confidence i appreciate the opportunity heard who did not take this such advice and listen to both sides of faith with that said it was a great thoughtfulness that we addressed the topic of you knowing that counterparty our goal is to raise our honor to be him [Music] that our country and our system of knowledge [Music] i'm sorry i swear [Music] okay members of the board dr bashar and yes [Music] i am here to speak about something just as important as school reopening and that is the racism lies

005and discrimination that [Music] on purchases 8 2008 luther maddox a senior at albany's high school shot and killed himself the administration's response to luther's suicide was to quote get back to normal as soon as possible the word suicide was whispered but there were no conversations with students about labor suicide or about mental health in general among the staff there are no opportunities to reflect and discuss what might trigger a young man to take his own life a large piece of paper that was changed up in the main hall on which students could write messages and remembrances was removed within days of loser's death within a week's time luther rare brought up as he was known to his closest friends was embraced on january 4th 2016 david roloff a former government high school student packed himself

006the district and community's response to david suicide was the very ancient of their response to legal suicide when negative suicide was attributed to bullying the public outcry and outrage went beyond the boundaries of the heights responsibility for native suicide is placed squarely on the high school a district has households reform science branding arts t-shirts and member speakers were printed and on september 1st 2017 david's law a law protecting children against cyberbullying went into effectiveness why was the district's response to two equally tragic deaths so vastly different luther was bullied mercilessly and ostracized from white elementary through high school why is there no loser's law is it possibly because luther maddox was poor biracial and gay and because he existed on the fringes of the most marginalized heights twelve years after lincoln's death illinois still has

007not gone our students of color are still marginalized and still do not have the same access to programs as white students our lgbtqi plus students are still harassed bullied and excluded our poor students are still reminded every day that renee brown says if you don't know the story you can't write the ending and if you don't know a story the story owns you it is time for animal heights to own the story of white privilege racism and exclusion our marginalized underrepresented students have lived in the shadows lived with discomfort physical danger and emotional abuse for far too long we cannot wait for people to feel comfortable to acknowledge the advantages they have simply because they are white before we begin to write a different ending to our story thank you uh please keep names of

008faculty students confidentials firstly i'd like to thank the board for allowing the community to come engage with us these times my name is garcia i graduated graduated this june 2020 from alan heights high school today we are here to begin a much needed public dialogue with the school board in creating a more inclusive and welcoming environment for all students as well as the threshold of accountability in the community when a student violates discriminate discrimination policies very recently was brought up in our community and surrounding communities that our high students were using racial slurs publicly and this is an incident that many students minority students have experienced within the ottawa school district in response to this recent incident myself mackenzie kirby created a petition that has received over 1.5 000 signatures to encourage the board to

009look closer at its own policies related to racial slurs discriminatory language and behavior among students shortly after the creation of the petition mackenzie and i attended a meeting with dr sharma delgaro on july 2nd where we discussed the planned action to create more effective policies in collaboration with album high school district students teachers administrators alumni and attorneys we created a draft amendment to the ffh district policy as well as resources for administrators to use to help implement on campuses specifically we discussed today's school board meeting where we thought we were going to have an opportunity to discuss this issue with the board but unfortunately my time today is limited i asked the board that it commits to creating an agenda item for this issue at the next board meeting where we can engage in a

010public dialogue about the need for more effective policies the manner in which we can recreate policies and the creation of focus some people receive support lastly people underestimate your capacity for change there is never a right time to do the difficult thing thank you for your time [Music] microphone on the other side hello high school board administration thank you for your time uh my name is jerry says my family i want to give a voice to all children in the album high school district represented uh behind me by the advocates of the face-to-face learning program i want to start by thanking you guys i was president the last meeting and i feel like i fully understand how much work you guys are doing when it comes to reopening how ta guidelines governor guidelines everything continues

011to change i fully supported your decision which i know there was some backlash against to offer a face-to-face program and a high tech home program i want you to partner with us advocates of the face-to-face program to advocate for the well-being eventually nationally even locally in you know state level in texas and locally in our community there's been a lot of voices loud voices that have heavily influenced the decision-making process of how we're going to open school and what that's going to look like those voices have not primarily been coming from people in groups that are primarily focused on well-being of children in many cases those are coming from teachers unions and they're coming even even worse than politicians in most cases if not all they are not advocating for the for children's considerations you're

012doing so in spite of it the american academy for pediatrics has come out to say that kids need to be back in school face-to-face learning as soon as possible citing adverse health effects that have already been happening in a lot of research that they've done depression socialization about social isolation not to mention abuse from from not having surgery to come to furthermore i'd point to statistics on the island school district website 20.7 percent of ahisd students are economically disadvantaged as defined by state definitions it is not going to work to give them an ipad and tell them to log on and do their classes if there is no family structure to support that you're going to see much more social isolation depression and even worse so we're calling on you guys to provide the leadership

013that has been lacking to push against mayor nirenberg pushing it [Music] against nelson woolf and advocate for a face-to-face option called governor abbott to issue a statement saying every texas child deserves a face-to-face learning option and to call on ken paxton to aid in this process on taking control away from local leaders like mayor gironberg and dr wu and ishkin giving it to the governor to issue a statement that there has to be a face-to-face option or at least give along school district of all districts the ability to decide what course they want to pursue so that we can advocate for students that don't have a voice thank you [Music] good evening my name briefly my is is essential to live in all my heights in advanced school district my husband joey ashcroft is a

014full-time essential employee for the u.s air force which means he cannot take off to assist with our children's assistance learning lucky me i get to do it all i have a specific reason for talking this evening and that is that we have five children three in the district spanish emergency program and two toddlers i don't know spanish immersion is the language of one of the many reasons our district has been great we want to be sure our students continue to flourish learning foreign language and reporting the emerging style of learning we signed up for learning from home on a tablet does not meet the standards of education we expect our district with regards to foreign language education furthermore we all agree to a mining agreement to commit to five years to this phenomenal program we

015expect it to work both us committing to the program and in return the district committed to our children the level of conversion necessary to continue advancing in the program and i i went out and received the documentation before the school board meeting with regards to versus ninth grade so thank you for sending that out we have all that experience with the different learning due to the last 9 years of school and the spring going virtual we honor what's expected of this type of program as parent and our experience is proven this is a bird not only on our children but also on parents in my experience i'm required to have three different ipads three separate educational environments inducing virtual learning in my home at the same time all managing two happy dollars and feeling work

016phone calls all students have similar requirements that their families may not be able to import them we are here tonight for you all to understand that a large number of parents in the district want a waiver spot so that we as an independent school district can make the choice of either reopening our campuses or virtual learning we understand the mandates you all have been given and we want you all advocating with and for us to push back on policies that do not include giving the choice to the children and their families where there's a will there's always a way i feel like the school board is valuing behind closed doors with the powers that be over when we will be able to open up our schools for the children of so desperately and want to

017be there for their social emotional developmental and educational needs thank you for your time [Applause] hi my and i name an incoming senior he's a varsity football player and he's also an artist and i'm sort of speaking behalf on just anyone in the high school with varsity level athletes and athletes in general i think what i found is so sad to me that right now is easier for our teenagers to access pot and drugs than it is to have face-to-face contact with a coach or any kind of sports activity i think it is really disgusting when it's easier for our children to be able to access pornography than it is to have face-to-face instruction from a coach or possibly a mentor that can change their life you know this is sort of the trend i've

018been watching with our high schoolers and when i asked my son at the end of you know the spring i said well how did he go he said you know the teachers didn't give a they said they don't give a by the end of it they were frustrated we were frustrated here and you know when i think about what sports does for him and what it does for his friends and how it builds confidence how it gives them grit and perseverance how it teaches them to endure through the through adversity and it gives them drives and goals it's so sad that right now we're advocating hiding instead of getting them out there and developing perseverance personally i don't want to be part of a legacy that's creating a lost generation they're [Music] versus stripping them

019of every skill every interaction every opportunity for some of these kids athletics are the only way they get an opportunity to go to college and they don't even have the ability to build a resume in that way right now shutting our schools creates a mindset that tells our kids to shut down mentally and we will not get this time back the stress the fear anxiety and consistency the lack of joy has a terrible impact on their psyche you know the only way is humans that we build joy it's not from things it's not from video games the only way we build joy and it's proven in neuroscience is by being in community when i'm glad to [Music] that's why solitary confinement actually works in a prison system and is essentially what we're doing screens don't

020build joy zoom calls we have better solutions than to shut down open our school let them play the kids that want us to stay home and do hikes at home but those of us who want our kids to have face-to-face interaction let's rise up as a community and come together and let the kids play first of all i want to start off by saying a huge thank you to everyone on board meeting and stage so impressed with the amount of work your team put in to prepare for this school year i left that board meeting feeling confident that you all have the best interest of our students in mind i also know that all of you have spent many hours returning phone calls and emails from concerned parents so thank you for all that you

021did and are continuing to do to ensure we provide the excellent education our district is known for i like so many other parents is extremely disappointed to learn about the mandate prohibiting schools to open for increasing learning until after labor day i can sit here and list all the reasons why face-to-face schooling is so important but i know that many other parents are going to share this and after sitting through the last board meeting i think that you all know that providing kids with a face-to-face option is important dr walker you said herself that younger learners and the struggling learners will fall behind without a face-to-face option i truly hope that in absence of a county order our board and administrators would have been forced but the plan rolled out last monday allowing those that

022wanted to return to school with a face-to-face option option however we as individuals and as a school district cannot sit back and wait for our local city leadership to deem schools ready to open we do not have the same challenges in our city that other districts do to reopen our schools in a safe manner we are a small district with only a handful of campuses and we have already formulated a plan that our administration of work was behind you all worked around the clock and forego your july grade to make sure our doors would be ready to open on august 17th i understand that we can't change ta guidance or lha guidance for the back to school transition period but we need y'all's voices as leaders in education and as our elective leaders to have

023a voice with fair county and to actively advocate that school districts have the ability to make their own choice in opening schools after this grace period as the ta guidance suggests i want you all to challenge the authority of the lhasa whose health department has managed their own reporting to be able to close schools beyond this time with it we need to be pushing hard for our school district to have representation on the mayor's council that is helping dr wu make decisions that directly impact the students in this community and once we get a seat at that table we need to be pushing hard for school reopening and for clear guidelines for what it will take so that we're not chasing a moving target and in the event that mayor county has granted the authority

024to extend the period for virtual learning on labor day i would like our district to obtain a waiver of some sort allowing us to open i understand that's not an option on the table right now but we need to fight to make one if school districts can request rakers to remain virtual we should absolutely be able to open our schools and we can prove that we are ready to open them safely in summary i would like to see our school board and administration actively fighting to have face-to-face options for the good of our students as adamantly as we saw those other schools [Applause] oh that was great my name is will rogers my wife and i have got a second grade or incoming second grader and incoming kids we've got so many great parents here

