001now the recording process uh is about to be done um just wait for a couple more people to enter the room just have like 30 seconds okay thank you i'm hearing you a little bit breakout for some reason barb is that just me no i'm hearing that too i'll put my headset on thank you okay all set great thank you um good evening everyone like to call the meeting to order first item on our agenda is uh public comments and uh barbara should i do the written ones or should we do the folks that are on on the line i can go ahead and read the summary for the written ones please item 2.2 uh am i reading the four pages no no the public comments section has a summary public content section uh i
002only see the written statement submitted i don't see a summary under 2.2 i only see the pdf with four pages oh the bullets yes correct that's correct thank you one in support of offering spring sports only if appropriate uh appropriate safety precautions mask wearing practicing outdoors staying six feet apart and reducing car pools slash shared rides to and from practice are adhered to and three in support of making sports happen so thank you so much bart for getting those summarized for us and um whenever you're ready to have the per the first person in okay the first speaker is maddie reed hi everyone thank you for having me um my name is maddie reed my pronouns are she her hers and i'm a senior at west and a captain of the swim team and i'm
003here to talk about the virtual season for alternate sports uh alternate fall sports sorry i wanted to kind of start off by saying that i know that you'll probably hear a lot about personal loss that this unfortunate situation has created um but i kind of want to take these three minutes to talk about the community loss because that's what we're truly losing a community of people that may not otherwise be brought together so in my opinion athletics outside of the classroom builds this bond between your teammates that's different from the bond you may build with your classmates whether you're encouraging each other to dig deep and persevere through a hard workout or you're cheering a teammate on the competition this kind of bond is different because it creates kind of a shared joy and a
004shared experience and it cannot be created in the classroom and definitely not over a camera second i think that we can all agree as a community mmsd values activities outside of the classroom this is evident as if you go to a high school within msd you can compete in anything from golf to hockey to diving to volleyball the list goes on and that's not to mention the hundreds of clubs that are offered across the high schools furthermore the district offers so many different options because they know the life skills that it teaches us and the support systems that it gives us and these are lessons that we cannot learn from core classes or electives and communities that we cannot build in the classroom let alone over-resume athlete athletics teaches us qualities like perseverance and resilience
005two qualities that i've used especially in this past year and will use for the rest of my life also mmsd has had to get very creative this school year to say the least just to make sure that average day-to-day events run smoothly and students and teachers have gotten really creative by learning and teaching in their houses and i think we've all proven to ourselves that we can get creative so why does it stop at athletics i think we as athletes know how to stay safe some of us who are fortunate enough to have the ability to compete with club teams know all the procedures and guidelines to follow we are still building that community and learning those essential life skills that turn us into high functioning adults however others who are not able to participate
006in club sports are missing out on having that community in that outlet and having those valuable experiences for many students high school sports kind of creates that access to learn those lessons and build that community which are two things that cannot be done over zoom and two things that are absolutely irreplaceable in our high school education so i ask you to please get creative and know that we as athletes take this very seriously and will follow every guideline every expectation and every procedure to achieve because like you we want to keep everyone safe and healthy and in a world that's trying to divide us right now kind of let us use that power of shared joy and experience that athletics brings to create an even stronger mmsd community and beyond thank you thank you so
007much next speaker is natalie pollock thank you bart hi natalie [Music] whenever you're ready yes good evening everyone my name is natalie my pronouns are she her hers and i'm a senior and captain of the girls swim team at west i understand that each of us has been impacted in different ways by the coronavirus and then we have each struggled individually to cope with the challenges presented by the pandemic in our own ways for me remaining physically active through this time has been my main source of discipline and normalcy in an otherwise confusing and turbulent period i feel incredibly fortunate that i live in an area with plenty of paths for running that i was able to utilize during the spring while my club swim team was unable to practice in person and that my
008club team provided me with daily strength workouts i'm also thankful that i've been able to return to the pool as my club team is now able to safely train in person again this has not only helped me stay active but it's given me an opportunity to socialize with others and spend time with my friends in a safe environment i recognize my privilege in being able to say that i unlike so many others whose families are unable to participate in club sports and able to continue participating in athletics at this time for many high school sports are their only opportunity to get involved in athletics and one of their primary means of socializing and interacting with their peers while i love to train and compete the most important part of high school athletics for me is
009the community as i found some of my closest friends on the team and have learned important life lessons such as leadership teamwork compassion and the importance of a positive mental attitude additionally many of the seniors such as myself have missed out on some of our most formative high school experiences through the cancellation of athletics and i know it means so much to so many of us to regain even a fraction of what we have lost this year it is not correct to equate in-person athletics with in-person schooling as it has been proven that athletics can be conducted safely and responsibly for all those involved all students deserve to have the same opportunities that i have enjoyed throughout my time as a high school athlete which encourages not only their physical health but their mental and
010emotional well-being and this is an experience that simply cannot be replaced virtually i appreciate your time and consideration thank you so much natalie our next speaker is natalie schick hello natalie hi hi whenever you're ready oh and looks like you just had a birthday yeah i just turned 18. so happy birthday to you thank you my name is natalie schick and i have swim for west since i was a freshman and will be swimming for rutgers university next year being a senior i have watched three years of seniors get to take part in special dress-ups senior night and much else i've been looking forward to my senior year swim season since i was very little every other piece of my senior year has been stripped away from me and the only thing i've been holding
011out hope for was this alternative spring season my junior wia state meet did not go as i had hoped and the only thoughts that ran through my mind ever since then have been at least i'll have my senior year although the meets are important to me the practices and being part of such a close team brings a joy to swimming that is indescribable sports do more for students than just develop athletic skills sports teach sports teach teamwork leadership confidence and help build self-esteem i am extremely fortunate to have access to a club team here and to be able to train consistently with a team in texas i was fortunate enough this past fall to be able to move to texas for several months to train many kids do not have these opportunities and without high
012school athletics they are missing out on athletic opportunities altogether it is extremely frustrating to see that all other teams in the big 8 conference outside of madison get to have their swim season it does not make sense that just by living 10 minutes from where i live currently i could have had my sports season it felt it has felt like much of the board has not acknowledged the toll that not having sports has had on our student athletes when i heard the news as msd not having the alternative spring season i was absolutely devastated this being canceled hurt the most out of everything that's been canceled from me during this pandemic high school swimming is truly the highlight of my entire high school experience i cannot speak to the science piece but i do know
013that there are options it is completely unreasonable to not allow sports to happen until we are fully in the building a building with 24 students 2 400 students may be high risk but a low contact sport with 30 to 40 athletes is low risk the two of these are vastly different and should not be equated to one another athletics are optional and there are enough people interested that these options should exist low contact sports have been proved to be a low-risk activity and club teams and high school teams in the area have been holding safe practices and meets and there's no reason why we cannot do the same there's been 10 plus months to plan for this season and all districts around us have found an option mmsd is not i strongly encourage you to
014reconsider the alternative spring season thank you so much natalie thank you our fourth speaker is nana osaki uh my name is nana osaki i'm a junior on the madison list dance team and i just wanted to come in here and just talk about um my support for restarting sports um so essentially right now the dance team just for context we're just participating in virtual competitions however while i'm able to submit like a solo dance just by myself because we aren't allowed to access the school gyms to any extent i know people are at various like economic disadvantages which prevents many from submitting these dances and i this is what i heard from coach but we are not allowed to access our team funds in order to pay for virtual competitions uh which has made some
015things challenging um and additionally it's been like difficult because we see a lot of other schools participating even in the virtual sections which are less than 10 people um and it's completely on our own like at our own risk no one is pushed to participate in these events and it would just be great if we could get like permission to just participate in just virtual events this might just be for dance and cheer um but like that extent would really help us and additionally like having dance has been a really great social outlet for me personally and a great support group during this time thank you so much thank you our next speaker is bella garnetsky hello my name is bella grenetsky i'm a junior at west and i'm on the girls swim and dive
016team i wrote an email last week about the topic of spring sports the reason given for not having spring sports seems to be no in-person school means no sports that doesn't make sense to me though because bringing over 2 000 kids back into the school building is way different than letting less than 40 kids into the building that also doesn't explain why other schools in our conference and in jane county are currently competing in their sports and are not yet in person the verona boys swim team just had a full swim season and they don't go back to school until february 8th i do understand the safety aspect of not wanting to spread coven i know i don't want covet and i don't want it to spread but there are other factors that need to
017be taken into consideration every sport that is played during the spring season is outside which means there can be gatherings up to 50 people and it is less likely for copa to spread outside these teams will not even be in the school building after february if the weather permits swimming is the only one that would be inside the school building i've been swimming with my club team and the only reported cases we have had are two coaches and it's never spread to anyone else we are able to easily space out in the pool and have 6 to 12 girls out of practice we have 36 girls on our swim team so we can have multiple practices or practice groups to help space things out and covet has not been proven to spread through chlorine yet
018there are many other studies that prove athletics can work spring sports can work it is working for everyone else so why can't it work for us why are we the exception or yeah team teens in high school need sports now more than ever today in my spanish class we did a word garden where everyone types words of how they feel about the second semester there weren't many positive words the biggest words i saw were overwhelmed bored stressed sad nervous and tired of zoom i hope those words show you where we at mentally trust us to be responsible to have athletics please give us something normal back thank you thank you bella our next speaker is kate aman lavicki thank you hi hi my name is kate and i'm a sophomore at west last year i
019ran cross country played basketball and started playing soccer sports are an incredibly important part of my life now and i hope to continue to play to play soccer in college playing sports makes me feel good physically connects me with other people and teaches me many life lessons i really miss school sports and i would like to see mmsd try to figure out a way to let student athletes participate in sports even while we are going through school virtually i know that student athletes speaking tonight don't represent the diversity of our high schools but getting online to join these meetings can be difficult and not everyone who has something to say is able to join through our techs and zooms we know our teammates in all sports and throughout the school want to return to athletics
020too when the soccer season got cancelled last spring i was so disappointed i had looked forward to playing all year and just as so many students would student play but right now i'm super hopeful we can have some sort of a season this spring i've been lucky enough to drive almost two hours each way several times a week to play soccer and i'm fortunate to have workout equipment at home and be able to go to a gym but i know many student athletes in our schools don't have the same opportunities but all of us would like to get back to school sports where we can have an opportunity to play high school sports are more than just competing but also about the friendships and teammates you get to share fun times with the lack of
021sports seasons has taken its toll on many students mental health and being given the chance to get back to playing like so many other students around us in wisconsin and across the country would bring a sense of normalcy back into our lives it's frustrating and heartbreaking to hear about so many of my friends from schools in places like milwaukee and mount horeb and verona so close who are getting the opportunity to play or even just the chance to practice in some form while we have to stay seated on the sidelines i asked the board to please consider the public health of madison and dane county statements that it's okay to hold practices and competitions where physical distancing is maintained with up to 10 people indoors and 50 people outdoors and look at the many successful
022high school sports seasons currently happening all around us when deciding if we should go back on the field as of today over 1 000 people in mmst have signed a petition to return to sports thank you for your time thank you kate our next speaker is dennis rhodes mr rhodes are you are you uh able to turn on your mic in your video please ms rhodes mr rhodes it says megan but you're listed as hi i'm sorry can you hear me yes thank you hi sorry about that that's okay um i don't have much to add to these uh passionate student voices and i i also want to confess i'm not on any dance or swim team at west currently but i do have a couple of student athletes at home and i don't think
023my kids are unique but i think they would really benefit they would be able to engage better academically i am sure if they were able to participate in spring sports um i know a number of the coaches my kids are at jmm the coaches there are just great um i think they are more than equipped to handle a season safely to handle practices safely i think the public health professionals are now on board that particularly outdoor sports can be can be managed safely um so again i think the students have articulated this pretty well i do want to end with um one of one of my daughters kind of put a very fine point on it when she said you know the pros are competing the colleges are competing the clubs are competing and now
024it really hurts to see the other big schools competing when we're not and i and i i think it is breeding a little bit of cynicism and anger with the kids which it's just something you don't like you don't like to see in high school students or you don't like to see you know high school sports breeding that kind of attitude so i appreciate um i appreciate your consideration and i hope i hope we can work out that we have um spring athletics thanks thank you our final speaker is sherry schwartz thank you barb i think we can hear the background but still joining oh she's having a little bit of difficulty there she comes oh sherry hello can you hear us i sure can you unmute your mic please i couldn't i couldn't hear
025you okay yo okay hi um my name is sherry sports and i'm speaking as a parent of a jmm 9th grader and i'm going to start by saying there's a woman in my neighborhood who's an elderly widow and i've been calling her every week or two during quarantine and just checking up how she's doing giving her someone to talk to and this weekend she finally got to go and be with her family out of town but the reason wasn't because she got a vaccine and it was safe safer than before the reason is because she was attending her grandson's funeral he was 18 years old he died from suicide last week a week ago today he was still alive and that's the reason i'm here in support of high school athletics and getting something in
026person for our high schoolers in whatever way we can i do believe i think especially if we don't return to in-person classes for high school which i hope we do but especially if we don't it's even more important to offer athletics and hopefully other extracurriculars too that that provided students a chance to be face to face with each other face-to-face with adults outside of their their parents and their family and just the chance to be outside and exercise those all those things are known to be to improve mental health status and just from observing my own son and his friends um they're they're really needing that so and uh this um boy who died last week his name is carter and i'm sure that of the hundreds of um student athletes who would participate if