025tonight we've got a great school board and i never thought i would speak in front of you i volunteer for the heightened business incubator and i've been in this room many times didn't go to school here but we talked about how to do a presentation what do you do never die i would sit there talking to y'all today there's so many reasons why people shouldn't be in school for so many reasons why you shouldn't be in school don't have to give everyone a choice what we're asking for is the advocates of these parents who are standing probably the other thousand that didn't [Music] there's so many important factors for kids but no one talks about what it does to parents how do i keep my kindergartener in front of an ipad for more than five

026minutes even with the most fun game we don't use ipads right now but he's gonna have to is he gonna be on there for eight hours is his curriculum going to be eight hours of zoom calls on the ipad or kindergarten i don't think that's going to go over is he going to repeat kindergarten are we going to have double kids in college next year because everyone failed everyone had to be held back they're not first graders the seventh graders i understand they failed over six years of high school kids promote men and have women thought hey let's get howard woodbridge cambridge in school at the middle how do we do that we should have enough teachers to get pre-schooled so the junior high high school be all remote think about the little kids what

027do we do for them how do we keep them from falling so far behind that oh they're in summer school which unfortunately i hear that's the plan for spanish emerging already in talking about speeches to my students here you always gotta have a purpose gotta have a call to action tell them what you're gonna tell them tell them tell them what you told them can't sit back and not do anything we can't sit back we can't oppose those working parents two parents at work single parent households it's impossible how do you have a kindergartner five kids from earlier that are under the age of 10 all the zoo calls in five different rooms in your house that you don't have you [Music] supposedly listens to they don't listen to us but hopefully they will listen

028to the superintendent that will monitor that's who we want saying we want options of face-to-face learning we want the ability to seek our kids [Applause] all right i realized very difficult time in our lives giving the parents and choices appreciated with that all well so let's just right up so is ahisd following the epa guidelines in order to bring back students to campus for the teachers union the tea is allowing the first four weeks of school to have an online additional four weeks at least what specific actions is his name taking to ensure that they're back in the classroom not online what how can parents be assured that hisa will not see the goal code and continue to extend time [Music] letter that we received about an hour prior to this meeting from the army

029walker we do acknowledge that we have received this letter in this update we do appreciate that we do prefer to have some clarification on whether or not this was directed to all of the language immersion students or those that have just made the choice to do virtual learning for now while i have your attention though we are not interested in a virtual as a primary learning method for our children i need to be very clear however i think some of the other resources are good ideas as most of these kids are behind right now as a parent with two children one family the first and one going to third both in the inversion program currently i have intimate knowledge of the program and the difficulties of it i cannot stress the importance that we get

030the kids back in school i recently completed a survey and was given the choice ask for feedback etc was this totally disregarded if what i was told is true and depending on how the statistics are delayed that i'll give the benefit of the doubt to say my question roughly 60 saw in person learning so my question is do we not have enough teachers willing to teach in person for those of us who requested in-person education if not we need to know is the taxpayer so the appropriate changes can be made at all levels i cannot stress the need for transparency from the administration at this point if the ultimate plan is to be virtual for the rest of the year please don't keep us in the dark you stated the top priority is our children's

031education let us decide if the program is right for us my children's education will not be upon in the states hello and good afternoon my name is senior this fall i'm here today to voice my concerns on re-opening the school after labor day one point in specific i'd like to bring you to life is the exclusion in which distraught against special needs students many students have an autoimmune disorder and or shorter life expectancy to ask parents to risk their child's lives would be cool as it would be for any parent we cannot as a district say we have the utmost inclusivity towards special needs students and or students with autoimmune disorders but neglect their help to rio in many climate children are less prone to code 19 and if they do contract they will be

032asymptomatic this argument is to say the least barbaric for its faculty as well as essential workers not every person on campus is guaranteed to be asymptomatic and to assume so raises a question in the district's lack of humanity it is easy to want to open and to proceed so however i ask you to beg the question what are the student contracts code 19 will students involves will students involved be removed will they be tracing holding be an extension to the amount of days the student can be absent as the quarantine period is 14 days there is a big lack of empathy for teachers in this district and all districts for that matter they are underpaid and overworked in particular our teachers come with their own set of travels they are facing bigotry and in toxic

033environments teachers are forced to bear their lives for their students give their own money to pay for materials plan impeccable lessons while bearing everyday privacy such as divorce loss of a partner and loss of a family member i'm a varsity swimmer and while i miss practicing as much as the next athlete there's a myriad of questions that need to be answered how do you plan to keep social distance saying will teams have as many as 60 members do you have the proper equipment between locker rooms gym gym equipment weight rooms toys for elementary students how can you guarantee no transmissions of sweat concerning swimmers we to the best of our knowledge have no studies done on how coca-19 interacts in water polls contain several contaminants that can transfer coca-19 we must be unrealistic and that

034we still know very little about this disease our booster has endured many losses david black sebastian choa reed kelly and many many more i believe the people in this room with this question when we reopen are you willing to let hundreds more kids die thank you good evening who would enter kindergarten this year in howard as a fourth generation mule and a three-year-old daughter who would no doubt follow in his footsteps i'm also employed full-time as the executive director of the destination marketing organization i'm a taxpayer and concerned citizen i know there are all these difficult times and i cannot imagine the situation that you all are in right now making decisions for your students in your community and so i appreciate your time and non-politics after a year of being so excited about entering

035hard my family has made a difficult decision to unenroll my son from howard until in-person learning is available so that we can be flexible to find a more reasonable alternative for my guide real design and for me as a working mother because virtual learning is simply not an option since i am not employed as a teacher it's even more difficult we hope that this will be students that we can re-enroll in the school district that we have carefully chosen to live and invest in i want to say we started a petition as a group less than 24 hours ago i'd like to read that in other 24 hours over 400 people have signed this petition in support of what i'm about to read which if roughly 4 700 people are enrolled in the alpha infinite

036school district that's a that's a quick turnaround for 10 um the petition reads just as the american academy of pediatrics strongly advocates for the importance of in-person learning we are parents taxpayers contributing members of this community volunteers educators essential workers and concerned citizens the gilded alcoholics isd has an obligation to provide the option for face-to-face learning to students in-person learning is an essential service and critical to the well-being education and development of the children in this district just as physicians healthcare workers grocery stores to eight years restaurants and many others have all returned to work so much our schools to provide service that is critical to children adolescent families in the community by keeping our children at home we risk inflicting more harm than the potential risk of transmission of coca-19 especially considering our children

037are less likely to become infected and may be less likely to spread the infection with the implication of several safety measures to further reduce the risk of transmission especially to mitigate exposure for our teachers and staff we feel that there is a way to safely return to the classroom and then allen heights isd must provide an option for in-person learning for the children of taxpaying citizens as stated by the aap the importance of in-person learning is well-documented and there is already evidence of the negative impacts on children because of school closures in the spring of 2020. lengthy time away from school associated interruptions supportive services often results in social isolation making it difficult for schools to identify and address important learning deficits as well as child and adolescent physical or sexual abuse substance abuse depression

038and suicidalization this in turn places uh children and adolescents in considerable risk of morbidity and some basis mortality beyond the educational impact and social impact of school pleasures there's a substantial impact on food security [Applause] [Music] your political incidents by having your meeting being personal from the safety of your company will be less likely to step up and seek you show that he had industrial government who aren't already last lost by having a name of more than 10 people a school working is not followed by previous options that were made i am once again asking you that you do not automate these schools there is no validation for teachers to give at virtual houses the first three weeks or frustration after labor day understand a lot of repairs and other stakeholders such as taxpayers who

039have gone on and on these recommendations for european schools even after the aap walked out from these suggestions from their suggestions what happened to the suggestion i also understand a lot of them have concerns about such as mental health and employee education and centralizing and while i also encourage consumers and students i still believe that the top of the community should take place especially as cases continue to increase but phases incentive and then at an all-time high being much higher than they mean positive arms the district should have spent the summer perfecting virtual learning rather than frantically trying to come up with the way to go back to school in the middle end as somebody with asperger's who suffers from anxiety and other mental health issues and somebody whose mother is a psychologist i fully

040understand mental health however i think that instead of trying to return to as soon as possible the district should make mental health recipients more widely available socializing with should be more thoroughly implemented in virtual learning and school and central school events such as podcasts should be made virtual obviously this isn't a perfect replacement face-to-face contact but the alternative is students and people in the community i don't think people like you start taking this public health crisis seriously an epidemic sign found by sound when you guaranteed that among your friends and teachers [Applause] [Music] [Applause] first your elected officials and your group and your constituents that will be most impacted by your decisions perhaps students may find a suggestion that the possible student strives to swap him and to you might say that it's still on

041the table and possibility has a direct relationship with your automatic interior of these schools i am all internal students right and i have another students who are as well so please take me seriously and put help up your priority we are your constituents and we have our safe and parents who do not take this hi my name [Music] and is those who felt like there was no point first i know many of you've been working tirelessly in their lives and trying to find solutions for school reopening and i want to thank you i also want to share with you all my heart i grew up wanting to be a teacher knowing the well done the teacher in the classroom elementary were the first two teachers i remember having impacted musically they both watched me grow

042up they could teach in the same district in which they taught me senior also attended my college graduation party and met with me in teaching program at age 22. i love being a teacher and i miss the in-person relationships with my students so much if it were safe for me for students for my colleagues to return to the classroom i would absolutely be there what makes this district great is our teachers and hic takes pride in founding teachers as professionals and experts just on my immediate team of english 138 three teachers myself and two others have combined six master's degrees and over 20 years of experience in the classroom it is rare to find that kind of expertise and quality and i know we say we take pride in that that is why however it

043is so demoralizing and disheartening to hear and read comments saying quote if teachers don't want to do their job they should start looking for another job in quote and that the virtual learning agency provided the last quarter of the year was quote unquote subpar my summer has been filled with tears curve anxiety fear loss of sleep lots of work and favor and it's not because i don't want to do my job it's because contracting 19 risks hospitalization and death for me my colleagues my students and her family members have all evolved it of our community don't is the same way and that custodians administrative staff transportation staff food service staff teachers and paraprofessionals are viewed as disposable while the district says your value can tell you many of us across all campuses feel disrespected and

044insulted i want to be explicitly clear that those of us who are advocating for virtual learning want to do our jobs great for my health and that of my family colleagues and students does not mean i lack courage the right mindset or that i quote don't want to do my job it means we need to remember that physiological and safety needs on maslow's hierarchy of leads must be met before higher level thinking of whose taxonomy can be achieved we are asking that district leadership and trustees exercise extreme caution beyond the september 7th expiration of the county health director to keep school instruction virtual for everyone not just students i know this is not ideal that's something that's facing space instruction will have to be sacrificed however the risk of spreading and contracting hospitalization lifelong health

045effects and deaths should not outweigh a rush to get back to someone's normal one hospitalization of death whether the student custodian teacher family member or other staff member as a result of being forced to campus too soon is too many [Music] as an educator i am very happy that the san antonio metro health director dr boo is requiring our schools not reopened for on-campus face-to-face instruction until after september 7th this allows for the number of public 19 cases in san antonio area below if the 19 cases continue to rise in san antonio then school districts are able to adopt an additional four week later to continue virtual instruction this is the decision that how compliant science needs to agree to maintenance this is a great news to support parents who are concerned about sending their

046children to school since june 15 of the new cope and 19 cases reported having children many have been hostilized and more than 60 percent of these children who back up the remaining conditions since santa claus does not have a contact tracing structure this allows for the corona virus of his friends there are four phases to reopen ceremonies these phases were created in april and as of today san antonio was still in phase one stay home work safe this is the most severe stage on the handling of providers during faith one the san antonio county open 19 health transition team asked the close of community operates based in district schools to promote telework and to promote virtual meetings and conferences when you begin talking about reopening outfinding campuses keep students at the beginning of every sentence

047you are charged with the safety of almost 5 000 children and if you reopen with face-to-face instruction you can face great results some children are recovering quickly yet we do not know which child will hit harder with the coconut and symptoms which child will bring home and affect their parents who will both work and affect others the risks that are taking us over 19 is scary especially since we are still seeing this i will handle the skills analogy if you were given a bowl of skittles ever told a brain to kill you would you need a handful think about that when you're asking parents to send their precious and valuable children to school risking them to get sick with the virus not knowing how severe the riders can affect themselves thank you for your continuing

048commitment and services superintendent board members and guests my name is donna sherman and i'd like to speak to you tonight on behalf of your back-to-school plan safety is the first priority the first priority for all students and staff with that in mind i would like to ask you to consider that teachers not be mandated to report to work in their classrooms for virtual or distant learning i bring this to the board because of the mental health alert issue last week restricting many activities related to schools also for your consideration the concern that distance learning be in effect for the first entire nine weeks of school face-to-face learning can always be an option when it is safe virtual learning can also be in in-person learning with great delivery of instruction you have extremely talented talented teachers

049in this district please utilize their skills and training allow them to deliver virtual instruction for your students because that instruction can be absolutely outstanding and it can do a lot of face-to-face learning that way face-to-face learning does not mean they have to be sitting in front of you three feet in front of your face let's please consider safety first there is completing information out there about the risks involved with the safety and transmission of a virus that has no vaccine and today has no cure please please i ask you to consider safety first when reopening the schools in the almighty system thank you very much i can't imagine the amount of time the district the board members have been doing to do this so you know for both sides thank you all for doing this

050for our children no matter where we sit on the island um i wasn't sure what i was going to say because i spoke last time but i do i don't think safety is your primary mission educating children is your primary mission and doing that efficiently and effectively is your primary mission safety has to be considered certainly but your primary mission is educating our children um i think there's you're clearly seeing two different groups in the district within both students and within teachers and within families i would ask you to do all you can to to marry those groups together to the extent you can if you have teachers that aren't comfortable coming back yet i don't think anybody's asking you to force them to come back if you have students that aren't comfortable coming back

051face to face and i think you have enough teachers to do that please do everything you can to marry that up also say one more thing i think a lot of the comments you've heard us is us saying we want you to do this we want you to take this action we want you to press press press to do this for me and my family um i grew up two school teachers were my parents my dad was in administration for a long time i understand the hurdles you're jumping through both in the classroom and through tda the state county local you've got a lot of factors pressing on you um ask us for help as far as what you need so please let us know what impediments you're facing to getting back to a more

052normalized school and if there's things that the community can do to make that happen please let us [Music] thank you to our district they appreciate your service i have two points that i would like to impart with you one is to be disciplined as possible to ensure that safety evolved and two that our students are resilient and can adapt to change i have a transgender son who was a racing sophomore more than anything done to eventually disagree back here in this building to see his friends and teachers and this is terrible we have had many conversations at home about copenhagen says that there are viruses are governed by the laws curriculum standards are given by society and although it's complicated this isn't about lowering expectations it's about reasonable expectations and the reality is [Music] the

053health and safety of our students teachers and staff dante recently told me as much as i could test online learning if it means getting my peers friends and teachers that i am [Music] there are different symptoms of depression anxiety and other behavioral health issues and while this is alarming i also learned what resilient art kids are i see every day by a large case of nerve adaptive change to situations they can do hard things especially for the adults and caregivers in their lives come alongside them and help them along the way there's also help available through counselors at schools for community on adults model how to be flexible how to adjust to new circumstances how to talk about the feelings and cognitions it's the minimum to do the same i know that most of our

054students have resistance and have the capacity to continue to blossom even in these difficult times built into right to ensure that the mental health is intended too in conclusion my two points are surprising as such i would prefer that our kids do one time online as long as [Music] of community members became [Applause] miss kelly are you in the guns this past friday we posted that the protection of the health and wellness of our students and staff is our priority however you only proclaim this after metro health district ordered public school buildings to stay closed for freebies as well how can you convince your employees students and families that their health is the priority when you don't make the really tough decisions unless you are forced to do so tea has announced that school buildings

055can remain closed for up to eight weeks san antonio is in one of the most dangerous spots in our country right now and you are not even preparing parents for the possibility that eight weeks of remote learning may be necessary will you actually consider the health crisis surrounding our community and make necessary tough decisions or will you only do the bare minimum mandated by metro health your employees deserve to know your position we also requested that you survey the staff again because you did not adequately represent the results of employees that are comfortable going back to the classrooms that survey never happened instead a small invitation only focus group was held and the results were not disclosed to parents or staff in addition it was facilitated by a working parent of a child in the

056district which is arguably not a neutral choice to run a focus group we all have a right to know what percentage of teachers are willing to return to campus on their own report and what percentage of teachers are returning against their better judgment i am not going to support a school district that does not fully and unequivocally support educators my second major concern is that some alamo heights eleanor heights parents are neglecting to recognize the basic fundamental health rights of employees yesterday another petition began circulating demanding that you reopen and comments were included like if you don't want to do your job you should start looking for another job the majority of these petitioners are also annual contributors to the alamo heights foundation which raised over one million dollars last year yet they made no

057mention of backing teachers in any capacity they did not suggest that fund could be allocated for additional sick leave or coordinating attorneys to prepare living wells and every teacher going back into the classroom will need a living well this wall your lack of clear communication and transparency while reopening is really generating an unmanageable divide between your benefactors and your employees your teachers are left to defend themselves when they only want a safe work environment something that is potentially inconceivable as well as an educator myself i've seen teachers unpaid and overworked that i have never seen them so disrespected by a community before teachers are many things resilient creative resourceful and relentlessly generous but they are not immune to kobe 19. they are not easily replaceable as some parents in this community [Music] uh [Music] it's

058not fair that people come to stay home without health concerns full time if our teachers start being sick or dying what will happen to all the kids in their classes that will not be fair to them for students or their families members [Music] [Applause] you so this good one if you'd like to see please make your way down to the microphone and make sure that you've got a yellow sheet for her well thank you dr bashara and school board thank you dr chairs world war ii being here tonight uh i am a former educator in the northeast school district my wife is a former educator here in alamo heights school district she's also a graduate of this as our parents and grandparents and great grandparent we have a long history in this district i would

059like to say that i speak some people have spoken to the special education department previously but i have a child in the special education department and and remote learning disenfranchises those kids it does not work what we have seen over the course of the spring and summer when it was on and it was off and it was on that it was up again is every time the schedule changes for these kids who depend on consistency what we get at home is violent outbursts what we get home is a 14 year old who can't control her balance and goes to bathroom all over the place why because the consistency is broken down because when she sits in front of a computer face to face learning it does not happen it cannot happen with her she doesn't

060mentally connect that way and so what you are asking me to do when i was a teacher and i did it and i love teachers and i support teachers you're asking me to sacrifice the education of my child for the sake of you now i know that i'm asking the same thing and so somewhere we have to come into the middle i would suggest that doctors and all the people who operate around hospitals all the custodians all the people who work in their cafeterias are taking risks every day to do something that is essential that is nothing more than what we parents are asking of our teachers who are willing to do so to take a risk to do something that is essential for the disenfranchised special education department you need to step forward and

061come up with a plan that works for them because if you do not you are breaking laws because you're not meeting their eagles i hope and i think that's what matthew said [Music] uh [Music] um there's no easy solution to this if there was we would already have it and i certainly think that some final solution is going to have to be a hybrid that allows face-to-face learning in addition to online learning for those who are in categories um i've been working with three thousand other people every day since may and um if you're willing i'd like to share a little bit of advice the first is you got to be disciplined to do this safely first point is you got to change the policies for example you've got to make it clear that if

062anybody even has the remoteness of symptoms that they are comfortable and safe to call in or to not attend and you got to be prepared that people are going to be out 14 20 40 days with this thing it'll last a really long time face coverage [Music] you got to put up barriers somehow we found that plexiglass is really important because you can still see each other but the barrier exists and it allows people to have that face-to-face communication and and still at the same time have protection and we've learned a lot about what height barrier or what distance they need to be to be safe you have to have a layered sanitization and plan has to include um daily sanitization and it has to include response sanitization people are going to get sick and

063when that happens you've got to have a plan for how to deal with it and you gotta have contact tracing and that contract tracing has to require that the people who are attending face to face are willing to share who they've been with outside of the school [Music] since may 11th i'm okay but it takes a lot of work and i think you need to be willing to listen um what you're doing today and i very much appreciate the willingness to speak to you thank you you mentioned that oh yes thank you very [Music] much but i do think that it's very telling that there are so many people here tonight um all voicing our concerns about the same issue which is pre-opening school and ensuring that safety i am here tonight to is on

064behalf of staff and students alike that are afraid of their health benefits of space in the midst of the recent metro health corrective and rising hospitalizations in our state i'm finding it odd that there is still an unhealed emergency to get physical bodies back in those buildings uh many times are excited the uh american accounting and pediatrics is the proponent representing face-to-face instruction please know that the aap has walked back their initial statement as has been said earlier tonight last week the aap the american federation of teachers the national education association and the school superintendents association released a joint statement emphasizing we must pursue the opening in a way that was safe of all students to use in staff science should drive decision making on safely review schools public health agencies must make recommendations based

065on evidence on politics we should leave it to the health experts to tell us when the time is best to open school buildings and listen to the educators and administrators uh to shape how we do it vocals leaders will help experts educators and parents must be at the center of decisions as we have all shown tonight about how and when to reopen schools taking into account spread of 2019 in their communities and capacities of school districts to adopt safety protocols to make in-person learning safety feasible for instance schools in areas with high levels of governed 19 community spread should not be compelled to be open against the judgment of global experts and vote furthermore again as some of us have already mentioned uh mayor currently noted were sharp spiked and identified cases over the last

066few days it's clear in our community and take the fourth of july seriously um as we have hoped quote 19 isn't going away anytime soon especially if we don't keep the warnings from our health officials the argument to get bodies back in buildings raises two immediate concerns for me um out of many but someone's later the argument is based on the assumption that young people are at a lower risk even the recent incidents of christie florida and south korea suggested this incorrect i also wonder what is the rationale for heights at home teachers working in buildings no clear concise explanation has been given though evidence has been found on the tva website or elsewhere to suggest why it's imperative when it would seem to put those teachers in the very same at-risk categories in the