027we offered spring sports there are at least a few carters there and that's why we should do it thank you uh that was the last speaker thank you so much barb uh i wanted to start the meeting uh oh i'm sorry i think we have um meeting notes yep august 3rd um so i moved to approve the meeting uh the minutes from the instruction work group meeting dated august 3rd 2020. second okay uh thomas nikki ii um any comments or corrections julia your advisory boat hi all those in favor say aye aye um motion carries 7-0 thank you barb so before we begin i wanted to acknowledge that um for almost 100 years this country have acknowledged um black history in some way a form starting with a few days to to now celebrating an
028entire or acknowledging an entire month um i urge folks that are watching us in particular educators to learn more about what the history of this month means uh to [Music] our black students and our black families but in particular for non-black individuals what is our responsibility what do we need to know um about this month and this date um so when i acknowledge that today is the first day of black history and it's very it's me just differently it's not very common that we have uh black board members uh and black leadership at a school district uh leading the school district and as i understand that there are um many folks that are not used to uh non-white leadership so i wanna to one acknowledge um today but also open space for um my black
029colleagues to share a few words and also to dr jenkins to share a few words on that if they may choose wanna start with the board rooms saving our alley yeah i guess i wasn't necessarily prepared to speak to black history month and i think speaking to black history month or black history in general is a pretty you know serious wide-ranging and extensive comment and i think particularly given where we have positioned or the conditions of black america today uh that you know being being able to speak to the implications of black history as as an educator and as a board member is something that i think takes a really substantial amount of time and in space although i appreciate the acknowledgement um in instruction work group i guess i think you know really really
030talking about this from a curricular standpoint would mean it would be baked into tonight's agenda in a different way thank you um yeah i want to echo what ali just said um history isn't history it's still living in us and uh i guess to quote dr carter g woodson or paraphrase for instruction work group with no study no progress so let's keep on studying or just like that am i breaking up first of all okay all right great uh first of all thank you for those comments too to both of the board members and i would just say for myself having done 30 years in education and just seeing different things and different acknowledgements for uh african-american history there are so many contributions that have been made and i think it's even greater not just
031on the african-americans but for other individuals to be able to understand the contributions that african americans have made to this country from the white house to the current to the current residents the individuals reside in now the country contributions are just so many uh over time and even though it's a month this is something that we should be acknowledging daily it should be within our everyday curriculum and it should be something that's celebrated by all i appreciate the moment to pause but don't pause let's figure out a way to keep running this has been a part of the american journey of everything that you look at around you from the science to the math african-americans have contributed to it to the literature african-americans have contributed to it and i think it's time in our country
032as we begin to have this serious discussion about our democracy is it now democracy for all or is it democracy for some and i think as we really look at the history of african-american history there are some lessons in it that we should probably take forward as we consider the contributions of african americans and i am so proud to be here as superintendent and not just as african-american superintendent but as superintendent and i hope that when people see me they don't see the first and the last superintendent that looks like me because there are many more children and there were people before me and there would be people come after me that are going to be more qualified than myself so thank you thank you so much dr jenkins and thank you to my colleagues
033and you absolutely correct to make sure that to rectify uh for future board meetings that we ensure that an agenda item is is um is eliminating this important fact um and uh in particular that uh the fact that in wisconsin we have a legislation that insures or asks for all school districts to ensure that we have um factual information about black history and african american history so thank you all um with that we start our instruction work group with an opening [Music] comments and updates regarding reopening in schools and i shared an email with you all earlier today thank you so much barb to getting us set up um i shared an email earlier today um i think that some folks that were confused about how those updates were going to happen in a weekly
034basis and there might be some confusion uh among some of my colleagues expecting a a a review of uh every single item around uh what the our staff is working on in regards to colvin and that that was not the intention is for us to learn about progress learn about updates and in particular to elevate issues that um are either being brought to us by community members for example uh the topic that we are elevating tonight around athletics um as well as any topics that board members are concerned um in particular to um in particular to mention around the times of our meetings and how much time we are we are allocating to the entire discussion uh given the fact that we had already a pretty robust agenda item uh calendar set your uh yearly
035set for instruction work group and adding now covet and reopening as an additional as an additional item so i appreciate everyone's understanding of that and grace of that and i certainly appreciate everyone's respect for my leadership in this work group if there are things about this work group that is not working well i would love to hear uh those comments and and concerns and definitely would love to hear if there are other ways to improve this early part of our meeting which is the updates on virtual learning and now reopening schools nikki i never received the email for some reason oh listen to the board address but i'll forward it uh to sure i haven't been getting the board emails always i don't know if it's my yahoo as being a pain in the butt
036but i'm using my mmsd address and so i don't know why nikki i can talk to you about that on the side sure thank you i'm sorry nikki i tried to summarize as much as i as i could uh now um no problem um and then with that i would like to turn to dr um jenkins um to to begin this presentation okay uh first of all let me just acknowledge thank you to uh for clarifying in terms of what we are trying to do each month uh as a team particularly with the instructional work group as we have a calendar that was already set for the year but during this time of covert we want to pivot and make sure that we're bringing everyone along with the number of things that's happening with our
037schools relative to our looking at reopening we started off uh in january january 8th we sent out the communication and said we're going to start off third term and virtual but there's so much work being done behind the scene to get to the point to where we can reopen our schools and i can't go any further without acknowledging the fact the night of our students coming in the powerful words that they share with us we know this because we've been talking to our students as well that a number of them have shared very similar sentiments and we do appreciate them our students uplifting their voices tonight and coming here and thank you to to the parents who shared their uh thoughts with us tonight you're going to hear more of some update on in terms
038of what we're gonna uh do in terms of reopening and in fact tonight athletics is on the table to discuss in terms of how we're looking at our entire managing this whole unprecedented uh where whereas we're trying to get as many voices as we can continue to allow the science and safety lead us as we move forward but we have learned more information and you will hear a little bit about that tonight as we've confirmed some things we thought and we're also continuing to learn every day so this time i would just like uh turn it over to the team and we're going to begin the presentation addressing the powerpoints thanks dr jenkins appreciate it and i do want to echo it was really great to hear that student voice the public comments today and
039i think that first slide that we're seeing about our athletics department division and to introduce myself uh jeremy schlitz he him and uh the athletic director for our district and i also oversee memorial athletics at the building level um you know the vision up there and we developed this vision five years ago um as part of you know a look at the board level regarding the role athletics plays in our schools and we use many different approaches to that and in how the impact of co-curriculars and educational outcomes are related to sports uh from parallel paralleling you know both our instructional model but also at that time pathways and accessibility and varied experiences and and really what i think we're seeing right now with the secondary and tertiary effect on the school community and really
040the community at large um as we move towards that so it was you know it's excellent to hear from the students and and to continue learning you know as we work through this i look back you know ten and a half months ago uh is really kind of when i guess in retrospect we started kind of using that that dice approach to formulate you know what we needed to do and um we pivoted really quickly last spring and and developed what i would say was kind of the blueprint across the state for what virtual athletics looked like we have not canceled any of our seasons we've been fortunate enough to advocate for different alternatives but also to really do to produce robust programming from our coaches um and involving our students whether that was last
041spring or as we kind of finish up some winter seasons right now um you know as we work through that i've really i gotta say how much i appreciate how our coaches and student athletes are embracing the we is greater than me philosophy on a greater scale you know recognizing the sacrifices they are making to help keep the greater community in better health by reducing the number of ways the virus can can spread and you know recognizing that the privilege of education-based athletics shouldn't impact the right to an education and you know back in in march when we we moved to that and paralleled our instructional model virtually we also started planning for alternatives we successfully were able to to look at some relief for fall sports um you know as we moved into july
042and august and that alternative season uh starts beginning here in in february and all the way through to the end of march to try to slot in those fall sports that were unable to occur um and it also created a spring season which starts a little bit later right now we're just finishing up a winter season where we had you know similar levels of participation in person as we did virtually with which is what we offered for our winter sports so now as we kind of look forward i can barb if you want to advance that to kind of the current status i'll give you a quick overview and then i'm looking forward to taking some questions from the board and hopefully helping you know further illuminate kind of where we're at so our current
043status is we are we are offering virtual athletics and what that is is four to five hours of programming for those students that are in person or excuse me are in season um in terms of the wia calendar because that allows our coaches unrestricted uh access to kind of what they do with them and you know what they're doing is is great you know it's great to see the innovation and the different ways that they're connecting with the students both to support their physical health but also their mental health you know we we've tried to do our best to kind of put out some different ways um as the four different high schools kind of learn from each other um around how to connect the kids and what kids are doing i think back a
044week and a half ago i was able to facilitate a trivia competition related to high school gymnastics for all of our all of our schools and it was great to to see and be part of that and i know there's lots of things like that happening in our different places and you know so we're doing that at the same time we're trying to figure out how we get back to what we all want and and that is um you know to be able to do things um you know in some ways the way that they used to be done but also just that gathering of in-person sports and some of those other pieces you know we meet regularly with the big eight conference we've got a bi-weekly meeting with dane county public health and their
045sports liaison for all the athletic directors there statewide i'm part of our wisconsin athletic directors leadership and we've got quite a a repository of resources for our coaches and our student athletes to access you know as we work through that um and and i think as you can see i tried to bring out a couple of the virtual athletic programming pieces that i think are important we've really focused on the connectivity and and the ways to get students an opportunity to feel comfortable in a vulnerable space and i think our coaches have done a fabulous job of providing that space and to see the the cameras come on when i stopping at a virtual practice and to see the kids engaging and and and doing that they are finding ways you know it's not obviously
046what what we all prefer but it's it's they're finding ways to smile and laugh together um we're providing the academic supports our coaches are monitoring attendance and grades regularly and are another advocate for our students um as they you know work through the the curricular work and and what they need to do to be good students first um we've had an opportunity to help with some of the transition to high school for both our freshmen and actually this year's eighth graders because we're able to connect a little bit more easily as we become well versed in the in the virtual world and virtual meetings as students and coaches and we really provided physical training opportunities for all and some sport specific one as able and i think we've used our athletic trainers from the uw
047to help do some prehab and rehab work for our students and i really appreciate what our coaches have done to find ways to keep the kids engaged and to keep them active both physically and mentally as we work through that a couple of the you know silver linings i think where some of the social justice work we've been able to do with our student athletes to have that pause where we're not chasing from a practice or to a game and to be able to look at our platform as as athletes and leaders in our schools and communities and to work on some of those bigger picture work which has been really an excellent thing to do as well so that's kind of where we're at as i said we haven't canceled anything yet right now
048as alternate fall season starts um we are in a virtual model but we we continually evaluate that as we move forward um as that goes and then barbara if you want to jump to the next slide you know it is in terms of return to play considerations obviously that the science continues to evolve on on what would be the best way we approach it it's been pretty consistent that the way to help support um you know from a public health standpoint is to limit those gatherings outside of the home and to limit travel um but the bottom line is you know athletics as we've learned um should parallel what we're looking at from a from a general education piece because we don't want that privilege of high school athletics to impact the the right to
049an education for all our students and as we look at those guidance from from public health and some of the operational guidance you know it continually changes i i just saw this afternoon the national federation came out with some updates uh to their covid um their covet approach in terms of the way that they look at different risk factors and you know i appreciate the the ability to collaborate with both public health with our advisory group with the coaches and ads across the the city across the county across the state and across the country um as we do that and you know i really think the hard part here is this is what we all want and how do we do it for what we all need and and that's really what as ads and
050coaches and student athletes um we're doing a i think really a great job of gathering all those perspectives and figuring out how we can do it and how we can do it better as each day goes on and i did mention there at the bottom the alternate fall season dates which were our traditional fall sports which we have 11 of that we offer normally would start up in august range from start dates of february 8th next monday all the way out till march 29th and our traditional spring sports is sometimes which would start as early as the first week of march all of our traditional spring season start dates um from the wi have been moved back to april 19th so that does give us some more time as we prepare to get back to
051that and then finally i did request additional accommodation with the wiaa our state governing body for some flexibility about contact if we're unable to do in-person activities during those calendar wia dates to allow the potential for some school based contact either later this spring or summer for those winter and alternate fall or spring sports if we are in that situation so i hope that kind of gets you up to speed on where we're at and i'd love to uh take some questions great thank you so much uh jeremy is nice meeting you um barb whenever you can to take down the slide presentation thank you and nikki i see you again um this is not really a question it's more of a comment one thank you jeremy for your work thank you mike hernandez for
052your work now people are gonna go well you're not an athlete you shouldn't speak on this i grew up with athletics i traveled with the college team college basketball team for 23 years in close contact when one person gets sick everyone ends up getting some form of it i have managed to get everything other than measles from the team at some point in my life whether it be from water bottles close contact dixie cups etc and it's not for people not being careful it's about air air circulation and i think the way people first of all i love the fact that students were so eloquent but i think the issue is the hvac issue right now we heard during the referendum that west has some serious air quality problems in the pool i'm not sure