067situation that they're trying to avoid um i urge the district to monitor the data from people and dispose until san antonio has reached a minimum [Music] you should um without saying that we all want to be with our students we miss seeing them face to face [Applause] no no okay um so typically this is a special call for me this is so that i can provide my voice around issues of diversity equity and inclusion that surfaced quite prominently this past month since i sent my community message that on june 5th expressing my concern and my sadness around senseless loss of lives in our nation my door has been open and i have listened to countless um stories and experiences from students of color and their experiences on our campuses from staff members of colored cases

068as well and from parents who are raising your children in our district uh later on in the our school district was scrutinized throughout the community and even through the city and due to a student situation an issue on social media this incident further invited the opportunity for me to open my door and to listen and again i listened to countless experiences around some of our students and what some of our staff members and what some of our parents were living through um i've committed this past month to patiently and empathically listening and from all of that time in listening to stories and experiences i come my goal around this important work would be to ensure that our classrooms and our campuses are places that are free of discrimination and prejudice for our students and our

069staff members and that i would encourage us to embrace diversity racial equity and inclusivity to the point of entity that that those the words that we formed in our profound learner back in 2015. um i've served this district for quite some time now and i look back here on my side with continued pride and transformative efforts that really does set our district apart from others i find confidence through those transformative efforts um that we will be able to accomplish this goal uh i first cite the work that we've done we did together back in 2008 in our first iteration of strategic planning when we had a focus on equity and access in the district the results from that work resulted in opening our ap enrollment and our creative enrollment to all students it also resulted

070in a late bus for students to promote equitable access to resources and technique and sorry technology on all of our campuses the result of that work and that focus helped us move to what we call an enrichment model environmental education that is our glandular away from the legs traditional model of bible education where our students our bilingual students are educated in classrooms apart from their peers we also through that 2008 strategic plan we're committed to a robust response to intermission system to help address some academic disparities between our students to help students who are truly struggling in our schools and also to help close the achievement gap that we noticed at that time so i would also continue on through the historical perspective here to point out the work that we did in 2015 when

071we articulated um a bold profile learner for our district this focus initially called us to commit to diligent or work focused work around meeting the social emotional needs of our students that work resulted in national and state recognition due to our extensive priority around character education on all of our cases it also resulted in a nationally recognized unified champion program that promotes inclusivity at its highest levels for our special education students and that work additionally um resulted in teacher leadership efforts to lead legislative change at the state level this past legislative session regarding the importance of teaching tolerance and so it is from that transformative work those efforts over a long period of our history here um that gives me the confidence in moving forward in the important work that we can take on it

072also gives me confidence working and meeting a district that is committed to continuous improvement over time and has been proven in that it will set us on the right direction to achieve this goal um i recognize that these are whole words the words that explain the rationale behind the work and they're also words that hopefully describe some of the vision around it but today there's so much more um that our community is deserving of in his action and so tonight i call for us as a learning organization to prioritize the work around blessed false strategic action around the goal area of belonging and equity i'm calling on our campus leaders and our district leaders prioritize um to create a district equity council and the purpose of the district equity housing airport is going to be

073to establish a framework to identify to measure and to eliminate any bias prejudice or unlawful discrimination in our school system that may affect student achievement and learning experiences and to promote learning and working environments that welcome respect and value racial equity diversity and inclusion i will tell you that we're going to move into this work with open minds and the voting parts i would promise you that we will continue to commit ourselves to listening and to learning but we are also going ourselves to take these in partnership with our superintendent's efforts uh we have a resolution um whereas recent this increase the need for our community and leaders to stand in solidarity around our students and staff members of color to ensure a culture that embraces racial equity practices in an environment free from discrimination

074and graduates in our classrooms and on our campuses whereas on july 20th the hisc superintendent recommended the development of a district equity council for the purpose of establishing a framework to identify and measure eliminating bias predictors or lawful discrimination in our school system that may affect student achievement and learning experiences and to promote learning and working environments that walk with respect and value racialization inclusion whereas the board of jesse stands with our superintendent in support of the creation of the district council whereas hisd is a firmly is firmly rooted in our core values of humility empathy courage resiliency and dignity and into these values [Music] superintendent will prioritize the action planning efforts as part of the existing 2020 vision strategic action rule focused on belonging whereas the board of trustees and superintendent recognizes the responsibility

075to ensure that communities of color are heard by and have trust in our school district whereas the board and the superintendent recognize the need and therefore call for additional training support for ourselves our staff as well through very social and racial practices whereas the board of superintendent sandy [Music] actions as well as the efforts initiated by the 2020 vision strategic action process are prioritized to this end we will be bold in our commitment to make diversity equity inclusively in parent and organizational structure and policies our professional development efforts and our student experience in our efforts to further promote diverse equitable and inclusive cultures for our students for staff of this 20th day of july so i move do i have a motion moving on item 4b opening of school details presenters dr jimmy walker [Music]

076please and again this is just a reminder this is a presentation of the work that our staff is doing so that we can be able to act this isn't there's anything like that and just you know again letting you all know that we call this special meaning fully thinking that we have we're going to have a finalized plan roll out to the office our trustees into our community at this time um this is a plan that we continue to dedicate endless time and effort around we're coming to you tonight without a finalized and logistics around the two options that we are offering to our community moving forward for the start of the 2020 2021 school year and those options are highs and home or face-to-face instruction we're still standing the force for those two options

077to stand um but i want to be clear that these planes at this point are not finalized i'll study the last friday of our planning and what i say upside down for us there were updated flexibilities that we heard about on our ta commissioner call that night and then you all know we also um received notice of the executive orders from the bear county health they call us this summer opening our doors for face to face until september 8th and so we did it just like we were called to pivot back in march and we have that happiness and we have been thoughtful about our backup plans um we're committed working our hardest and working in the best way that we can to do our very best to meet the needs of students in a

078time of remote learning and we will be ready to do that for the first three weeks of school we have planned on this recognizing the conversation around the need that throughout the year we're going to have to pull back as the virus spreads in different pockets in different ways and go remote sometimes as a campus sometimes it's a small group so we need to be ready for this um because of the uncertainty around the spread of the virus so our presentation tonight does not focus on that remote time that three weeks remote time of learning and it's focused on the two options and our planning efforts today we know that being affordable and clear tonight but we knew this before tonight many of our families are ready and excited to get back in classrooms with

079our teachers we also know that many of our families are fearful about that and need the option for their families um to provide their learning in a facebook i'm sorry in hindsight for the option and that's where we are and i encourage us as we walk through this together to continue to try to extend care and compassion to parents who are making this very difficult decision um i'm hopeful that support for each other's choices provides us an opportunity in this community to embrace unity over divisiveness and so that's my challenge but i think us are here tonight we want desperately to be back in our classrooms with our students provided that we can provide this the safe and safety and health measures that may be prioritized to make that happen hear that love affair we

080also desperately want to support our families in a responsive and thoughtful we want both of those things for our community so frank i'm going to ask you to kind of talk through to some of the process piece before we get into the nitty gritty update thanks dr mr hornberger members of the board i will not repeat my 20 minute exposition from our june 25th meeting about the process instead i will simply summarize that we did have a variety of work teams that were divided since may that were may june and after the summer to stand up the variety of options that might we might be called upon to do whether it's face to face if it was safe we were allowed to or whether it's remote we plan all of those do a variety of

081worksheets like spain williams the second thing i want to summarize is that throughout all of the work we went to our community advising team that was made up of a student of teachers of parents that represented both the men mental community mental health and variety of expertise as well as folks to serve this district through leadership throughout the years already and so we had our last week last night last week with them and we met three times total so the summary of this presentation which shows the two versions face to face and heights at home are the results of all the work that we've done in all of those things on the outer support to provide options that are safe as safe as they can be allowed as well as educationally rigorous and so this

082is our best work our job was not to make a decision on how to save totals we had to do it our job was to design once they told us the way we should know we need to be ready to do it and so that's a lot of work and so that's what you're going to summarize i will say that when she summarized nice and cold right then we'll stop for a second and entertain questions from you all then we'll talk about the face-to-face option which is dr mentioned really can't kick off until uh september 8th anyway and then after that we need to ask you guys to consider the approval of our actual heights in the whole plan which is one of the new rules that dea is required your reload plan for ac

083persistent learning you guys think you're approved [Music] all right so emma is going to be my partners through these for me thank you so tonight we're going to talk through three uh key ideas the first one is we'll just pause and just lessons learned from the spring about continuous learning then we'll get into some logistic detail and big picture detail and we'll talk about the differences between continuous learning that we will have in spring and what we're bringing forward for the fall and then some specific details about heights at home and then lastly we'll move into the next steps so what we learned from this brain we sent out a survey in may to all parents to tell us about the experience of continuous learning and just like we wanted to know things to improve

084we also wanted to know things that worked well so we could build on those what were the strong structures that we could leverage for the next time of april the second fall so three of the key things one piece was what we heard from parents and from students and from teachers the most high leverage of continuous learning was the live interactions between teachers and students and so the survey question was how interested is your child and we will meet and we had 71 saying my child seems interested or very interested in enjoying the live session through via google me the next one was about social and emotional support our counselors were working tirelessly behind the scene in small groups in individual sessions and classroom sessions and the question was if your child has helped you

085know how to reach out 83 said yes i do know how to reach out if my child needs counseling or extra social emotional support the last was about communication dr bachara had multiple um on the road on location on location videos we had letters going out with campus information we had teacher information and overall the feedback was that the communication was solid so we knew moving forward the three things we wanted to keep in place were communication and multiple venues multiple ways solid special emotional consortium support and it's a life sentence when we ask parents about one positive experience some of the things we've heard or learning with my child i have a better understanding of what my son's capabilities are i think i've underestimated what he's able to do and i have a deeper

086respect for special education teachers about children learning life skills beyond just academics recognition of the hard work that teachers put in the connection and then just a little more family time a little more stress less stress but it wasn't we also asked about things challenges three of the key challenges we've heard from the spring one was about consistency some classes some courses had more direct interaction with educators than others we also heard from families it was quite hard if a google meet schedules were cancelled or changed and so we heard about that as we built in a plans around that instructional quality we heard concerns that the quality of online learning is just not the same as face-to-face and could lead to learning loss there were also concerns about the overall rigor and then finally

087one of the key things we've heard about challenges was just a sense of isolation students missing their friends their teachers and their overall school community [Music] the greatest challenges when we asked parents for themselves to speak up what was the greatest challenge to you as a parent two of the things that we heard from parents the first one was balancing working and teaching from home how difficult that was what a tall order that was as a parent we heard many parents speak about that tonight that very real reality of trying to be both parent and teacher we also heard again especially with the younger grades about the intense parent supervision needed we heard all those voices loud and clear the plan that we put in continuous learning was much emulated across the state it was

088quite good but it was a crisis response plan but just like we tried to afford the best plan for continuous learning in the spring we spent this summer trying to build the absolute best plan for remote learning anywhere in the state of texas we know it's going to be a part of our lives next year so if we need to do it we're going to do it really well so tonight i'm going to talk to you about some of the changes and some of the logistics for heights at home so these are three on this page three on the next six key differences between continuous learning last spring and heights at home for this year the first one is curriculum last spring we asked our teachers to focus on the essential skills rather than trying