053i want to put people in a building where we have compromised hvac on a disease that we known as airborne i want kids to have an outlet i believe that sports are necessary for the mental health i know this is rough on mental health but it's also rough to lose a student to lose a teacher and what i'm afraid if someone comes home and gives it to someone else we have seen grandparents die after weddings after funerals after small gatherings that were supposedly safe and i worry about that and the effects on our students because i don't think mentally anyone can deal with it i've lost five friends during this pandemic free virtual in the disability community too that i knew in real life it's not something i take lightly something i talk a heck
054of a lot about but very simply i don't want to take the chance of infecting somebody and having them lose their life the people who right now are getting this disease most are black brown and disabled individuals up to four times as many as white individuals i don't know if we can really make that risk and that sacrifice when the price when the price is someone's life i just can't do it thank you so much nikki gorman schmidt yeah thank you um thanks jeremy for joining us today and um thanks for all the work that's going on with the athletic directors with all the coaches to try to stay connected um to students while we're in this virtual mode um i guess you know the first thing i would respond to and and just nikki
055i appreciate your comments i don't i think everybody wants to keep people safe um in this pandemic and i i guess one of the questions i have is are we aiming for zero risk because we're not going to get to zero risk for a really long time so i guess i'm coming at this from the perspective is that we've learned a lot since last fall and we've learned a lot about the strategies that can be put into place to keep students and keep coaches safe and especially outdoors when we're talking about you know sports outdoors um and um so i guess i mean i'll just say that i'm a huge proponent of youth sports and the large array of extracurricular opportunities that students can participate in in our high schools from clubs to drama speech
056you name it there's a lot of activities that go on in our high schools and i see how sports can motivate students to stay engaged in school and provide accountability accountability feedback um loops through relationships that are developed with staff and their coaches and teammates so as we look at the k-12 system and our phased approach to reopening um to in-person instruction i i guess i'm asking what's possible and what's reasonable at the high school level our students are in school virtually um they're learning they're participating in classes isn't even if they aren't physically in our buildings due to the logistics of having 2000 students plus staff back in a single school building and i i guess i mean i don't have to reiterate the importance of keeping students connected and engaged and addressing the
057real mental health challenges that many of our teenagers are facing during this pandemic um i think we have a lot of students disengaged and disconnected from school right now and i'd argue that even the ones that are showing up in virtual learning day to day are struggling to stay engaged and is there a question for jeremy yep i do have a question so i i guess you know my question looking forward you know my primary question is you know can sports and other extracurriculars start in person before students are back in our high school buildings for in-person instruction we had a written comment from an epidemiologist shared on our board docs today that she thinks virtual school with outdoor sports this spring would be safer than in-person learning with no sports included um and i
058guess another question so that's sort of the primary point can you know what's possible can we do this and have we categorized our sports into low risk medium risk and high risk and started to work to define what modifications would we need would be needed to um provide an in-person experience for each sport this spring thanks yeah i'll grab a couple of those um you know in terms of the safety of our students and student athletes i know i think i linked in the presentation something from the american medical association um regarding kind of the sports and interplay with with athletics um and i i do want to share kind of one of the things that's it's obviously a collaborative approach to the whole picture as you mentioned chris um you know talking with other
059ads around the state the impact that it has on when somebody on a team gets infected the number of students that you know these are schools that are back in person different parts of the state or whatever end up being quarantined because the team membership is an additional grouping um you know in terms of where that goes so obviously the connectivity of sports is extremely important um the other thing that you mentioned um in terms of the safety piece of it we're starting to see some emerging data and science around the residual effects of covet and what that means for a cardiovascular system i do want to make sure we prepare our students that maybe have recovered from a coveted infection to make sure they're getting the proper information and screening needed to make sure
060we're not putting them at risk as well in terms of the outdoor versus indoor and then the different risk levels associated that nhs sports medical advisory document that i referenced earlier actually went away from the different tiers of sport contact i think that the the publication actually might come out tomorrow but it talked more about indoor versus outdoor mast versus unmasked and how um both returning to school and returning to sports parallels the virus trajectory of the community spread i haven't had a chance to digest a lot of that information in there yet and i don't know that necessarily answers your question and please clarify if there's a detail i can add but public health madison county and their orders have been using high medium and low risk sports based upon the closeness of the
061contact but also just the nature of the sport previously and i don't know if if this release from the national federation is something that might change it and to the other out of school activities um the national federation of high schools um also speaks to our fine arts and music band and all those sorts of things so that guidance has been really helpful as we continue to plan for if we are able to and when we are able to how to do its best okay yeah i i just think we need to look at it on an individual sport basis and again i'm just going to really encourage us to look and sort of change the mindset around what is possible instead of a blanket we can't do anything um i i would just really
062urge us to to say you know what what might be possible for us to do in bringing small groups of high school students back for athletics because i i truly appreciate what has been going on virtually but it's just not the same and i don't think it's working i mean what i've been hearing from high school students is just it's just not working in the same ways that you know being on a field or being outside you know with your teammates does and that's you know a consequence of the pandemic but i'd just like us to you know think proactively and looking ahead towards spring and what's possible thank you chris and then i saw julia did you had your hand up um i didn't but i do have a question yeah it's sort of
063sort of similar to what christina was saying but um i was wondering if you could kind of just speak to why or the connection between bringing students back to school and bringing them back into sports and how that might be different or why they've been decided to beat this thing well i think right now that that connection has been you know all of our winter sports that are currently ongoing are also in the building and i think we've seen quite the concern around indoor gatherings in fact public health limits your sport gatherings uh to 10 people indoors at this point going forward you know as the science and the the public health decisions and the research evolves you know i think you know everything's on the table and as somebody who loves to plan for
064every contingency uh back when i was both coaching and as an athletic director um we'll be ready when we can do that appropriately and just to piggyback on that we are we have some really unique ways of maybe avoiding some of those large gatherings um for practice that we're seeing from others that are trying it but the other feedback we're hearing from schools around is also we definitely can't provide that experience that they're used to because you're not going to have the team dinners you're not going to have the locker rooms you're not going to have a lot of those things so we really try to manage not only what it means to recreate and compete in the sport but what it means to be part of education-based athletics and that overall genuine experience and
065dr jenkins i think you also had something you wanted to add yes first of all i just want to say thank you for the questions and thank you to mr sleds for his response and i would like everyone to know uh just the team we have internal external the advisory teams this is a collaborative effort and you heard mr slitz there share a plethora of information with you we're not just taking a single source uh we're working with our colleagues i'm working with the regional superintendent state superintendent he's working with the regional athletic directors state and i think to chris this question in terms of the direct correlation there's the answer is uh no not necessarily because at if we begin to phase um which is our hope to begin to reopen there may be
066new information gathered from our public health from national about particular sports and you heard the difference between not just to you chris i'm saying to everyone we've heard the difference between indoor outdoor some of the distinctions between them that would make it safer we're still leading with the science we're still leading with safety and we understand the mental health piece is serious uh and to all of you my uh the whole co-curricular participation that's what my dissertation was on and talk about the benefits of co-curricular if anyone want to see children engage and know the benefits i i'm telling you i've studied this and i know that it's really tough at this time it's tough at all of us this is a pandemic but we are looking at ways that we can engage students outside
067of just the classroom social emotionally and paying attention to their mental health but we're looking at and mr sliss i i want to tell you thank you publicly for just the breath of information you bring and every time i go to him and i'm asking him questions you better believe it just like he just told you about some recent research he's all over it uh and trying to get it to the point where we can do some things uh safely uh in our community so thank you and julia really thank you for that question on the student side because they've been lifting that up you know what's the difference between the two so thank you thank you so much so i see ali sabian nikki gloria and chris jeremy i have heard you reference comparing
068kind of our approach to athletics to districts across the state a few weeks ago or even a couple months ago tony ever said that folks needed to cut down on things like play dates and small group gatherings because that was where the spiking coved was coming from as schools were closed there's only two percent of districts across the country that serve over 20 students a year mmsd is one of three districts in the state that serves over 20 000 students a year how is our approach compared to other districts of our size and scale yeah i actually had a call today with uh racine and mps's uh directors of athletics as well um they're in the same position we are from a state perspective right now um but you know i think it i i
069i have a much respect for jeff sullivan out of maryland county um a large district on the east coast and and he and i share some information back and forth about different ways to approach it and i've stolen some ideas from him around our virtual impact and i think a lot of it really just speaks to the connectivity of schools school sports in the community and making sure that you know that's the approach that we're taking and you know there are some obviously in different parts of the country that are also trying to do it in person and i think what we saw in the fall was about a third of the scheduled contests ended up being rescheduled or postponed from and those are from smaller districts or different situations with maybe less community spread
070so the disruption that would be both to the academic and athletic is is definitely consideration we look at as we do those planning and is it appropriate to have this size group whether it's 5 or 10 or 25 um and how do we you know limit risk while still trying to make sure that we're giving everybody the best opportunity um to do this thank you so much for speaking to that thank you ellie for contextualizing uh really trying to compare apples to apples green bay is also uh 20 you know a large district over 20 and i think those districts are struggling like we are trying to figure this out so i appreciate that um savian i think you have a question yep thank you so much jeremy um i guess two comments and a
071question uh one i appreciate your lafollet sweater uh two um you know i do just you know in terms of in-person athletics you know i do just want to remind people about that study from ohio state outlining you know 30 of their athletes that had coveted do have a permanent change in their heart structure um that's something that i view as irreparable behind uh you know compared to an acl tear for example so we're dealing with that kind of stuff i guess my question is have you know what kind of learning are we doing from the mscr outdoors club are there ways that we can try and replicate their success are there ways that um you know that we can learn from what they're doing especially as the weather gets warmer um and as the
072vaccine vaccines get distributed around middle march april hopefully and as we look at summer semester great thanks yeah and and actually was just doing a little research pen is doing a study on the residual effects of cobot and unused sports and youth athletes uh around myocarditis that you'd referenced and i think that's really something that we need to make sure is part of the conversation um so we can make sure we educate people you know as we work through what it means to come back um and and when we come back in terms of what we can learn from some of those mscr activities i think it's it's good information about those size groups and what they're doing and what they're doing outside i think with the hard part is when we look at a
073traditionally a fall season which is our alternate fall starting up here potentially you know we're talking about close to 2100 students that are part of our fall sports traditionally where those mscorr outdoor activities are doing that in small groups and that's not to say we can't offer small group solutions to our larger teams but obviously we do need to make sure that we're not uh using 24 hours of the day to make sure we meet all those students needs as we do it and i think we've got some creative potential solutions where small groups could be made where we aren't meeting at schools and we're using our virtual platforms to do some things and maybe have that model of that small group outdoor activity be something that is workable but that obviously isn't what we
074normally think of when we think of high school sports i mean we're definitely trying to be creative and it's great to hear from the coaches about their ideas and ways to do this as well which i've been lucky enough to do through the process yeah absolutely thank you i think it'll be interesting as we prepare for hopefully you know bolstered summer semester if we can offer some type of you know athletic or physical activity even if it isn't the traditional you know team sports as we know it from previous years you say than um thank you uh gloria thank you ananda and uh thank you jeremy for being here um you know i just want to say it's not necessarily a question i just uh want to say that we all want to have our
075kids back in school um and we all want our kids to get back to somewhat normal to place sports i don't think anybody on this board wants to keep us from that and i think we are all just very concerned and bring our variety of the issue i think that we are we are unfortunately really we're stuck um given the um obviously the health pandemic given what's happening politically around us and how uh the the repeal of a mask mandate can significantly bring us back um uh months of progress right we are in a very good space right now like i can see the light like it is it is coming but that is because we are we are seeing people wearing their mask um they are being very careful and we just need to
076we we need to keep um doing that unfortunately what's happening at the state level um politically is not helping our cause um and uh you know my son just got uh coveted um and he's really sick he's really really sick and he's young he's in his early 20s uh and so this is going to have long-term impact on him and he and he wasn't an athlete he wasn't playing sports he was just going to work um and so um i just asked us to really consider you know what the alternative is if we have our kids go back and play sports my daughter is an athlete attends memorial high school is a swimmer basketball player volleyball she wants to play i want to get her out there to play um but what what am i
077willing to sacrifice as soon as the minute that we do at athletics everybody's going to want to go right i mean and that is um it's going to be become either way we look at it and an equity issue right i know uh being a person a woman of color and families of color that they have much more to lose uh than sending their kid to go play a sport um because they know how how that would have a significant impact on the the child coming back home living with grandparents living with you know parents with underlying conditions how this can impact them so in talking of parents and grandparents who are you know families of color who are really having to balance how this can significantly impact their families and so yeah that is
078a choice that each and every one of us have to make uh and so um i just want us to um really think about that like it is not a decision based on our own individual self but it is a decision that we have to make on all of our students and the impact that this will have on our school community and so i want i want my kid to go back to school it's she's struggling um and so i think many of our families and children are struggling as we can here today you know we heard today um but it's not an easy and easy uh decision for us to make uh and so um if jeremy if you can give us just a a yes no uh that would be really helpful for
079us um i was trying to i was trying to get that answer from the virus too but it doesn't mean yes or no and gloria i did hear from your daughter and she's gonna be part of our read your heart out that our athletes outreach is doing but so she's she's still engaging with some of us and that's great to hear from some of those things in terms of a yes or no um you know we're gonna find that and we're gonna we're gonna figure out what that means thank you so much laura and um i hope your baby feels well soon and uh thank you for sharing your personal story with such vulnerability my hardest is aching with your story uh kuruzi and i see you uh schmidt and nikki first but schmidt after