089to speed through the curriculum and teach everything we ask them to go deep on just the most important things but this year we know that we need to teach the entire breadth and depth of all of our teams that's our plan from the beginning last year with our instructional materials teachers were using what they could come up with to quickly on a dime put together some pretty great lessons for kids but this year we streamlined the instructional materials for teachers to use relying on our district adopted materials which are all available in english and spanish they're all available in both print and online modalities we've also asked our teachers this summer to dedicate a lot of hours planning out lesson plans so that it is here's my instructional objective here's how i will teach it

090face to face and here's how it can be taught the exact same rigor if it is a remote environment so our curriculum is much improved than it was over the spring impact between face to face and heights at home the next point is writing in the screen for continuous learning grading was credit or no credit this year we're going back to our traditional grading that means numerical grades beginning in third grade we'll go back to our original report our original progress reports the dates and the formats for assessments the state of texas canceled star intercourse and douglas exams and alcoholics we also did not have our spring exams and we didn't have our engineer screeners this year we start at is back on the table it will be online and they're all flexible dates we

091will have our exams but instead of the exam exemption policy which includes attendance we're taking attendance out of that high school exam extension policy we don't want any students feeling compelled to come to school if they're not feeling well because they don't want to risk losing an examined session we will we know that having our beginning of the year assessment is essential so we will be getting into your screeners and in addition we're creating an academic integrity policy for at-home learners we've always had an academic integrity policy and this one will be more detailed to target students who are in heights at home you know the next three our teachers last spring sleep turn off dime did not provide teachers with much training because we are weak to launch continuous learning this year we've developed

092i think it's 87 hours worth of professional development for teachers and some total that we'll be rolling out that we haven't got to roll out will continue to roll out this includes training on technology instructional strategies and this grade specific and program specific training for our heights at home teachers in addition we'll have ongoing coaching beyond just a one-and-done training but ongoing coaching throughout the year likewise last year are just like our teachers turned on a time our parents turned on a time we didn't we weren't able to provide much of an orientation or a training to parents whereas this year that's our plan it's our plan to provide on-demand videos for parents that want to learn more about google classroom or seesaw or envisions map will have the resources available to support families that

093choose heights at home additionally with communication that i spoke to we'll continue to by the email we'll continue with district communication videos one thing we heard about player for parents was that it's difficult when they were getting an email every day with the lessons in addition to seesaw in addition to a remind 101 in addition to other text messages so we streamlined the communication to exclusively be see-saw from pre-date of third grade and exclusively google classroom from 4th grade to 12th grade for students during heights at home the last piece on communication is that it's difficult when you're a secondary teacher we get a secondary student upwards of seven teachers so one will be named as your mentor teacher that is the point of contact for the entire family while they're engaged in heights at

094home they'll have one person that they will talk to if there are concerns at home so those are six of the key ways that heights at home is different from continuous learning another point we saw from feedback was that question of consistency that it was a difference between grade level or classes so now there is a minimum number of minutes and the idea is that if you take a commensurate school day face to face you take out lunch you take out recess you take out transition periods and you take out any down time then in high school six grades four hours four hours of instructional time so when heights at home our plan is to build a commensurate day in terms of academic engaging with academic contact for students all of the google lead sessions

095will be recorded so they can be viewed later and there really is a plan in the schedule to focus on small group instruction not only for early years in guided reading but all the way through statistics biology for every class to focus on small group because it's really easy if you're in an online environment with 40 students to be quiet and go unnoticed but if you're in a small group with just six students and your teacher online then uh students are getting the attention that they deserve so there is a strong focus on small reconstruction i'm going to talk through the two schedules now the first one being elementary and then alternative secondary and again this is for heights and home students the day remains the same as it is with face to face one

096note the exact times are subject to change based on the campus so with elementary it begins as our face-to-face day begins with a morning meeting all students what did you do over the weekend how's your dog it's just this time to build as a classroom it moves into literacy walk note that is an hour and a half in no way is it our intention to have students sitting on a google meet for an hour and a half that hour and a half is built to provide flexibility for the teacher to pull multiple small groups during that block of time numeracy block fall is literacy block there's time for lunch and then there's what we're calling integrated block in the afternoon and this is where science social studies project based learning problem based learning all occurs

097during this block of integrated vlog the afternoon which goes from 1 15 to 3 is a new structure we're putting in place and it's called opportunity law and this is where there is scheduled student support it also is where one thing we heard from our teachers is about i miss recess time where i can just sit and talk with my students i miss this informal getting to know students so this allows support some social hours just sometimes the teachers can build some communication collaboration team building times there the very first group that we are bringing back in opportunity blog is our special ed kids the very first group that's part of the reason that this opportunity block was created so that we can provide specialized services at a designated time without needing to pull any

098special student out of core instruction we don't want them to miss their guided reading group because they need to go to a resource class so that's what that opportunity block is created in addition it's also office hours for parents to talk to teachers and office hours for students who need additional support to have a teacher who's available online that they can reach out to that teacher through a designated google lead needed on demand it includes teacher planning time and play speed planning time again talking about elementary there are several questions about specials so the specials in heights at home there will be live specials on a rotation this will be different activities that they can do there will also be recorded sessions so it'll be a combination of both there will be live pe as

099well as recorded and pe will focus on wellness and staying active thanks so much which is a little more complex than elementary and i know it's hard to see in the back so i'll talk about it kind of a conceptual level but this is different than what it did last year in general this is a modified block schedule so that means monday begins with a traditional schedule where students are going to every single class on monday the reason for this is that students have a successful week it's talking about here's our objective for the week here's the key due dates for the week here's the activities for the week so you go through your complete schedule in one day the rest of the week is a modified block to support that small group instruction that

100i was talking about notice that we do have one period that's slightly longer to accommodate advisory also note that seventh period seems slightly out of order seventh period is at the end of the day again when i said we are building the best remote learning plan in the great state of texas part of that includes having a way for students to continue to participate in extracurricular activities as you heard tonight football sports yearbook whatever it is those things matter to kids and if we have a student who has asthma and needs to be in heights at home but their reason for waking up in the morning is to be a percussionist in the band we want to make that happen so we've got this seventh period so that kids can come after school and before

101school so that the seventh period will blend right into after school practice so that students can continue to practice with those activities those sports before and after school the other pieces you'll notice on gold day there is opportunity block there as well on wednesday and on friday and this opportunity block again as i said before is for special education classes it's also giving us the flexibility as the year goes on if we have seniors who are on heights at home or any grade level who are participating in rocketry and need to come up to help build the rocket opportunities long that gives them a spot where they can come to campus even if they're a heist at home student and continue to participate in those vital activities and programs that we have that make our

102way so special so that's part of what opportunity blog is another piece that's new is we've got simulcasting um options this is where a teacher would be teaching a face-to-face class and there's technology that follows the teacher as she's teaching and that live class is broadcasted students who are in heights at home this is for teachers that are what we're calling singleton teachers that means it is where is only one teacher that teaches that class or there's only one section i think about the example i often use is ap european history so we want students to be able to participate in this class whether they're face-to-face or height is at home and so simulpads will enable us to do that [Music] secondary fine arms another point that is vital to just the animal heights experience

103so we know dependent on uil guidelines that um fine arts may have a different focus next year so it may be that from instead of marching that our band they're working on ensembles or solos that are a dance instead of working on football performances now turn to competition routines but if anyone can be incredibly creative and capitalize on any challenges that are thrown their way it's our fine arts staff our drama teachers are already thinking about how to pivot and focus on filmmaking and drama likewise our art teachers are thinking about how to focus on digital graphics and again likewise those class options here the class may be simon pass classes being clustered together with one specific google me time or there may be a designated art teacher who's working with classes throughout the day

104all of that's dependent on the number of students that are signing up for the classes and that are is the need for more than just online learning but to have paper pencil activities to have novels to have clothes to have reference materials so we are building what we're calling at home learning kids and you can see some pictures different grade levels such slightly different size boxes but one thing of note every single at-home kit will have a pre-programmed device in it so that when you open it up and you pull out the ipad for your kindergarten child every child and teacher can say touch the icon in the upper left corner and it will be the same for all students there will be workbooks there will be novels there will be habits of information that

105students that teachers are designing for students as well as additional resources like math manipulatives teddy bear counters protractors anything that our students need to learn from home we're putting inside the boxes um i have to give a huge shout out to where i'm at my school foundation when i called and said we need help with this we need help we need to get five thousand boxes they said we'll help and so i'm incredibly grateful for them i'm grateful for our teachers who in addition to planning lessons are also thinking through what are the materials that my students will need to do this at home and we're putting it away i'm not going to talk through some specific programs and the way that we've been bottled in designing how those would fall out in a heights

106and home environment firstly i'll talk about dyslexia and special education one thing that is absolutely essential is beginning of your assessment information we have meticulous records from our teachers about what was taught in the spring now we need meticulous records of what was actually learned so this beginning of your assessment piece is essential looking at where our students and dyslexia are in terms of the program of the lesson number that they're on and where our students serve through special education in relationship to their goals there will also be individual parent meetings in the fall to go over that beginning of your data to look at iep goals to see if anything needs to be changed on the iep paperwork in terms of services or compensatory services which we'll talk about in a second i spoke

107about opportunity block where we very deliberately schedule time to meet the unique needs of these students and then compensatory services are our special ed teachers worked incredibly hard to be the needs of our students but we know not every service happened not every lesson was taught we know that we need to continue moving forward with lessons for this year and services of this year in addition going back and recouping some of the lost instructional time from last year so compensatory services made the space for it during that opportunity block and all of those conversations will happen during those set parent meetings that are one-on-one meetings language programs again i did send an email to first and second grade language parent parents earlier this evening and then they'll go back to third through fifth grade one

108thing to note is that all of these supports are absolutely for parents and language programs who are in heights at home they absolutely are for all language for all language parents who are in face to face we put these in place because we know interruptions are going to happen even our families that choose face to face students may need to be our warranty for few weeks there will be interruptions that's why we put in some supports in place the first is spanish will remain the dominant language of instruction but there will be flexibility with english especially the beginning of the year to allow students to build authentic relationships with their teachers and their peers in a language for which they are the most comfortable home training are language program teachers or will develop parent orientations

109specific for language program parents who are doing heights at home so they understand what is the program estimating that what does it need to teach phonics in spanish so that they do have a working understanding of the work the routines that their students will have at home we will have homework help available this will be in designated hours monday through thursday just an on demand if you're trying to help your students do their homework at home when you have a question staff member will be there to help the summer academy is optional but it is every day in the month of june a half day program that will be a full immersion program we hope that in this time we'll be able to do some of the face-to-face things that we may not be able

110to do in heights at home because so much of language is about early language learning is about anchor charts it's about songs it's about dance and we want to make sure that none of our students want to ensure that all of our students have those opportunities so that's the summer academy that will be this summer and it is free of charge last is our language buddies we've always had fifth grade buddies but we've also had high schoolers that push into our language program classrooms and this year that may take place online but we will still develop those relationships as a complete language family a few key logistics i talked about the heights of atmo learning kits we will let you pick up where parents will come pick up the learning kids and we'll have herbs

111that need the teacher for parents that are in heights at home one of the questions that i've had a lot is about transition well if i select heights at home now but then later i want to change what does that look like so we have a plan in place of that students who select heights at home can transition into face-to-face at the end of every single learning quarter there'll be a form that goes on the sixth week of the 90s period that asked all families in high school what's your wish for the next 90s do you want to remain in heights at home or do you want to transition back into face to face for parents that select face to face but then later decide it really would be more comfortable and nice at home

112that can happen at any point during the 90s but we do it will probably take about two days to get the student's new schedule up and running during that time students will be working on independent work at home another point that's really important is short term absences and i'm defining short term as two weeks or less if and i need to quarantine for two weeks the idea isn't that i would leave my teacher and my peers and my routines for two weeks to learn something different and then bounce back the idea is that i will stay with to go to martinez i will stay with my homeroom teacher or stay with my original schedule and then work on work from home through google classroom much like we've always done if a child has chickenpox or

113for any other reason it needs to be out for a couple weeks it's only when a student needs to miss three weeks or more that they would move into heights at home just to limit those interruptions and transitions one thing i do want to be really clear about because this is going to be a year unlike any other year that means there will be scheduled changes throughout the year as we as students who transition from face to face into heights at home from heights at home back into face to face that means we're going to need to balance classes we're going to need to balance schedules and schedules are likely to change throughout the year in response to that finally one thing we're putting up on our website and we're adding to it every day

114is just more information for parents it is a big deal it is a big decision we want to empower parents with as much information as you can so we're putting up videos by the folks who are leading those programs for those courses or those campuses so that a parent can select to hear from and hear about just the programs that are most important to them so i'm going to show you one now and this is one put together by our elementary heights teacher it's about a minute and a half hello we're the heights team from cambridge woodridge and howard we want to assure you that we have plans to provide an enriching program of the same high quality for all elementary students who receive gt services whether you choose heights at home or face-to-face learning

115for your child's learning environment during the next school year [Music] high quality students who receive gt services whether you choose hikes at home or face-to-face learning for your child's learning environment during the next school year we will all be prepared to offer an advanced curriculum for our shoes we plan to continue our full-out program style for all of our shooters beginning to space to face learning we plan providing smaller group sizes with consistent grouping during gt classes in order to continue with lower group sizes the length of the height may be charged if you select height from home our curriculum is still going to be healthy will meet the curriculum for both group stays the same we continue with stem activities critical and creative problem solving research all to enhance our project-based learning style in

116addition we plan to continue sending two newsletters and two progress reports each year we believe we created a community of learners so we will encourage collaboration among all of our students regardless we look forward to next school year and we are committed to serving every student in our gt program we look forward to an exciting year new learning opportunities so we talked about many things about heights at home we've talked about how it was different from continuous learning last spring we've talked about some key logistics we've talked about schedules we talk about curriculum and we talk about specific some specific programs and then our efforts to continue to provide additional information to parents to make a well-informed decision for their own students so our next session we're going to go on to [Music] uh [Music]

117a couple quick questions but first of all no one wants to be here but here we are nonetheless so i thank you guys for continuing to not [Music] but for um auditing a certain level of rigor or oversight you know in the classroom so if we thought through yet what the plan is going to be for either assessing the equity for each student that's engaged in [Music] because i think both are important in terms of the river the final assessments the common assessments are exactly the same whether a student is in heights of health or their face to face so we would expect the same level of questioning the same answer of the response and grades between those two programs in addition our universal screeners we're putting back in place students that do need an

118extra push needs a measure of support we spring those students more frequently up to every two weeks to see if there's any gaps in learning or if there's progress being made and in terms of engagement we're looking at that's multiple ways we're looking at did students submit work did they make progress on work did they engage in a class with a student with a teacher so that we're tracking that on a daily basis as well just like in a classroom under my eyes i want my students to know that they're engaged we're asking our teachers to do the same when students are in a remote with the singleton teachers i know we're trying to balance curriculum also with small groups valuable better remotely [Music] are you just trying to balance offering with group size for

119engagement reasons because i can see some [Music] we will train our teachers to engage with students who are in a simulcast environment but it's still not the same whereas if i'm in a google meet with you and just six students you're getting all of my attention okay and then the last question i would ask them officers [Music] you know regardless if we go back normal or not is that something that we're kind of keeping an eye on absolutely um we gathered a lot of feedback in may we had students over the summer who engaged in our high school summer classes to engage in that online online or figuring out what worked during the summer environment to keep that and what didn't work so that would [Music] change one of the concerns we're hearing a lot

120about and of course were the parents of younger students and younger students needing to be in school that they're the ones who are losing the most one thing that struck me as i'm watching this presentation thinking about it we spent all this time developing this engaged classroom model and i remember going on school tours as a school board member stuck at woodrington a first grade classroom and i'm sure all your parents who went in there the same thing you'd see your kids working finally and independently are those principles are we able to carry them over in one to take some of the load off of our kids a bit and or our parents and also i mean it seems to me that we ought to be pretty good is that i mean do you find

121some overlap with that yeah i love that question thank you for that um especially because one of the things that makes engaged classrooms so successful isn't a chair it's not a table it's our teachers and it's the curriculum that is assigned by teachers and they're still doing that in a remote environment so part of what makes the engh classroom are the blueprint units as we call them which are the units that do end in a culminating performance for our product that's still happening in a remote environment there is still small group collaboration we are going to be much better at it this fall learning based on the lessons we learned in the screen but we'll still have students collaborating and still have students working on some in-depth authentic problem solving even when they're in a

122mexican environment and then the other another student population group i'm concerned about a couple parents spoke about are the our special needs students in particular missing out on just the human interaction that can be particularly difficult have we given any thought to take something like robin's or one of our smaller campuses and opening it in a very small way for students who need the interaction more and i'm not saying that there are any students who don't we at all but maybe our most vulnerable population we need to get creative the first version of the tea rules they had this three grandpa where you can say hey we're gonna soft open with remote for some but we can kind of ease into folks like that under the current rules of the bear county we cannot and

123so your question is a great question and given enough flexibility for tda and we could do that we currently can't do that i mean since it's a health group that's kind of controlling what we get to do all right it strikes me that they'd be a receptive audience to that kind of place or is that a foolish thought i will let mr anderson asked was it seems like the health will be open to that kind of flexibility and dr bashara said that is something that our student favorite county superintendents asked that kind of flexibility for the bear county folks period so we actually did that [Music] folks superintendents all the 17's who were in 1944 and they were asking us for feedback about the kinds of things that we would want to have what is

124one of these things we listed out we have some very severe uh needs that we would love to give you guys but again we know we have some flexibility moving forward up to eight weeks if we were in this at this point but everything changes you know day to day meeting exactly the one thing i'll just add to that is one thing we always consider when we're talking about students or through special education is the least restrictive environment and so putting all of those students on one campus by themselves while it may seem good we would want to ensure that we're always providing students the training you talked about for on-demand can you talk a little bit more about it i think you said it's available to make [Music] and whether that would be just

125for families that select heights at home or available for all and the insurance is going to be available for all so any parent that wants to learn about google classroom because all students will be using google classroom they will be there all parents want to learn about seesaw or learn about the specific instructional materials we're using or about supporting your child's social emotional health all of those will be available for all in addition any of our lives or any meetings that we have we will record those so that they'll be available for parents that aren't able to attend at the exact moment those trainings happen jimmy along those lines in the opportunity block didn't also say that the parents could get them at that point and talk with teachers or not yeah that's a great

126question also the question was about opportunity block when it says office hours yes absolutely that is a great time for parents if they do want to schedule a time to talk with a specific teacher or a group of teachers it could occur during those office hours i have one quick question and you may not be able to answer this because we may not be at that point yet but uh along the lines of transition uh if we have students that want to transition back from from heights at home to face to face how are we going to accommodate that if we are if if if we're being told how much space we have i mean if we have one extra child wanting to come back i mean we can't create i mean we can't create

127classrooms at that point because we're gonna be maxed out in space because of our physical distance are we gonna tell students no they can't come back to support students but again by the time of when students transition because there are grammars around my students and i have been outspoken on this with groups of superintendents because we were told that you can transition back in grading periods i'm sorry um the impossibility of transferring members of students back into image just so so that we can fully provide for building you know operations staffing there's an incredible amount of details of our staffing that goes into this as well and that was not heard very clearly so that's where you have to adhere to um three nine periods to transition back and forth again if a student wants

128to transition out of face to face into remote you can do that [Music] with what is an incredibly complex process as far as building staffing facilities again the report will go out in the week 6 of the 90s asking all families who are in nice at home what's their preference for the next nine weeks that will give us a couple weeks to figure out the staffing the physical facilities to communicate with the family and also so that we have a smooth transition so that a child doesn't feel like today and tomorrow i have a totally different teacher that there is a nice smooth transition from one option to the other so as as you switch it out i'm going to be afraid overview two options are being presented to you all today and the two

129options that parents have available to them are the heights that co-ops will be finished at and we're about to ship them to face option to reframe just a bit say one of the great things that we all love about the district is that we all assume good intent from each other and that's i've been the district 20 years and it's always been that way teachers uh i love the teachers and whether they believe it or not i love them to death and i always assume the best intent from any question they have or any suggestion they make i love the parents and i always assume the best intent of any question they have or any comment that they made likewise i presume that everyone loves me too or at least if you don't love me

130you assume the best intent of what i'm saying and so as we lay out heights and homes it's important to clarify that we're required we have to have an option called nights at home so if you feed that constructive criticism or questions you have i'm assuming they're based on how to make heights that aren't the best i surely hope people aren't giving trojan horses suggestions or questions that are designed to say i want any heist at home i just want face to face so i'm going to ask some questions at home people argue that i know but i just want to make sure that that's kind of what the environment were in i say that to shift now because we're about to talk about face to face and just the same thing we're tasked to

131create uh the safest option to mitigate risk knowing that we are as people mentioned like the diggins we relied on cdc diagrams we talked to smart people who know stuff about the last post we got input from a lot of folks people say they want to be transferred i think danny's been very friendly which is like we don't so what you see before you then as we explain face to face i'm going to assume good intent and that was everyone holding the studio intent from us too as we're trying to create the safest best environment of a face-to-face environment when the health situation allows us to do that and so all the questions on the feedback we get i hope come through the place and say great when we do have face to face whenever

132that is let's make it the best possible and to have a um plan in place but we have to we have to just definitely plan something we've got to get feedback to make that the best face to face not kind of like we don't want to go face to face like i get that but the place for this is [Music] so we're going to talk through several of the key components that will help to mitigate any risk for students that are choosing our face-to-face option so i'll talk through several different categories and then i'm going to pass it over to dr alvaro to talk about some more buildings and large topics the first one is one that um it seems like it's one that should be so obvious but it's something that we have to