080that thank you ananda um jeremy thank you so much for being here tonight um in addition to thanking you i really want to lift up our coaches who have worked so hard to provide virtual experiences to students and who are also reaching out to kids individually and making sure they're okay um that means the world i know to many many parents and um i i greatly appreciate that mmsd coaches care so deeply about their athletes go um chris gomez said and i you know i think for many of our students the sticking point here isn't like you know wanting to be unsafe the sticking point is hearing that um you know we're not going to do sports until we're back in school in person and a lot of them are feeling a lot of despair
081that we're not going to be back in school in person for a while and then when they hear that about sports it just lowers their mood that much more you know if we were to send our kids the message that we are going to see what's possible for spring sports and detach that from the decision to go back in person for actual in-person instruction i think that would mean a lot to our students and our parents um who are struggling and trying to figure out how to navigate through you know we don't know how much longer until we get to go back to school in person um you know chris has already um said that the public health madison dane county guidelines show that we or say that we can go back for low-risk sports
082um i think we as a district have to decide what low-risk means for us given that we're a large district in a diverse district but just saying we're not going to do it until we reopen schools is tough on kids it just makes them feel hopeless um and as much as the virtual environment has been you know i'm so grateful that coaches are providing that for kids and i have an athlete and at the same time i've never heard any of the students i know talk about virtual sports as a season it just feels like more school in some ways like you're seeing your friends on zoom again going back in person if we can find ways to do it that are safe i think in terms of our students mental health and well-being will
083make a world of difference and also giving them some hope that this might be possible in the spring regardless of our decision about in-person instruction um you know the decision to go back in person again if we look at the dane county or the public health madison county metrics they're you know we're not close to being able to go back in person at the high school level but we do have permission from public health medicine dane county to start doing low-risk sports in person and i think for our kids to see that we're putting sports under the same lens as the very you know neat you know necessarily rigorous lens for going back in in school in person at the high school level is tough on kids so um i would really encourage us you
084know as chris said to focus on what's possible and send the message that um we're going to try to be safe we're going to try to be equitable but we're also going to try to be flexible abs absolutely and i think to clarify i think a lot of people are looking at that january statement which was following uh dr jenkins announcement um where at this time we were going to follow the instructional model um and that really was referenced at winter sports you know i think we're going to see another public health order come out uh you know by february 8th and and i know i meet with them on on february 11th i think it is and you know i'll definitely probably get something out in february kind of updating where we're at and
085and what's next i know you know as we collaborate with the different sectors around the district um you know we want to make a collaborative decision and i'm definitely gathering all this information but in no way did i hope to convey during from that statement in january that our alternate fall seasons were never going to be able to start in person nor our spring seasons were going to start in person it was just that at this time we're following our instructional model to hopefully make sure that we saw students stay engaged um you know because we are paralleling the way that we're you know our instructional model with our sports delivery model um but we have not reeled out the fact that we could potentially return for fall of that alternate fall season or that
086spring season which is still it seems like spring should get here really fast but the first spring sport isn't able to start from a wi calendar standpoint until mid april so you know you're definitely going to see regular updates and communication from athletics along with the rest of our stack of sectors i believe thank you chris for your question your comments i you know one of the challenges nikki i see you one minute one of the challenges at times of being in this board is is the disproportionate way in which we experience something that is impacting everyone and covet is definitely highlighting a lot of that and i i hear your plea chris around hope my plea around hope is is for our children to be alive um i've lost an aunt uh last month
087i lost a dear friend last month uh last you know every week there are friends or people that i'm close to uh getting covered and i understand that the way in which we experience covet racially is extremely different um i hear you want to keep hope to our children i i really want sincerely want our our staff know that this is my hope is that we keep our children alive that no child uh gets coveted under our purview that means in our buildings that means in our fields that means in any uh school district sponsor activity and it's um i shared gloria's comments my daughter is struggling with mental health and all sort of things her father passed away last year so there's so many things are happening but the way i think what's important
088in this in this in this meeting and in the school board is that we are experiencing this very differently and when i say we i'm talking about people of color and white people we are experiencing covet very differently the numbers are there to show that there is plenty of data and plenty of reports to say that so my hope for my child your child um and everyone's ms mmsd's children is for us to keep our children safe from covet to the extent possible and if that means that we're just gonna have to have like a lot of sacrifices that we're doing that um yeah so i i thank you for letting me use the privilege of of the chair and to interrupt that um i think nikki you are you are next yeah as an
089individual with disabilities who originally uh population wasn't even included on the graph because we were deemed not important enough to even be charted until a lawsuit occurred because the national institute of health themed that the disabled weren't even worth lives weren't even worth categorizing i have to say that people do experience it differently based on race based on class based on disability those are the facts whether we want to admit it or not they're there i'm all about votes normally i'm all about democratic process 99.9 percent of the time this is the one time i'm not and the only time you may ever hear this out of my mouth carl that i sent you a text saying people have asked me if we're going to vote on it i don't know the answer to that
090but i can tell you what my answer is i can't vote in someone's life i won't i can't i don't know how to do that and justify that i know that sounds rather dramatic but to my community these cases are decent and that's something that i have to live with that does not mean i disrespect either chris i respect your ideas that gets been the heck over here because my father's a basketball coach saying you're speaking against athletics that's normally an impeachable offense in my hustle but it came down to this people could die people are going to die i can't increase that suffered enough as a society i don't want our kids to go through that even more i just can't do it and i think uh schmidty had a hand yeah i just
091i just want to say i think we really this is a really emotional issue it's it's really hard um when we're talking about a pandemic and talking about keeping people safe and people have different experiences different perceptions of of what keeps people safe and what we can do and what we shouldn't be doing and you know my question is is if we don't do anything does that mean no student is going to get covet that's it's just not it's in the community and what we have seen if we're really talking about the science is that the spread has not been from athletics that are done safely with all of the mitigation and safety strategies in place the spread has been from the community and so yes i will plea to our community to please wear
092your masks to please do your distancing to please not go to bars because we want our students back in school in person and we want to be able to provide some of these experiences for our students that are safe um i also have a student who i have a son who has coveted right now um he's away at college he's isolating in a dorm he's not feeling well and it's a scary thing but he he got it from his roommate and it it's how we just you guys there's no zero risk in this and there's not going to be zero viscous covid for a really long time and so i would really encourage us let's bring some epidemiologists back let's figure out how to look at the studies that are most relevant for when we're
093talking about athletics and figure out again how we can talk to each other about what's possible and um you know looking towards the spring i guess and spring sports um because i i just think it's yeah really important to figure out how to do this under the guidance of public health um and under the guidance of our our medical experts um what they've said to us is that you know they can provide the science um we're the policy makers and we make the decisions um but i really want us to keep an eye on on that science and um yeah how we how we figure this out together thank you thank you thank you yeah i do just want to point out to crisis point as well i did link in that presentation uh something
094from the american medical association and also an article from the american association of pediatrics that i thought were pretty well balanced in terms of the science and scientific review and i'll continue to do that and then and make sure the team has access to those sports specific things as we continue to work through it i appreciate that jeremy and i guess i would i would just challenge us i don't i don't know um if you could maybe report back to us or if we could figure out a way to do this if we could really categorize our sports as low medium and high risk and then start talking to our coaches about what modifications they could do i don't think anybody expects this to look like it did before the pandemic started i don't think
095students expect that i don't think parents expect that but if we look around there are sports going on all over this country um for better for worse minneapolis and st paul public schools that are larger than us have been doing athletics throughout the year also and yes things have been canceled but but that's that's part of doing things safely you cancel it when you need to in order to to mitigate the risk and so yeah just encourage us going forward to look at all the pieces of that yeah dr jenkins yeah i just like to close with this first of all i would just like for everyone to know that we've heard everything that was said here tonight and we've been working on this from every angle there's not a decision made one way or
096the other we're continuing to explore i cannot thank jeremy and the committee and all the individuals who will continue to bring the thoughts to the table i will say so don't leave here tonight thinking that they're not looking at everything we know the importance of students being engaged in co-curricular activities the medical doctors being that we brought them up they said let's look at reopening of schools and that's where we are right now but we also can do this as well look at co-curricular participation we're doing both so let's not leave here thinking we're only doing one thing we're going to do our due diligence to make sure that it's safe first this is a health crisis mental health social emotional well-being are very important we're walking a fine line in the middle of a
097pandemic of having to do more than one thing at one time so but please don't leave here thinking we're only looking at this from one view we may not arrive there as fast as people want us to arrive but we're looking at it and those students when they spoke a moment ago wow powerful and whatever we do too we're modeling for them and we're going to try as soon as we can get our students back in school get our students back participating and i'm glad that it was acknowledged several times here it doesn't mean that it's going to look the same way but we're not done we're going to keep doing that so thank you uh for the time on the agenda ananda and thank you to everyone for the time and attention given to
098this this is a serious matter thank you um i wanna echo uh dr jenkins uh gratitude jeremy to you and to your team um i think there is definitely not a consensus on how we are experiencing definitely not how we are venue and what would like to recommend i really appreciate you doing all the review and the research uh to ensure that our students are um that the plan for transitioning back is is is accurate and it's informative um and please keep us informed and let us know if there's anything else that we needed to do do you have any other closing thoughts before nope just uh thank you thank you for the time and the consideration and i appreciate all the work all of us are doing to to serve our students and do
099it safely and appropriately so thank you very much yeah thank you please extend our gratitude to all the coaches as well thank you um dr jenkins um i'm sorry i'm going to turn it over at this time to lisa i'll continue with the agenda and i'll have to stop out step out for a second and i'll be right back okay thank you thank you dr jenkins at this time i'd like to call on our chiefs of elementary schools excuse me they have done some site visits um to serve some surrounding districts and um took a look at some of the instructional models um that they saw and we actually had a chance today to do some processing and to do some learning right we want to really look at what other districts are doing and
100then think about our what some of the good things are and the promising practices are that we can bring back and also identify maybe the why things are happening in some districts and maybe they're happening in a different way here so i'm going to turn it over to carletra to start that off and then tremaine will join in as well good after evening everyone um it's good to be here and be able to report out on some of the visits that we have been able to take to other districts again as lisa said to learn from some of the things that they have done and some of the strategies that they have implemented as they have gone back to face-to-face instruction we were particularly interested in the safety measures that they put in place the
101instructional strategies and then also how they are addressing the social emotional well-being of staff and students when they re-enter back in the team has had a chance to visit some prairie and verona um sauk prairie in which mti president andy wadey was also able to join us and most recently wanna key and so um the middle or the secondary team is also visiting schools at this time as well so it's not just elementary that is visiting different districts so the themes that we saw across the districts relative to safety measures was the intentionality around teaching students routines and procedures it was evident during our visits that time had been spent with modeling and having explicit teaching with students once they returned but also in parent communication as to what can be done to prepare students
102for face-to-face instruction so that intentional work that was done for safety protocol protocols and mitigation efforts um confirmed for us specifically the need for that two-week phase-in period for each grade level to ensure that those practices were in place so that was one of the things that we were able to really um get a firm from those visits that we that we took um the first week of face-to-face instruction was dedicated to systems and teaching modeling and having students practice routines as i said before so and even relationship building itself looked different um and needed to be practiced specifically with our younger students so things that we have taken for granted such as just being able to see someone smile um they really did some intentional teaching around like how do you smile with your
103eyes how do you let someone know that you appreciate what they're doing you know what does an air high five look like so those are just some things that you don't really think about when you are returning back in person but it's really important especially again for our younger kids we also wanted to look at some themes across what they're doing for their instructional model and so one difference that we have for us here in mmsd is that the schools that we have visited um all have the hybrid model and use the ab cohorts which is something that we are not um doing for mmsd at this time but something that we are continuing to look at so while sock prairie did select a hybrid with concurrent teaching which is what we have landed on
104for mmsd concurrent teaching um it was for their third grade and up so the decision was made again this is just sock prairie to have the 4k through second grade primary students have in-person teachers and virtual teachers rather than do concurrent instruction so we just wanted to when looking at that keep in mind that they are a smaller district that has four elementary schools so they were able to create a virtual academy and so what they have done is they're actually sharing their teachers across buildings so that you might have a first grade teacher that's teaching virtually but she would have students from or she or he would have students from any of the elementary schools to make up that class for teachers that were implementing the concurrent model we also talked to them about
105some of the challenges with that and they talked through that but they did say that while it was challenging to begin with once they started going um and learning what needed to happen things got better and um it's what they're doing right now and they're not having as many challenges with it as at this time collaboration was also key to the success of phasing back into face-to-face so from their school-based leadership teams to grade level teams there needs to be dedicated time for teachers and all staff to collaborate and they said that that was essential but it was also one of the most challenging things for them to schedule outside of the instructional model and operational pieces we also wanted to know about the work that was done related to social and emotional well-being of