133be very diligent about and it is high hand hygiene etiquette one thing we'll ensure is that there's frequent hand washing and sanitation that there is hand sanitizer at every entrance in every hallway in every classroom and we're requiring everyone who enters our building to sanitize their hands when they walk into our buildings the last one is one that i as a teacher think it's essential is teaching our students good hand washing techniques how to get thumbs how to get clean fingers like it's a really big deal so that we're not running hands underwater but we're explicitly teaching this to students so that's the first part and i'm thinking the next one is about base coverings and facts all employees all visitors all students in grades four and above will wear masks or face shields on

134our campuses and they'll cover the nose and the mouth all of our students regardless of what age they will wear masks when they're riding the bus to and from school and when they're entering and exits our buildings when we can't ensure any social distancing and then we'll go home for students that are younger than grade 4 we really want to try to ensure that we have a natural classroom environment and so that we can see faces we're teaching products so that we are purchasing face shields for every student in grades pre-k to 3 they'll remain in the classroom and they'll be warned at any time that social distancing can't be maintained so for instance if six kids are moving into the literacy center and they're going to be working and playing here together they'll have

135on face shields there's also will be times that mass part will not be required when students are exercising when they're eating or drinking or at any point that social distancing can be maintained so for instance the second grade classroom goes out into the imaginarium of woodbridge to do some silent sustained reading and their spread of heart students would not need to wear a mask i want you to know that we have worked really diligently to ensure that we do have personal protective equipment for our faculty and for our students we've ordered 31 000 adult disposable mass 13 child disposable mask eight thousand adult reusable three thousand child reusable masks twenty three thousand love sixty six kilometers 521 gallons of hand sanitizer 600 adult face shields 1600 child sized face shields and plexiglass dividers for every

136teacher's desk in our entire district so we've tried to order these things in advance knowing that often there is a back order of some of these things [Music] our elementary students will be grouped together often with elementary classes that are departmentalized meaning one teacher might teach language arts and social studies another one math and science and we might mix groups depending on printing and pulling a guided reading group next year students will stay with their class and if they're departmentalized the teacher would rotate rather than the students one point about all of this is that we do have district guidelines but then it's up to the campus to figure out how to employ that on a very unique campus so when we talk about entry exit and visitors this will be a plan that's unique

137to the campus the arrival procedures at the high school are very different than the arrival procedures at howard early childhood center but each campus will work diligently to ensure that they have arrival and dismissal staggered times staggered procedures to try to eliminate large groups another piece is that we love our volunteers that come into our campuses and assist in periodic ways but next year we will be restricting visits to the campus to only those that are essential to school operations and anytime a parent does need to come up to have a conference with a teacher that will need to be through a scheduled visit and when they check into the office there'll be a check-in procedure and all visitors on campuses will need to wear a face mask another thing that's important to us is

138that we limit the sharing of materials this includes devices this includes pencils this includes art materials so that's the new structures in classrooms it also means we will be limiting the items brought from home so that students that bring something bright and shiny from home into the classroom and everyone wants to touch it that will be limiting that we also will not have our water balance in use so that these students will need to bring water bottles from them one thing that we um i'm incredibly grateful about is all of our campus do have some beautiful outdoor spaces you've got some pictures here of our wood ridge imaginarium our junior school outdoor space and our cambridge outdoor classroom we will be maximizing that i also had the survey put out a call just to see

139if we would have any intent donated as of last check we have 263 offers so we can set up spaces each classroom may have their own designated outdoor space where they could go or small routes can go to the outside take off mass and breathe in fresh air one of the questions we've been asked a lot is how are you going to manage this well there's one thing our album makes teachers do well is teach so we're going to teach our students how to wash hands we will teach our students how to wear masks and another thing that's essential is we will expect all of the adults in our buildings to follow our guidelines because we can say and say but what parents what students are going to follow is what we do and do

140and do so step number one is making sure that our the adults in our building are adhering to our protocols and it's also rather than approaching there will be consequences wearing a mask is an expectation there will be consequences but that can't be our first or our only way of managing this we manage this by creating a culture that says we care about each other i was in a meeting with dr dr bashir just earlier this week and dana's in the face shield frank's in a face shield and i'm a bright yellow mask the reason is i care about those two people crazy i deeply care about the family that i go home to and i care about the families they go home to so that's why i choose to wear a mask and so

141part of that is asking all of us just like we're asking across san antonio to say i'm doing this because it's important to my community it's also important because we're going to have students who make different decisions and as a culture we have to appreciate and abide and respect the decisions that each family makes it also has to be okay if a child needs to warranty for two weeks when they come back that it's okay for them to come back so our counselors are working together to create a child-friendly language and culture of care compact that students will sign that just is situated in the place of character education about caring for each other so uh in october of 2018 um we did a series of community safety talks and one of the guiding principles

142behind a school safety building security and marketing campaigns like safety drills and stuff one of the key uh concepts behind that i think is happening here that's the whole notion of levels of safety right and so you have these uh um well you can't totally mitigate uh danger you can have these levels of safety to help kind of slow down uh the situation the the same can be said here something mentioned as well is that while the virus can't there's not a we cannot eliminate the risk of the virus all of the things that jimmy has already listed are these various levels of creating levels of safety and creating an environment that has multiple levels at decreasing the risk whereas no no one really is the biggest deal although there are some that are more

143uh research so some are more powerful than others but it's all these different levels so i think that's the framing as we lose to all these things because they're both various levels one of which is cleaning and sanitation and so you all last me i believe uh approved the addition of seven new custodial positions to help in rotation to a variety of things to clean common areas throughout the day to make sure you complete hourly uh to make sure that in the evenings we'll do the foggy disinfectants that you guys have seen in the news and whatnot cdc is recommended sort of a lot of being services in the classrooms because that's safer for kids to be around then other kinds of disinfections will all have that there hannitized hand sanitizer in classrooms and then

144the bottom things are about hvac and ac because we're looking at the research about ventilation and how to minimize risk through maximizing ventilation next slide uh likewise uh self screen screening is uh shown to be have a pretty big effect that is folks before they even leave their house answer a series of questions uh about symptoms and based on how you respond it suggests that you should go to school or not we are actually investigating some online apps that would be very useful for that for both parents as well as staff before they leave and allow us in real time to know that people have checked their their screening but that's one of the big things that would happen we had completed a process map for what happens if you have been exposed or what

145happens if you've come down with it we've pushed all that out as well um talk about transparent working drafts are online right now and we're still working on them the stuff that jimmy said about what campuses are working through everyone needs to know that our traditional plan anyway was to wait until tda told us what to get to lock those down i want to be the dead horse july 7th we found out for tda what those were so we started working a little bit and then last friday they changed it as well but campuses were digging deep with them these next two weeks that ironed out those various specific things which i just said the big enough principles of faith about work that they have to turn around by the 27th to have those various

146iterations now once again a reminder that we don't have to have those we won't have to use those until there's a tuesday after labor day the way it is now so our plan is never ready for august 17th my point is that we have a little wiggle group as well to keep working those and getting feedback from staff as well as everyone else we could consult and we have processes in place now i will say uh in talking to the local pediatricians and doctors in town parents have questions about so what happens if somebody has that what's going to happen okay how are we going to afford that we told the staff in a call we had last thursday we're still uh we have ideas how to do that but i'm working on articulating that

147in the right way right so i'm being transparent okay i'm working through the because the answer to that is not like a clear coupling right it's [Music] so the fact that everybody's wearing a mask means the odds of having direct exposure in the classroom low and so but we're still tweaking through the way to explain that to folks in a digestible way and so it doesn't we have plans but i think i'm just not i want to make sure that our explanation isn't tight before we start pushing that out [Music] this is what we mean by x and so close contact can be defined by um less than six feet apart for 15 minutes or greater not wearing a face mask so this is one of the things in some of our advisory groups and

148some of the feedback i've been getting as we're uh drafting things uh we have some people in the medical profession called first responders that say it's really important be clear to everybody that when they when you ask them if they've been around the questions without a mask because we have a lot of medical professionals who have been around but they have all their ppe on and so that's not the question when you ask about close contact it's without an accident and then it's uh second dot is living with somebody you're caring for somebody that has a lab diagram of that and by the way that's another thing we have to define right lab uh lab tested and whatever ga calls it right because tda is the definition you have to go search the cdc website

149for that there's a definition for what lab lab cdc um and it's too long for me to say that but we have it and it's not the antibodies but it's very clearly defined by the cpc and then likewise contacting infectious secretions [Music] and so this is one thing that's honored this is honoring like this now and so we're just going to keep just kind of educating each other about what we mean by close contact that's it keep going that's it one thing i was wondering about is i know some dea does not quote encourage temperature checks on the regular um but i was wondering how much we considered um i really ordered something on the mercy are we giving the teachers you know i want to get concerned about making the teachers comfortable you know

150do they have the power authority to give temperature checks freely is that something that we feel comfortable doing i mean obviously the nurses have that um that's kind of part of my question and part of the question is to you know if i'm picturing a parent or a teacher that you see a kid come in day after day after day and you know that mom dad has coped and under the ta rules they are required to be able to continue to send that child to school as i read them [Music] yeah so i wouldn't want to answer your questions yeah let me just know what you just mentioned the question so if that's happening um can we have across the board rule that the nurse or teacher is checking that particular child's temperature every day

151if they're coming to school every day they're living with someone that has an active case of it so that's sort of the temperature-related questions i had and i guess i was wondering too um along the lines of what brian is asking about the teacher participation right now in the focus groups and with your calls you know having seen all of this work that you all have done and all of these precautions are are they by large getting into a more comfortable place and do you feel like they are you know on the whole being staffed in the way that they need to be with heights at home versus face to face and you know basically what's the spirit lying there because you know obviously there there was some division in this room that i don't

152think truly exists in the real world in alpha heights like i just like to think that our parents love our teachers we adore our teachers and i think that most of the parents do feel that way but at the same time i'm seeing this division that i've never seen before in all of my life about heights where there's some hostility there and i i just would like to see that disappear and i would like us to get to a place where with all of this work that we've done the teachers are joyfully coming back because they do feel like we as a school district are keeping them safe you know so that's a more big picture question but the thermometer stuff's an easy one um on our advising council on wednesday um i'm gonna just

153say and i'm saying the spirit of uh speaking with good intent but they uh they they fully worded their guidance okay and i checked with people on this uh if if you're if your kid has a positive testosterone a household with somebody has positive uh intestine you are not allowed to come to school you're absolutely not allowed right and so then they they that's the lead and then they try to soften it back by saying instead you should opt for the remote option right well that's a that's an overly generous word you can't come to school now how how we deal with you is you know didn't talk about what you're asking for you know a few days that's within three weeks but i checked with this and i talked to the lawyer today and

154he's like yeah they there they just they try to them too much and make it look ambiguous but it's pretty clear that especially when you read the next the very next section of the the guidance says an individual who you know like when it talks about an individual employees it's very clear about not coming to school it's the same effects for kids too so that's the first question about that the sunday's question about temperatures was actually asked by the teachers and this is one that i can say we're still working [Music] the reason why you have the screen is a series of questions and no one question is the you know the categorical so the temperature alone is never the only thing it's one among all the other ones and so the idea is that