106students um again this is speaking from the salk prairie model so at the elementary level morning meetings are required and it's something that we already have in place here in mmsd so that was something that was great to hear at the middle school level they actually developed a course it was a social emotional learning course that every middle school student would need to take for six weeks and at the high school level there is intentionality around adding an additional 20 minutes to the first period class where they had structured lessons for social emotional learning but also lessons that the students helped to develop um and so we recognized that and these are just some of the the themes that we saw again across the schools that we were able to visit and we recognize that
107as a district we have a larger lift just due to the number of schools that we have and also the number of students that will be phasing in when a decision is made for us to return but we also recognize the great opportunity that we have in learning from other districts by speaking with the teachers principals and in some cases as well the superintendents as to the lessons that they've learned as they've implemented face-to-face the challenges but also again the opportunities that have been presented and thinking of things differently when we're not going back to the old way of doing instruction and doing school in general but i will just say that most importantly the environments in the buildings that we had the opportunity to visit were very welcoming the students were very happy and
108it was a very joyful place and so that was great to be able to see as well doctor clarity was there anything you wanted to add collection get another magnificent job um and i will be remiss if i try to go over the themes that you did again because you cover them so thoroughly so thank you for that i think what i would do is just reinforce those key points um that we notice within our visits first of those be and the most important thing just being the modeling and remodeling and reteaching up for our students and having that reiterated time and time again in settings that traditionally we didn't always have that reteaching happen from the time a student leaves a car or a bus just navigating their entry into a doorway uh we
109noticed having staff available and just modeling and just do what the next expectation will be as the student navigate their way through the building for instance as you get to the door you're going to sanitize with a reminder as you when you as you leave the door you're going to go to this specific hallway and navigate navigate the highway there'll be a washing station here on your left and you'll have the opportunity to wash your wash your hands at this station uh your materials will go here and they'll be there for the day so just that that reiteration of the mitigation deficit safety protocols and then the very intentional modeling of that over and over again was very necessary but it also was very inviting because both students and staff want to want to do
110everything they can to be safe and you saw that mutual respect and we're going to do everything possible so we can uh reestablish education in the in the building setting to the instructional points that you covered wonderfully carleton again we do know that the concurrent model that we proposed would not be the hybrid and most of those that we've seen have have been hybrid uh with the things that we would lift up is first aid it is uh it is a it is a possible solution and i think it's something that with practice we would get better with over and over again teachers that did it said you know the first time uh i just had to learn basically where to stand and how to navigate both the students behind me are that are engaging
111virtually and having students in front of me body positioning where my voice projects but each time they did it they got better and better and now they're you know with anything we do they're feeling more comfortable so i'd like to thank our staff for the opportunity to visit those schools and those schools that we went to for entrusting us in their environments and if there's anything else from the team that we can uh that we did we're not clear about we were happy to answer those questions but thanks carleton you did a wonderful job covering those themes thank you dr clarity i also just wanted to add that um for us as a district we are the communications team is working on videos as well for parents um so that they would see what it
112looked like a day in the life of a student and then um elementary leaders are also working on videos so that it's specific to their school with their different entrances and with the classrooms and in some cases they've even had the um the the school mascot is the one that's actually doing the the tour of the building so it's a lot of great work that leaders are being are that are doing right now in collaboration with each other and again with other districts and preparing um for when we will return so thank you thank you so much carletra and jermaine um lisa do you have anything else that you wanna to highlight before we opened up no i don't think that i do um i think that carleton tremaine really did a great job of
113of giving the the sort of the themes right and the learnings that they had across multiple site visits and then also some specifics about how we can support teachers as they move forward into this model um if and when we reopen thank you so much so we're going to do a a round robin uh julia if you don't mind i'm going to start with you and then nikki you're next do you have any questions julia um i'm kind of still thinking can someone else go first and then i'll go in a minute okay wait nikki um yes my question is have they figured out strategies for 4k and five-year-olds on wearing masks because no offense i just i would love to know how they do it and how to reinforce that in a positive manner
114again with what um we talked about previously and just talking with the principals it was really about practice and not just practice when the students got to school but also giving parents those tools to practice with their students before they even returned so it was just a lot of practice a lot of modeling that they did and i'm kind of looking forward to the east mascot wearing the mask and giving the tour kind of thing cool thank you nikki i'm gonna go in order that at some point you were all on my screen so uh schmidt ali carrozzi and sabian yeah i want to say thank you for all the work that i know is going into planning all the complex logistics of bringing kids back to school and and doing that safely i guess
115um one of my questions is um as we look at this and and figure out you know the the virtual learning and the in-person learning split that schools have done um and knowing that you know based on our last survey that we're probably going to have families that want their students back in person and families that want to stay virtual um for the rest of the year um do we see ourselves doing that virtual academy at the early grades and then doing the in person the way you described one of those school districts is doing that and then i guess i would ask what is the timeline for surveying families again so we have an indication of what families are thinking they want and how do we communicate to them what our model is so
116that they know what they're choosing so i'm kind of going backwards order i think you have like five questions in there yeah i'm sorry so the we've communicated that the concurrent four day a week model is the model that when and if there's a decision to go back to school that that would be the well that's what it would look like so it took a lectures point earlier i think it's a matter of getting those visuals to parents so they can actually what does this actually look like i know i hear the word concurrent i hear four days a week but if where we want to put videos on the screen so they can actually visualize their child in that in that setting which we have those that we've shared with the leaders and i
117think it's just a matter of getting those out to the water community so you have those optics in play um can you can go reverse order after concurrent there was um what um i guess the getting the timeline on getting that information to families so then we can do the survey to to find out how many want to stay virtual versus in person so we know that the best actually family interaction comes from the school staff themselves and the school uh leaders uh and their teams directly to the families so that they're engaging in that work right now that's where you're gonna get rid of this this really this feel of whether you're coming back or not we there's gonna i mean we there is there will be a district another district survey i don't
118have the exact date i apologize for that uh it listen lisa has it but the responses that we're getting or the engagement that we're getting is has been ongoing uh that's part of a principal and their return teams specifically reading out the family's intentionality with families that may not uh have responded to surveys in the past and getting that information so you know it's family plan by family and also grade level by grade level who to expect back in those uh in our spaces so whereas where while we do appreciate that we have an overall district survey there's nothing better than the imp than the personal touch that we get from our buildings to those families i i guess the the last question i have is just a general more larger district level systems question
119um about if we're you know looking at um the metrics and those reopening metrics that we have on our website and updating those um i'm i'm encouraged to see that a lot more of those are green both in our planning and in um you know the the percent positive in dane county going down hopefully we're on a downward trend and then the number of overall cases um so when will we see that update um to all of those like reopening planning metrics um so that we know where we're at yeah we're working on um doing the update um each week we get the updated data from um public health of madison dane county and and again a lot of positive um things in terms of the reduction in the number of cases and the positivity
120rate and so we'll be we'll be working to um to get that uh update done and so um we anticipate that a week that we'll get an update this week thank you oh ali and promising yeah i have emphasized this a few times when we've talked about kind of what the return to school looks like but particularly for our elementary school students so really talking about how we're incorporating the outdoors and how we're incorporating play-based learning the other thing is is as i hear you speak to kind of adding time and places i think about the intensity of how we schedule instructional time for elementary schools which is not uh it is not an area in which we have a ton of extra time to do new stuff or to have new approaches right we
121are really scheduled um pretty intensively so do we have a sense of dpi relaxing standards around uh you know what instructional time looks like or how we utilize instructional time and the other uh the other thing i think i i want wanted to speak to or hear you all speak to um is how we will incorporate and utilize the arts for early childhood as a way to allow students to have a greater range of expression and maybe or emphasize play-based learning again within those areas lisa do you want to take the dpi one and then i can sure yeah um ali thank you for the question we do have the waiver for instructional minutes from dpi so we do have quite a bit of flexibility um in that area as well and we actually just
122had a little bit of a conversation today about specials and the arts um because carleton for maine did see some things some different um models around that moving forward and um i you know i do think what you what you said ali about you know minute by minute this bell to bell instruction in middle schools or in elementary schools is exhausting i was there for 11 years and i saw right from the minute a child gets off the bus where they go what they do how they walk when they open their locker all of that right i'm not sure all of that was great for anyone so as we go back we want to really think about how to invest in in our children differently in the time that they're going to need to build
123relationships to learn school right we have kinders and first graders who have never been in a building and that's going to take a lot of time and that's what we have to really lean in on first um you know if anyone and and we have to say this over and over again you know if anyone thinks that those little ones are coming back to us and launching right into literacy and math and learning and paper pencil tasks they would be mistaken right there are a lot of other social and emotional and ways that we all need to collectively come together again um appropriately socially distance of course but i do think that um those are certainly our first priorities coming back carleton i'll send it off to you and just to add ali that was
124a really great question around the arts and so we are in the process of scheduling a meeting with peter to um think through what specials will look like as well as how we will think differently around what we are offering for fine arts instruction in elementary and thinking about the other districts some of them are having we have right now virtual arts will be specials will be virtual and some of the other districts that we did have the opportunity to visit they do have face-to-face um instruction with special so their art teacher was right there with the students in face-to-face instruction with them so and they did have fayette class and so we're going to go back and look at that we had some conversation with sally today around what are the health and safety
125measures that we have to keep in mind if we're thinking about doing our special schedule differently leaders are really taking to heart again the outdoor opportunities and putting that into the schedule with recess um also with an additional break time and then doing as much outdoor learning as madison weather permits um that would be possible for students so yes thank you so much for speaking to that and also thank you for speaking to how specials may need to be adjusted um because i think a lot of us think about a teacher with maybe 15 kids or a teacher with you know 24 kids and we don't always think about an art teacher who sees an entire school or a string teacher who works with 60 kids in a day and the difference in exposure for
126that person or that educator um the other thing i want to say is lisa as you have have have guided us through this experience through this pandemic one of the most invigorating parts of these conversations has been listening to you talk about a new normal right talking about things that did not work um before this and that we have the opportunity to shift away from moving forward and that has been so truly inspired and i don't think i've ever heard anybody talk about feeling an abundance of flexibility around instruction time at the elementary level uh you're the you're the first person in my 13 years of working in education to use that term in regards to that specific narrative um and an approach to education so i hope that we that we take the opportunities
127where they are and and run with them um and i appreciate the thoughtfulness of your answers thank you ali i you know i learned something today i will add i read an article that was forwarded to me today and it talked about the time that we're in and it talked about how we should be reframing this as schooling loss not learning loss because learning loss implies that the only place learning can happen is at a school and we our children learn in all different kinds of places on the playground carleton said on the playground in the hallways in outdoor spaces and that really struck me today in thinking about that and i i would definitely want to share these articles with you but it really starts from um it starts from a positive rather than
128a deficit mindset and it really it really taught me a lot so i'll be sharing that and i think that speaks to ali this notion of right getting outside learning from other people other places and not assuming that the only learning that happens is on lexia or on dream box or on you know what might happen during another portion of the day so it was just a really um a good reminder and good learning for me even after all these years in education um to think differently so thank you thank you so much lisa and thank you all for your question uh karusi savian and gloria and then we're gonna wrap up so i'm really grateful for this conversation um ollie thank you so much for bringing up outdoor education and i just want to
129reiterate that if we're talking about a new normal outdoor learning is of course a way for us to deal with kovid and kovet is going to be with us for a while so i think we need to be thinking not just this spring but into the next school year how do we use the outdoors to keep our kids safe as we return to school and also how do we use outdoor learning as just a way to rethink what's normal and you know as you said lisa like get rid of the bell-to-bell learning experience that our kids especially in elementary school are having and start to like use the outdoors not as oh we're taking time away from instructional minutes but let's get our instructional minutes indoor outdoors let's make it work so i'm thank you
130so much ali for bringing that up i really appreciate it i also want to express gratitude to carleton and tremaine for um the site visits to other schools that's just fantastic i love that you're doing it and i really really appreciate the report to the board about what you learned um super helpful i think it's really helpful for the public to hear as well what you're seeing in other districts back when we did our first survey a piece of feedback i heard particularly from elementary parents was that it was very very difficult to answer that survey without knowing what the instructional model looked like like it was hard to say if you'd send your child back to school without knowing what the school day was going to look like without knowing what the classroom was
131going to look like i think one concern that parents have is that you know what happens if a lot of parents say they want their kids to go back in person is are they going to have to tell some kids they can't go because there's not room in the classroom for them are kids going to get put in in rooms with new teachers because there might be you know an imbalance of kids who want to go back in person from room to room so i think there's a lot of uncertainty on the part of parents at that level of detail that we need to be able to communicate so that people feel um you know secure and comfortable making a decision about whether to keep their child virtual or send them back to school in
132person um so the more we and the more detail we can express about even things like you know mike i know my kids classroom or my kid's school has you know two to four kids at a desk like how are we gonna mitigate the risk of exposure in situations where we don't have individual desks for children um are we you know the more we can communicate about like what we not only we've done to mitigate air quality concerns but also to test to make sure those mitigations are working i think parents are going to feel safer about this and our staff are going to feel safer about going back so it'd be really great to get an update about at some point about things like air quality and how we're communicating to parents the details