155if you ask all the questions including temperature before they leave home that's a higher thank you about rather than the word to use but that's that's more effective the id number two that if anybody suspects a kid has any of these symptoms including a temperature teachers i'll absolutely need to send those kids to the nurse so the nurse can be the person that does the temperature check the idea of putting teachers in positions where they have to do that kind of stuff is not optimal uh the the best thing is to say let's get the nurse involved asap if you think that's the situation but that's the latest right and that's being between my research the cdc me talking to pediatricians me talking to doctors all since thursday when we had our talk with teachers

156the idea is that clinically picked by sliding teachers have enough to be worrying about in this face-to-face environment than to be you know have a host of a temperature and your last question i'm going to try to answer what i've heard right from teachers and from what we've heard here tonight i what we heard here tonight what i heard from folks is to say hey it's the external environment that's scared to think inside of us it's the number of uh cases in bear county people went up the ladder and they had given the external environment uh what we're hearing is great yeah bring it together like that external environment is what is scaring me and so what we're trying to answer is what we do internally my job is to make sure i design face-to-face

157for folks that's as safe as it can be given the external environment which is something that i got in control of and i don't have the power to say it can come but i think from what i've heard from a lot of people it's the external environment that's freaking folks out that's not necessarily a little more specific though to where we're headed um [Music] don't worry about they're all off just keep great okay so jimmy's hosting multiple meetings with our staff members this upcoming week um to really outline the commitments around being an um heights at home teacher because there are we did not have expectations and guidelines in place for this and so we really retweet that to make sure that when folks sign up to be a heights at home teacher they're fully

158aware of what the expectations are around them and so after we get through those as meetings information as we could have provided that day last week when we provided our coffee talk with everybody we're going to ask those to take another survey and and give us updated information about where they are so we don't have the 26th of july and so we'll get better members from the community about their final commitment at that point we will know the numbers that we need we'll look at what we hear from our staff this week um once they issue that final survey just as a follow-up for for heights at home or remote learning um are we uh this is something i've been hearing from parents some are we expecting that we do take advantage of that 10

159capacity for the facility and have all of the faculty on site for that remote learning or are we allowing them to continue to work from home like they did in the spring yes at this point there will be three different ways to be working one will be in a face-to-face classroom the other will be providing additional heights at home from our buildings because we did hear very clearly that folks needed additional support and we're able to provide that support if our teachers are back in the classrooms um we also need to culminate this all hands-on approach because as we roll through some of the campus logistics that are going to need to take place to distribute the meals to our students and lunch at breakfast to keep our students socially distanced and following traffic patterns

160we're going to need folks we're going to need more bodies to do that we're going to need folks who are able to help um cover some lunch time right i mean just like the nitty-gritty logistics so that's the second group of teachers we'll have teachers back in classrooms providing the at-home remote heights and home instruction and then we're going to have some other teachers who have some medically documented needs that we'll need to make some accommodations around and to provide them some support with as much support as i can possibly provide them um as we move in that time of the remote operating to start off i mean i want to provide those supports i need to provide them throughout but that threw us curveball on friday and i don't know how i pick shopkins

161that i want to think about i want us to very creatively think outside the box to figure out how we how dana the superintendent does her job and runs for eight girls you know but with so many teachers that are in that situation and i want us to be very um during that three week time i've got i've got a question and i don't know if we want to go back to the slide about it about our students especially our elementary students wearing masks if they're going to be physically distanced why do we need them wearing masks in the classroom so you know we have medical experts but then they all disagree with each other and so we cherry pick which ones pick our side and we use those sets but but in general it

162seems like uh like that it's really important to protect adults because adults are the ones that are getting are the research shows that adults are more susceptible to getting than the kids so kids uh his work asks sure we want to keep the kids from getting in the kids are also carriers and so kids wearing masks uh helps protect the adults that they work with from getting over is that a fairway and i'll add to that frank that also when we think about inside of an elementary classroom a student may be sitting quietly in your desk right now for this minute but that does not mean that they would stay sitting at their desk longer than a minute and so by having face shields on our students when they're sitting here or when all of

163a sudden they need to get up and go sharpen a pencil then they can get up and go sharpen a pencil because asking a child who's five years old i think i need to sharpen the pencil i need to put on my bass because i need to walk over there it just ensures that we do have that level of protection throughout the day now if they can't be spaced apart and we can assure their face apart the mass can come out and that's how we're partly that we're hoping that we can really capitalize on some outdoor spaces so if they're if they're if i'm hearing you correctly if they're physically distanced and they're in a situation where the teacher is going to be speaking to them and they're staying in their desks they can take

164their masters off well right right now he says 10 years enough half of you were invested in social situations but you know yeah so if the governor were to lift his mass mandate that would apply to our students correct well we have to talk through that right and in other words that would be big you know what's providing comfort and compassion here right now is understanding that the spread is innovative with the face but it seems to me because the environment is constantly changing and we don't want to keep moving the goal posts on everybody that it would be nice if we as a district could say these are the mile markers that will drive our decision making and as we get through those mono markers the requisite decisions will be made it sort of

165feels like we don't really have that control is that accurate like i'm looking for let's just say just to start off let's just say start off because what i'm concerned about is we're doing all this work to figure out the best environment to educate kids but there's an element of viruses exist and never frankly go away like meningitis is still out there right and yet we don't want to act in a way that completely shuts down social interaction forever right we all want to get to a better place are we being allowed to define that better place or is somebody else get to define when that better place arrives and we react to their listeners you're right it depends like let's say let's say the three weeks expires it's labor day and they don't issue

166another order and they but we don't know that they're going to give us last week i believe this might be helpful for some parents just a talk that the governor was giving to the media that that was that he indicated that those were going to change without superintendents actually receiving any official new guidelines didn't that kind of happen overnight the governor's announcement yeah it's helpful to understand just how quickly these things are changing and how you guys are number one you get some official in guidance you're but you haven't received the directive to make that change yet and that kind of happened last week right yes the commissioner announced the flexibility of the four week um transition back into schools to the media and to parents on the website before he announced it in our

167one o'clock call to superintendents that's what you're doing thing for yeah to understand i gotta go i just talk about the seven days he reminds me of what cost that those are going to be [Music] uh [Music] based on what's going on at the state level again all of those cuts the 25 cuts that were made at that time have never been reinstated and so we're moving forward at a time of continued budget deficit planning [Applause] they'll be trained especially to help plug in these whatever we end up doing so that's that's positive [Music] i have a quick one frank at the bottom of one of your slides it got cut you couldn't see it perfectly and so i don't think you got to it but i was something i was excited to hear about

168today on uv light protection potentially in the vents i saw it i saw this kind of can you tell us what's what the progress is on that because that's something okay and so as you can see there's a lot of demand for those tests right but uh we definitely were on the [Music] is that something we can potentially use bond money for since it's part of the building structure so okay we're working with our current contractors helping us investigate the different options [Music] and this is kind of off the table now but it'll come up down the road when we have our dual tracks instead we're going to go to standard reading for both how do we really have great action with people going through two completely different tracks i mean it corrects me that

169we're going to try and be grading half of [Music] and so both classes are going to read the same information they're going to take the same quizzes at the end one group might make a post report and be it on the wall of the classroom the other group might make something at home take a picture and post it on a virtual wall but they could be great at this thing and then as i said before we will have that academic integrity contract that will be in there so some of the assessments that are done in the remote environment may be slightly different so what i mean by that it may have a similar essay question but it may also have an oral exam part to it whereas if i'm in a face-to-face it may be

170two essays so there will be some re-thinking retooling of assessments but the rigor may be the same just the causality may be different the other thing i had i don't [Applause] uh that's a great question you know that's a challenge that's always the challenge when even face to face that yeah um so i'm going to do this and then i'll talk on that so the part about team planning like this is essential because in the past i might have my same group of english two students all here but next year we're likely to see kids transition in and out either they might be in my room for nine weeks they might be in dr alvaro's class for 90s so that planning together as a team is essential so that if i receive kids they're still

171on track with where students in my classroom are so that's also helping us just from a pragmatic practical standpoint to ensure that although the modalities may be different they're not two separate tracks it's just we have some students who are doing their learning at home and some students will be face-to-face and the academic integrity part is i think i've mentioned this before but it is it was designed by a junior school teacher in collaboration with a high school teacher about where is language that is specific to academic integrity if you're learning at home and one thing to note is that it is signed by parents it is signed by students and there may be times that we do ask a parent to doctor as the child takes the test at home so that the parent

172is signing off i watched my daughter meredith take her math test and they're signing off so that there is a kind of a 360 approach one from a character ed i'm a person of integrity but also trust and verify parents are signing off as well part of the reason that we are deploying the chromebook devices to every student we can lock down the browser on chromebook we can push up some secure testing environments as opposed to their own personal devices so it's like a multi-faceted approach integrity support from parents and support from technology and innovative assessment design earlier if there are no other questions we'll move on [Music] so i don't really have a question i just want to make a comment for people that are still here and then hopefully the people that are

173listening and um obviously this is a very emotional time in our school system for everybody um i think the school is doing a really good job of providing options and i just hate unfortunately i've had to read a lot of really unkind emails and i just would ask that everybody had a patient with one another be open-minded see the other side um it's not one side against the other the school is trying to accommodate everyone which is kind of impossible right now but i just feel like respect for both sides is very important hearing those thoughts is very important be open-minded to what other people's struggles are and what their concerns are and again there's not any one right answer unfortunately and i just really thank that everybody try to come together in some way

174whether you agree or disagree try to hear both sides and support each other that's right consideration of approval of asynchronous learning anastasia the tda is asking that we not only submit a plan but that it's approved by tda and so what they're approving now what we've presented to you is much more comprehensive than what has to be approved through tda they're asking when we submit and get approval for our instructional schedules which i talk through tonight our instructional materials which are our district um adopted resources they're asking that we submit our specific professional development plan for teachers and our plan for the orientation for parents as well as our specific progress measure progress monitoring tools so those are the four components out of one of the things we would like because the time that it

175will take tva to read and approve all of these plans throughout the state of texas is going to take some time so we would like to get our plan um we started paying for this moment back in may and we have been talking with our administrators and our teachers and reading survey data all throughout the summer and gathering ideas to put together to have a plan before we ever knew we would have to submit with the tea once we knew we had to pull in the tga i just pulled all of those good ideas we've been talking about all summer and formatted it into our plan then i asked for any teachers administrators that wanted to help i gave them that rubric that tda is using and asked teachers who are incredibly adept at using

176a rubric to evaluate something to evaluate our plan and so the feedback from them helped me um itemize the specific places where i needed to put some more information into our plan but we've already gone through kind of a vetting process with our teachers so that we feel like what we submit to ta will be approved at first admission and we won't get revisions back just think that's really important that you all recognize so this is not a plan according to dan and jimmy frank this is a plan that has been thoroughly vetted by professional teachers [Music] so do i have uh do i have a motion to approve the asynchronous learning mode go ahead a second second all in favor post motion all right thank cares frank and jimmy so we will move next

177into uh [Music] executive session so if there are no objections we will from the board we'll move into executive session for texas government code section five five one zero zero one thank you all for being here at this time the public portion thank you