133of what the instructional model and the school day is going to look like and how we're communicating to staff about how we're going to keep them safe um the couple questions i have um one is um actually just one question at this point because of what other people have already asked um i do have a question about um vaccination for our teachers um staff vaccination's a game changer and um at first you know we we heard that our staff were going to be in group 1b for vaccination and we thought that was going to happen fairly soon and then we heard last week that it may not happen until march 1st um is it possible that that might get sped up with the new administration in washington and um what are we going to be
134doing to keep our staff safe as we're looking at re-entry and the possibility that we won't have a vaccine you know vaccination starting in february and you know with second doses in march hey guys i'll speak to that first of all that's one of the factors that we were also considering when you look at even on our dashboard we're saying we want everything to be completely safe with our staff vaccinations we didn't have any idea that it may come as soon as it's supposed to be coming right now so we were planning without that and i want to remind everyone we do have staff back right now all of our students special needs students who are needing to receive services our mscr we have staff there we've learned a lot from msdr in terms of
135how to do some of the mitigating uh strategies which you know that's one of the main things you've heard doctor thought you say am i breaking up at all okay yeah okay so one of the things i was saying that we're we put all these mitigating strategies in place to keep staff safe the vaccination i don't know if you heard that part that wasn't a part of what we're looking at how we go about reopening school it will be a game changer i totally agree with you we're supposed to have that done by march 1st one of the things to remember we said as we plan to reopen we will give significant notice to everyone at three weeks minimum and what we're also trying to do to make sure that staff is safe and aware
136of all the best practices we will bring our staff back in before we bring our students back in we had a conversation the other day with mscr talking about how we release some of the classrooms so we got to talk around and in this conversation in our internal advisory we have everyone there with us administrators uh app we have mti all of us are talking about it together we know that safety is going to be our main thing at this point if we said today we're headed back to school know this it would be holding to our commitment of a three weeks notice so we can't get back to school so realistically we have our update and our measurements next week by then we'll know whether or not we've actually met that four weeks in
137a row downward trend i think someone mentioned that a little bit earlier so right after that we're having our discussions about what does it look like for us even if it's next week then you look out three weeks about approximately bringing the teachers back into buildings before the students it would actually wind up being just beyond that march 1st deadline and so hopefully then we would also have the vaccines as well but if the vaccines are not there that wouldn't be just a total you know non-conversation starter about how we transition back in but we know that the vaccines are too going to be very important for us can i ask carlton a question chairman um nikki hold on one second gloria hasn't um asked a question yet but i just want to make sure
138um so i'll get to you nikki and then you you'll be the last person perfect i that's fine thank you dr jenkins go ahead uh go ahead um save you thank you so much alisa tremaine and carletra um for taking on this this huge undertaking um and dr jenkins um i guess i have two broader questions is um you know the phase reopening it it's a heavy lift logistically i can only imagine for working parents so i'm curious uh what flexibility will each school community have to make sure their phased schedule uh can also fit the needs of working parents schedules and my second question is you know there's going to be a lot of residual mental health and social emotional effects of this extended period of um you know quarantine and isolation and virtual
139learning uh what do we have in place or will we need to have in place to make sure our kids are you know getting the mental health support they will need once we go back especially for you know our young students it's going to be significant right now our plans during virtual but to continue to focus on the social emotional the mental health piece of it and i have to give it to jay and his department everything from our counselors our social workers our nurses our entire staff the teachers everyone we know that we have to pay attention when we initially come back to transition there's a lot of anxiety for a number of students who are coming back a lot of parents who want to send their children back but they're very concerned about
140that social emotional piece so uh we know that we have to pay a lot of attention to having our students back safely and safely as meaning the social emotional and the mental health uh piece of it and i just say again our team we're very conscientious about that particular piece of it and the phase regarding the the the great span how we talked about it initially uh we're still having conversations because i have heard from some parents saying hey you want to go k first and then my second grader's at home and if all conditions and everything is better we have the uh vaccination we have all these other things together that's another conversation but we have to continue we're going to have to continue to work on what we can do because some things
141may be accelerated further than what we thought they were going to be but we still have to be cautious at the same time we have learned a lot things have changed since we first started this we've learned a lot from mscr uh right now as it stands we're looking at the science run some of that's changed but we do know everything is concentrated on the youngest learners at this particular point yeah thank you um yeah i i just know from experience about um kind of the logistical barriers that partial day 4k is to some parents in terms of network for their schedule um and so um something that ali mentioned and carleto mentioned was a you know an abundance of flexibility right most definitely thank you for raising that though thank you sagan um gloria
142i don't i'm not that i don't have anything right now i'll pass it on to it yeah okay go ahead nikki you'll close us up okay i appreciate it sorry to cut save enough i wasn't i was in outer space sorry about that um but my question is is heard a lot at mscr cares and whether a lot on vaccines with ms cr cares and if they're scheduled 1b or 1c will we get information on who is in what group when you know it yes most definitely uh as we're reporting out and i also encourage uh everyone to look at our ops meetings that we're having we're having these discussions in terms of how things are rolling out and jay gives a report about where we are uh but i will definitely send that to
143you in terms of who's in which uh particular group and so that you all can have that all of that's a part of it though that's a great question too nick really appreciate that and can i this may be inappropriate so i have to ask it carefully how did mercy health manage to get the vaccine and vaccinate people before we did i don't know about the appropriateness of the question but i could tell you there's a lot of discussion about how things are happening from the federal level from the state level down to the health department level but i can tell you as superintendents in the region we're working together at this point and listen to the department of health and i think it's new guidance coming in right now that's pretty much trying to
144give some sense of order to where we are because the doses are not in at the degree in which we need it for everyone right now so that's kind of where we are all right just curious i did i didn't want to break any rules thank you so much nikki and thank you dr jenkins for addressing those final questions um i have a a question for either tremaine or carletra around if you can talk a little bit about like the curriculum adaptation for like are we what is the accessibility for curriculum for um k-12 or pre-k uh sorry pre-k two and then how are we um what's our thinking around disciplining basically not disciplining but discipline so we will continue to follow the scopes as they have been um set out for elementary as we
145move forward even when we go back face to face um the cni department um is continuing to to look at that and to work on if any adjustments need to be made and so they'll be doing that as far as the you said the discipline aspect discipline the discipline aspect um and so the board really stepped up and um took under advisement i don't know from um we go ahead for me i think dr germain is in two places at the same time oh that's all right so we are we are still working on um the discipline aspect as far as um if again there'll be any adjustments made to that for when we return face-to-face okay thank you so much el calatra and thank you so much uh tremaine for the great work and
146for going on on the field trip uh to other districts and collecting all that information uh we're looking forward to your more of your learnings and what what's exciting uh what's exciting about what you were learning from from other districts and what's exciting about uh what we could implement um i'm gonna get a moment for dr jenkins or lisa to get any final words yes let me just say first of all thank you again ananda for continuing to put this about our reopening and what's happening um with the whole thing with our schools and just some of this work behind the scene i think it's good to have it here at the instructional meeting it's good for the public to hear it as well and i can't thank our team enough it has been a
147team effort all throughout and i really appreciate the fact of how lisa has just personally engaged everybody in this work the work that the chiefs are doing themselves but our teachers mti being at the table the principal group being at the table all of us our medical advisors we have absolutely the best and they have different viewpoints and i want to thank them publicly for the guidance they're giving us and also their dr damiri is uh dimiri reaching out and grabbing some of his colleagues of color to participate as we move forward in our guidance that's huge to the work as i've heard parents raise different questions and wanted to hear from experts too who are of color as well in this and so i thank you for your patience uh with us in this
148and we're in this together we're gonna get through it you guys i mean i'm really excited we will get through this together and it will not look the same thank you lisa for continuing to raise that we will meet the needs of our students and have more students being successful lisa thank you anything else lisa before i move up to the next item no i think that was um an important wrap up thank you dr jenkins for that portion of the meeting and ananda if if you're ready and give me the thumbs up we can move on yeah i'm trying to instill a practice of at least a five minutes break within the two hours and we reach that mark so uh how about we come back at 7 15 and ready to go lisa
149thank you barb for putting that slide i keep forgetting to ask you what's the best way to do that no problem if we have everybody we can we can get started lisa oh we're ready when you are lisa thank you ananda so our final portion of the meeting tonight is to talk a little bit about our our bep update and what is happening um currently in a virtual environment i am going to turn it over to brin in just a minute but i first want to frame the presentation a little bit so that we can um sort of calibrate on expectations so brynn and her team have put together a very informative presentation brynn is not going to be reading through every single slide she's going to be giving you the highlights on what is
150most important she'll talk for about 10 minutes nikki i see you nodding i'm hoping that's an affirmation here of what we're saying thank you um so bryn's going to talk for about 10 minutes and then we will open it up to have a focused discussion so i want to thank bryn and her team and i will turn it over to you thanks so much um and barb were you going to a screen chair with the slides sure okay thank you great so thank you so much for having us here um we will we'll stay focused as we go through these and obviously you have the whole deck to review when you have the time i'll do my best in the short time to represent uh some of this work that represents so many people's workers
151department in our district and i do have um and jay is here as well and a few members of our team rachelle stone sarah can even be and lana stoltzfus um if questions come up at the end that they can help the answer so we can go to the next slide brand you're cutting out just a tad oh okay i could be more okay with my voice okay um all right so this is just simply a quick reminder that there was a bad weekly update in december um this is obviously not a typical year so this is not the typical mid-year update there is a final slide at the end of this presentation that has a number of links in it so i just will mention that where there are links there we're going to
152highlight some of our work during virtual how we've attached adapted during virtual to continue focusing on how do we create a sense of safety and belonging for everyone in our schools during this time what that looks like and then how we're using this time to plan to come back differently the next slide has a framing quote and simply a reminder that we need to keep vision in mind of where we want to go brand you're chopping up a little bit oh okay maybe i'll just put in my headphones um okay thank you sorry about that cool thank you all right is that is that better better much better yeah okay great all right so now we can go next to the outcomes and we'll just get right past these these obviously relate to our bet
153goals and we'll go right into the next slide we wanted to include this slide as a reminder these goals and guiding principles have remained constant over time in the bep um in our work at the district level and internally and with schools we've really been digging into these making meaning of these principles making sure our policy and practice is aligned with these principles and and looking at how they really come to life in schools and in classrooms our next slide highlights the foundational practices and we'll highlight some of our cell and rj work in this presentation but what's key is that all these foundational practices are interconnected and interrelated they're all essential for creating classrooms and schools where all students feel safe feel a sense of belonging where joyful and engaged learning can occur cynthia
154moore and sarah knieve along with the rest of our universal systems coach coaches work directly with schools on how they're implementing these foundational practices offering support and obviously there's so so much amazing work going on in our schools go to the next slide which will highlight just some of how social emotional learning is critical more now than ever during virtual um it's been a focus to say let's make sure that we get our relationships and our care for each other right during this time let's make sure student staff and families feel seen and loved during this incredibly difficult time on the next slide we have an overall framework for cell and msd just want to point out that this embodies a transformational definition of cell and hopefully you have time to read this through and
155really engage with this and where our district's going with cell this slide is to point out one piece of how this work is coming to life during virtual so the district's been providing cell lessons for elementary teachers to use this is the product of collaboration and significant work by many many people including classroom teachers and also wanting to point out this framework this is grounded in research from the aspen institute and really talking about how cell can come alive in schools and we're using this to ground our work as well and this next slide again i just want to point out that at the slide at the very end of this presentation there are links so you can look at some specific examples of how high schools are implementing these strategies these key cell strategies
156and how they're coming to life in virtual learning and looking forward where are we going with cell there's some amazing work going on in our district and in schools in terms of taking this transformational lens centered on student identities and youth voice and now so so that's sort of highlighting the cell piece again it's interrelated with all of those foundational practices now highlighting some of the restorative justice work again it is all interrelated and essential lana and rochelle as i pointed out are are here as well for questions at the end if needed and just want to highlight this definition it is expansive it is explicitly anti-racist this is a way of being this is not a one-off practice and we've included the graphic here as well of miesha wins the five pedagogical stances that
157myisha win offers for engaging in restorative justice work in education and that grounds much of our work again this this also captures that restorative justice restorative approaches are are a world view and grounded in community relationships and connection we have key community partnerships in doing the restorative justice work in mmsd so this slide is here to highlight the work of dane county time bank and our next slide highlights the work of another key partner the ywca this highlights the work that the y is doing embedded in our in mmsd schools and then the next slide highlights the wise work on related to our district level work as well and this highlights the work the restorative justice work going on at the district level and that direct work with schools and obviously there's also so much
158going on in schools so this highlights here opportunities for learning and growth as well as direct support and that collaboration with our community partners as you the board heard last monday some of the recommendations coming out of the safety and security ad hoc committee relate to restorative justice so mentioning here highlighting a couple of those key recommendations that are coming out of that process that relate to the restorative justice work and where where we can go with this work looking forward and now sort of shifting gears to where are we going with goal three in the bet and addressing exclusionary discipline i want to highlight again that this goal has been here in the bet we know that we are not where we need to be reducing disproportionality in the use of exclusionary practices including
159suspensions for african-american students and students with disabilities um during virtual this is a very short update because we are we are not using exclusionary practices during virtual we are we are schools are supporting families reaching out supporting students as needed when when things come up during virtual what we're really trying to do is use this time to prepare for return um samaj scognier is a key partner with me in this work she is the bea universal support coach and she and i have really along with many others across the district and in our schools trying to take this time to look at how we can approach behavior response and exclusionary discipline differently and that work is grounded in research and there are links to some of those key resources in that slide at the end
160of this presentation and really we're grounding in our mmsd values and those guiding principles in the bep and i have highlighted one of those key guiding mmd values here that we have really been looking at how how are we making meaning of this value as it relates to exclusionary discipline this is i wanted to point out and share out with the board a district behavior education team that samaj and i are co-leading along with jocelyn lipinski who is developmental design trainer and universal systems coach they both bring perspectives grounded having worked in our schools samaj as a bea jocelyn as a teacher we are connecting with departments across at at the district level and really coming together to make meaning of our values and principles do deep mindset work ourselves look at what needs happening
161throughout the district looking at practice and data across the district we're having really taking a meaningful look at what does true accountability mean in the context of exclusionary discipline and how do we re-imagine our use of exclusionary discipline how do we talk about what accountability can mean through a restorative and transformative lens at a student adult and system level again this alternative to suspension work the board um is obviously where this was added to the bat for 2 for 1920. what i want to highlight is again this ties back into what does accountability really mean how do we meaningfully respond when things come up in our schools we're learning a lot from schools about what works and where they want to go and their vision so much gratitude for all the time of school staff
162who engage with us in this work we're working on creating additional templates for alternatives to suspension and including a restorative approach to student staff conflict which i'll speak to in the next slide so this is work that um samaj myself lana rachelle and bill baldwin who is also with with the y and mmsd uh we're have pulled together a cohort of school staff across our district across levels across roles uh principals social workers so many other different roles engaging together in monthly meetings to do this work you can see the overall purpose here and we're really digging into that mindset work we know that we cannot underestimate the mindset work that needs to be done and really holding that vision of viewing conflict and difficulties not just as something to get through but an opportunity
163to address underlying needs transform our relationships and school communities and and one outcome of this will be a template alternative suspension plan for use when we return in person so that specifically can address those those behaviors that are labeled as swearing at staff so that we can have meaningful ways of addressing that and final two slides here um just to highlight also the the work that we're doing in terms of bap guidance uh which has obviously been ongoing and collaboration with schools and highlighting these values that have been guiding our work as we work with schools support schools in terms of planning for return how do we return differently that importance of all roles working together that importance of everyone sharing that value of keeping students in class at the center addressing relationships and and
164adult mindsets as well um hey we can go to the next one and then thinking about next steps we know that especially in this area building trust is critical and that trust has to be earned through action and we are looking at ways to enhance family and student voice we are we have ongoing um ways that we're listening to the experience of students impacted by exclusionary discipline getting their input we're looking at ways to enhance that including this also relates to one of the recommendations recommendations of the safety and security ad hoc about a discipline advisory group that would be made up of families students community members and then action planning that relates back to all of the slides really and that district behavior education team and again um there's a link at the end
165that talks about the action planning guide that's really a wonderful resource and so we are grounding our action planning and research we are rooted in anti-racism and uh the board would see any policy changes if if they are needed that we would bring those to the board in may and i will now pause for questions and discussion thank you all thank you so much bryn um whenever you um can um stop the screen sharing because we had a pretty robust conversation on the map last last year what i'm hoping to do and because it's really late is for us to just do a round robin and if folks can refrain from pontificating on and just really asking the direct question to bring it will be really helpful to expedite our uh last part of our
166meeting so uh nikki you go first and then ali carrozzi sadion julia gloria and schmidt um on the alternatives to suspension i think that's excellent i like the alternatives to suspension expulsion is there a way to ever do an alternative seclusion and restraint right now we seclude a large number of our elementary school students is there a way to create a system where seclusion restraint is i know they say it's only in emergency situations but it's still occurring larger than it should is their way to create a system or is that asking too much is my first question my second question would be on an alternative to suspension for african-american students and latino students absolutely we need to do that we have some of the worst outcomes and that's unacceptable i also would like uh
167students with disabilities to go with goal three just to make sure that oftentimes after not just after seclusion restraint but oftentimes when once the child has been removed from school they don't always come back and i just want to make sure all groups have that i hope that makes sense and that was as quick as i can talk amanda um ananda do you want me to answer right after each one yes please okay thanks um great thank you so much nikki and i will take the seclusion and restraint question back to others in our department who have more expertise but thank you for that question um and then as far as alternative suspension thank you for the opportunity to clarify those are plans that schools adopt that they will offer to any student who is
168who engages in a behavior that would fall at a level three and so we really are it should make an impact in our rates of disproportionality but it is a approach that schools adopt to say when this behavior occurs here's a meaningful way we are going to respond um that will not involve suspension so thank you thank you so much yeah thank you ellie yeah i think this is a complex conversation and a conversation that is deeply racially charged given the fact that the ep up until last year um you know indicated over and over again consistently that african-american students were punished more frequently than any other group of students and were punished more severely than any other group of students and so i think how we address that um and the different facets of
169how we address that are something that are are worth our our time and energy uh at this moment um so i'll start i'll start by saying that the second thing i i want to speak to is the role of trauma in terms of looking at how we intervene around behavior especially coming back from a global pandemic in which children have lost loved ones and have spent time in isolation and for some of our students have just seen their families struggle to make their basic needs have struggled to have stable housing and food and how we want to address the needs of those students without passing judgment on the character of a child as they navigate that complexity i want to speak to the benefits of exclusionary practices brian we talked about this last year i'm
170like if if there's something i'm missing about how we suspend kids and then they come back and they're straight a students and things just get better and better from them right after that expulsion or right after that suspension i want i want to see that data because my my understanding is is that suspension doesn't uh increase engagement it doesn't increase a student's sense of belonging it doesn't resolve conflict within the classroom in fact it can contribute and so if you have different information i'd love to hear that uh i think looking to what what nikki was saying and emphasizing the different ways that students are restrained secluded excluded practices around having kids tag out and also the levels of discipline that we see kids getting involved in the most frequently so when our students are
171suspended why when our students are removed from class why and how have those things shown up in a virtual learning space and that is it for right now for my questions brain and i know that was a lot um yeah it's great i think i thank you for your comments i mean everything that we hear from the board informs our work at the district level and i just i hope we'll have continued chances sort of update how we are incorporating everything that you're mentioning because um it's really in line with where we're trying to go i just want to thank you for those i don't think i don't have anything super particular on those at this moment do you want me to take a um a partnering on it on yeah yeah i'm sarah kanivi
172i have two roles i wear two hats i work at henderson at dr virginia henderson elementary and i also um have allocation at central office so um i feel like i get the best of both worlds because i have a real strong pulse i'm actually teaching in a fourth grade classroom right now so ten kiddos every day me and them we just we just go for it um i actually think nikki's question related to reducing restraint and seclusion and ali's question related to trauma they are so hand in hand because we actually when we choose strategies that harm our students we have perpetuated that cycle and i can speak for a school-based example when i first arrived at henderson seven years ago there were certain years we had over 80 restraints in seclusion by now
173we have arrived in a year where we will have less than five and that's disappointing for us if we even have us one or two and it was all it wasn't anything on the kids responsibility it was all on the responsibility of our staff to figure out what it was we needed to do differently and so some of the things i think we need to keep lifting is how adults in the building are viewing behavior and how they're taking care of themselves in intense moments how our own knowledge of mental health for ourselves and understanding how the brain works comes into play in those really pivotal moments in our inner students lives and we under talk about this but it got brought up from carleto on the school visits how are we collaborating with each
174other because if we just continue to go down this road of single person solutions it's not that is not where the magic happens when teachers get to team with staff and you form these pockets of community you can tag out you can use strategies so i think we have a lot of ingredients in place super excited to build to build that up to scale and see what that would look like throughout the city thank you so much for speaking to the trauma portion of my question i think the other question i want to emphasize is around how we support staff um in terms of the behavior education plan and both how do we support staff who are struggling around behavior but i want to be very clear about this the data that we have produced
175for the last few decades as a district indicates that we discriminate against black students and subject black students to more severe punishment more frequently what are we doing to address that discrimination to make sure that when students uh see in their classroom that certain young people based on what they look like are more likely to be sent out of class are more likely to be disciplined or more likely to be disciplined more severely that we as a district have a pulse of that are aware of that and intervene to support the teacher and shift their behavior thank you and then savior thanks sananda um thanks so much bryn for the presentation i really appreciate it um i think correct me if i'm wrong but i think we're in year seven of the bep now i
176think my oldest was in seventh grade when we started implementing it so that means that kids who are seniors this year have spent more than half their time in mmsd with the bep um and the disproportionality has persist they haven't gone away i find that incredibly concerning and ali has expressed an ananda and many people around this table have expressed repeated concern about the fact that despite the fact that we've had a superintendent's advisory committee we've had lots of staff development we've had lots and lots of emphasis on changing staff mindsets um we've invested in developmental designs and nvic and the disproportionality still persist and as board members i think it's our responsibility to take the long view and say what about the policy and its implementation you know at the large scale is not
177working and where do we need to change the policy or invest our district's resources to make it work better and um i just haven't i feel like we need to have that conversation as a board especially while we have this opportunity of not having kids in school and to to to step back and say what what are the like key levers here that we need to push to make the change we want to see which is we don't want to see this disproportionality and um exclusionary discipline in particular anymore um one thing i've often wondered and i don't have any data to back this up but it seems like we have schools that are doing much better with the bep and it seems like some of the schools have phenomenal principles who really know how
178to lead a team to implement the bep in a way that is addressing disproportionality and is getting the staff not just to have the right mindset but truly enthusiastic about embracing that goal and um if that's true and i don't know if that's true how do we how do we try to either like you know get our what role do principles play in making this work and how can we better support our principles to support their staff to get to that goal that we all share i guess that would be my question i can i can jump in on this um right i do think chris you're right a building leader right sets the shared climate and culture in a school and um a building leader should know what's going on in classrooms all the
179time and i think that some of our build our building leaders are in all different places across the district but we continue to work on this we continue to talk about it we continue to provide support but it's as dr jenkins has said we need to move from talk to action right and we need to be really clear if we are an anti-racist district in an anti-racist school and our schools are anti-racist what does that look like and sound like and teachers have to be able to articulate that and children have to be able to articulate that i'll tell a story from my last year at a school i was at i had um a teacher and ninety percent of the referrals were coming out of her classroom and i said we need to talk
180about this because ninety percent of the referrals are coming out of your classroom and it was really hard for me to say it was very hard for her to hear we sat down a lot we sat down that night we sat down the next night to talk about what was happening we put some things in place and i monitored and checked on it but it does take that continual watching coming back after it revisiting it again putting plans and actions so um i do think it's about taking action on things and um having those conversations that lead to action and it's not just talking it's not just helping people feel comfortable there's a lot of uncomfortableness in it because it right it makes people look inside so um i would just say from my own
181experience as a leader um i think that's part of what it takes um for moving a culture forward but i would um also um maybe carleto or tremaine there's anything else you would want to add to that i would agree with what you said lisa i would also add there are leaders right now that are doing some intentional work around what adaptations are going to be made when we do return um what strategies they're going to be using looking at things differently how are we engaging students um how are students being successful now in virtual where we can take some of those same lessons that we're learning and apply those for when they return face to face and so there is some intentional work being done around that right now even though we're in a
182virtual environment just preparing for that face-to-face instruction to happen again and i can add two and then i'll give a a quick comment and also jamie want to chime in but just um to highlight this is yeah chris i appreciate all of your comments and it i think relates to all these comments before you and this is this is not um we can't underestimate the amount of work it takes and and the amount of mindset work it takes and yes we've taken a lot of steps in the right direction and there are a lot of pockets of work in our district where there are really promising bright spots that we can build on and as a system we have to do better and so part of this action planning guide that's that's linked at the
183end two of the slides is is what we're using as a district to look deeply we have you're right we have to look at all of it we have to look at the we have to look at the policy we have to look at practice we have to use our data and we have to really be willing to look at things differently in terms of we can't keep doing the same thing and getting the same results so um and in certain in certain of those practices you named those are those are research-based approaches to reducing disproportionality in school discipline and sometimes we haven't gone far enough right we have to really commit fully to some of these approaches um and some of some of what was shared in the ad hoc around restorative justice was
184about that what is it what does it show what does the research show what do other districts teach us about what you really need to do to meaningfully make these changes um i'll pass to sarah and then and then jay super quick comment chris i think one thing we've neglected is to really look at our positive outliers the pockets of schools of classrooms that have really really taken on disproportionality and they have we have stories to tell around that we spend the bulk of our time admiring the problem in the data versus really lifting where it has significantly shifted and to pull that into the research world the university of chicago is doing great research right now principal as both instructional leader and leader of climate for so long it had been to the neglect
185of leader of climate and they have some great research coming out the principal's role as the person who sets the tone for climate we know that intuitively and now there's some some support to help us get there so just those two quick comments and just to add one last thing too as we're going into the allocation season there is um some work as well being done around what are we looking at for staffing that's proactive um in the strategies that we're using and not staffing that is reactive and so what does that look like as schools implement more things around restorative justice and who's going to lead that work if i may add one or two things please is that okay yeah go ahead okay we're talking about the restorative um process but we also
186need to have the conversation about surrounding our students with mere models we need to have discussions of there are two things that are happening that that we've been expecting different results in one is the response to behaviors but it's also the instructional delivery model that we're in the curriculum that we've been um using with children over the years this is the chance to make those adjustments to be more culturally relevant to see themselves within the curriculum we're beginning those conversations but there's going to have to be a lot of self reflection both on the leaders the teachers the central office on how to truly make these adjustments the disproportionality it's ali i remember last year around this time when you were asking those questions and i sat down with jay afterwards and we started talking
187about what are some possibilities of what we could and how we could how we could make these shifts i'm proud to say that i know in curriculum instruction we're having those discussions now but again as dr jenkins has said it's the discussions we need to change all aspects of what public school looks like in order to make these connections and make sure that all students and families feel welcomed in our school jay are you gonna add something yeah just briefly i um many of my points i think have been covered just by what people have brought into the space but um again i i appreciate this conversation i just want to take the opportunity to remind of the complexity and i think over over the years and historically we've talked about behavior sort of in
188the silo um and as an individual plan um and you know again i'll point to the work that we did in 1819 with chair reyes leading an ad hoc committee where we dug deep into the policy we dug deep into resources needed and we dug deep um into additional programming and supports but um you know much of the policy that we're referring to and where we get the disproportionality um is is in the response um and i point to all of the complex things that we can do proactively and mike certainly just raised curriculum efforts and i know the way the the meeting began today we were highlighting a conversation um you know that we're hoping to have um in a deeper way around curriculum i think all of our racial justice work as a
189district all of our work on mindset all of our hiring practices have shifted and um into the to the point that um carleto was even calling out you know the focus on social emotional learning and i think um sarah and cynthia moore leading that work in our district now in virtual space but also preparing and making sure our schools are ready to to to meet our students needs when they return and maintain that focus on social emotional learning savion raised the questions of mental health support when students return we know that behaviors are symptoms of students that do not have what they need and are not safe supported and feel that sense of belonging and so i just uh i just want to sort of bring back up the complexity of this that to some
190extent it's everything that we do to engage and support our students when we don't get that right um you know we we tend to see uh behaviors but i think um keeping our focus on everything that we can do proactively while also digging deep into what can we do differently when we react to to eliminate disproportionality um carrozzi were you is there anything else because i think some of the things that jay and um mike were responding to and bran were to elise questions so ellie did she had a follow-up to your question or from anything folks have shared i should have a quick follow-up comment which oh sorry appreciate all of your um comments and um brain you had mentioned in particular that we might need to go further with some of these research-based
191interventions if there is a need for the board to um reallocate resources to make that happen um we're heading into our budget season so it'd be good to know um you know if it's gonna happen this year what that might mean and what that might look like so thank you so much thank you chris ellie um bryn did you want to respond to the follow-up question from chris and then i have i will just simply say yes chris i hear you i am noting that and thank you yeah sarah i want to go back to something you actually said and lisa i think you spoke most directly to my original point so i really appreciate you for doing that but sarah you talked about highlighting uh the schools that are doing well um are there
192schools in mmsd where black students are not disproportionately represented in discipline um we don't have any schools to my knowledge where it's one for one i know we have schools that have gotten it as low as 1.4 um starting i think elementary average last year when we left was around 4.3 maybe or maybe that was district average i will pour over the numbers i haven't this year um looked at disproportionality numbers because we haven't used exclusionary practices so i can go back to the spring semester i think there's some schools that have definitely reduced it i also think there's pockets of teams that have reduced it in grade level bands that have reduced it and those are the spaces we need to be really curious about yeah i think that that those are incredible points
193but i also do think that this has been a consistent process a problem across fifty three hundred percent and if we have a school that has not shrunk the achievement gap but is actually achieved proportional discipline i absolutely want to hear about that and i want it to be highlighted to the greatest possible extent however if we haven't achieved that um i think we have a lot of work to do across the district and i do think it makes a lot of sense to focus on that work 100 percent agree yeah thank you everyone uh savion thank you um i want to go back to something lisa mentioned about particular teachers and percent of out of class referrals do we keep data on out of class referrals or detentions given per teacher we have as
194you know we um oh god what year are we in a veggie climber i think 1819 was the first year of edge climbers so yes we do have a way to track that and what we're working on is also making sure fidelity in terms of how people are entering behavior data so that we can be sure that we're able to accurately look at that i know again some schools are better at it than others in terms of making sure that the data gets in with if it occurs in a classroom the observer is the classroom teacher we are working on that fidelity across the district so that we can really have meaningful data to look at exactly that yeah so it's like a yes and it needs to be better yeah that fidelity piece is
195huge because every auto class referral is simply a tip of the iceberg between a relationship between or lack thereof between a student and a teacher and general interest in what is going on in that young person's life and would be interested to see if you know embracing relationship building with your students with students that you teach and serve uh how this could be um put into you know the sip into this the staffing decisions and the potential rubric that we have coming up on surplus layoff um and then my other question is you know so as elite has pointed out one end of this you know it's discrimination another end is you know what traumas are students experiencing what adverse childhood experiences are our students experiencing in school and outside of school so i'm wondering
196how the bep can incorporate trauma-informed care particularly at the early grade levels especially as we start this all day 4k experiment and at the kindergarten first grade great bands yeah i love i mean i'm writing all this down i it's it's definitely i think that trauma-informed piece is key and that is where it's really thinking about where's the right leverage point to make sure that that happens is it through policies through practice level guidance it's checking our data to make sure that we're living out our values that we're following our guidance and so um yes 100 we could do better on that at all levels and i'm writing it down and keeping it in the forefront so where you're going to say something misspelled okay um julia yeah thank you um i have two questions
197so one so first thanks for reiterating the goal of keeping students in the classroom i think that's really important and i was just wondering what do the school level alternatives to suspension actually look like or what should they look like in an ideal world oh i love that question thank you and that's a question that um i spent time asking or was in the over the last couple years not this year but talking with students at restore about and it is amazing what students come up with and i know many of our you know high school staff are asking students what what do we need to do what's the best response here so for alternatives to suspension i'll i'll i'll go quickly i know it is late um but types of things so it looks
198like sitting down and and keep in mind right this is for secondary so we're talking about middle schoolers or high schoolers and we're talking about people in buildings sitting down um with a student and saying all right instead of um having a suspension are if you are interested in engaging in a restorative process with a staff person now of course that's something that should be happening anyway right so this is a step towards where we want to be right um so it could be going through a restorative process if it was something that involved a conflict with another uh another student or a teacher and that's one of the things we're working on through this rj cohort is really trying to build out meaningfully how that can look and in making sure that we include
199that adult and system accountability level as well not just on the student but when something occurs what are we learning about adults in the building what they need to work on mindset work other work and what are we learning about how our system also might need to change um if there are other types of interventions right if it's something related to drug use that a student could engage in other types of interventions they can opt into sometimes there would be a group they could opt in to their there's we're really giving schools are putting their creativity to come up with really meaningful responses that are grounded in in what students need yeah so thank you sarah did you want to chime in or you're just off okay great thank you great great question thanks and
200then i just had one other question so i know chris and ali and i think sarah all brought up that um some schools or pockets are doing much better than others as far as shrinking the gap at least which is an ideal but have there been efforts to compare that data from teachers or students or principals to figure out why they're doing better if it's principles or for some other reason or if it's correlative to to different levels of trauma that student bodies might be facing have there been those efforts to compare data or might there be in the future i know from a school perspective and i'm speaking from for one school just like we look at academic data we look at behavior data in the pandemic times we look at engagement data and
201attendance data more than behavior but during regular school years there isn't a single um quarter that goes by where teacher teams are not looking at their behavior referral data and and asking each other hard questions about the disproportionality that's a that's a school-based practice that i think has replication efforts in can be replicated in other schools it goes back to lisa's point when we draw attention to when we zoom out we can see patterns and we can speak more directly to how it is that we're creating that pattern and that we're doing that harm so i do think the data i do think we have the capability to do that to look at teachers and teams and practices not in a shaming way but in a what support do you need for this to look
202different thank you julia um gloria uh thank you ananda um all this is making me very nervous um and i feel like we've come a long way but um we're still not quite there and it it's making me nervous on a few fronts right i think when we see the disproportionality and discipline and arrest right we ultimately you know that really ultimately um shows and demonstrates our failure right as a school district um across the board right education responding to behavior mental health etc and so what has happened what ultimately happens when we don't get this right is that we let history repeat itself and you know we we moved quickly to um to move officers into our schools to respond to behavior right uh at one point in history and um it doesn't it
203didn't solve the issue and we have our community has asked us to take officers out of her school due to disproportionality i know that it is naive to think that it is the officers that were solely responsible for the arrests of behaviors in our schools that it was ultimately the responsibility uh within our school district within in our failures to really deal with behaviors and ultimately build the capacity within our schools and our teachers and our staff and and provide support systems and and it's not only just mmsd but it is the community right it is our family structure it is across the board you know we are all responsible for um the the the failures of our children and so um so when we when we have behavior incidents in our schools and we
204don't have the capacity to respond to those in a way in which it's trauma-informed where we are providing restorative justice we are um uh within our schools then what do we see right what is the outcome we move quickly to um call the police as if the police is going to solve our behavior issues right and that's where we found ourselves in right i mean we um we can blame officers all we want but that's that wasn't the underlying uh issue here and so i feel like we haven't gotten to the root causes and really been able to support our schools um you know and when we talk about the bep it is a cultural shift and it is a culture shift that we have been trying to change for the past what eight years
205um and we are still struggling um and it there we can't have this um narrative that one school is doing better than the other schools we all need to be in this um together and if like dr jenkins says if we're going to be an anti-school and to raise a school district we have to be an anti-racist school district and so what are we my question is what are we going to do at the point in time when the behavior is so out of control because we have not equipped our teachers our staff to deal with the behavior issues that rises to the level of a situation in schools uh battery disorderly conduct we can put a whole bunch of ordinances um and attach them to a to a behavior issue and so i just
206don't want us to go down that path again and so i really don't i think we have come a long way i just don't feel like we're there and i'm concerned about as sabian says the increased um significant amount of trauma that we're going to be faced with when we reopen schools and so what are we going to do to ensure that our teachers our staff are equipped and are prepared to deal with the overwhelming issues and challenges of behavior in our schools that we are going to expect uh in the in the coming years brain um i um i think i'm i'm going to do a slight reframe if i can just because i think this crosses over into some of the other conversations of the safety and security ad hoc and i know
207there'll be further discussions of that work on the 15th february 15th so i don't want to kind of cross over into that in this presentation and i want to i want to ground us back in you know that this is this is all of our work this is about creating those school communities where students feel loved feel seen and that we we need to drive our work from that place from that vision of where we are going to and building up those supports for all of our students and then and and not to drive it by the outlier scenarios that that will you know that you have mentioned there so i don't i kind of don't want to shift our frame to looking at those scenarios but i want to keep it grounded in what
208we're trying to talk about here with the bep as a whole um and how we create communities where everyone can be supported and and sort of going back to response earlier you know we just because we've been trying some things for a number of years and we haven't solved this problem completely doesn't mean that those those efforts aren't on the right track it may mean we need to do them more deeply more meaningfully mindset work takes time it's taken an incredible number of years of systemic racism to get to the point where we are now it's going to take a lot of intentional work to get us out thank you brent for that um i i understand that the outliers right um that could be an outlier but it wasn't an outlier for years right
209and that's why we are where we are today um and i mean i just uh um i just think that we have to really and i'm pushing us i'm pushing us because i see that this is exactly if we do not move on this quickly with a sense of urgency that we will find ourselves again here within the next 10 years we're going to be looking back and we'll be like oh um we we haven't quite dealt with the behavior in our schools that have risen to the level of disproportionality in discipline and in a rest and so i just um yeah i just uh i know a lot of work we we have a lot of work to do a lot of good work has happened um but i just don't want us to
210repeat ourselves um i absolutely hear you and the only i know we will need to move on but i just i do want to point us to the the research and the resources in that last slide right because there is there i always like to you know pull out books and i know we this talks about a lot of the things we're doing and that we need to do them more deeply more meaningfully we need to commit over time to what what does work to move systems forward and and i and i hear what you're saying absolutely thank you gloria uh schmidt and i see you saving steven did you have a follow-up to that that you wanted to get in quick yeah you know i say this with all love and respect we just
211need to be careful about um this concept of family structure um you know especially for black and brown families considering you know living under that boot of oppression um when we switch our frame black family has actually shown a remarkable degree of resiliency in america um and so i'm just gonna offer that so i guess mike my question is is kind of a little detail-oriented but it was focusing on the in the alternatives to suspension slide and the restorative approaches to student staff conflict slides and those were you know focused on what we're doing and the next steps we're gonna take um in a couple places there was an indication that the next steps were an additional template um the outcome was a template that we're going to use when we return to in-person learning
212and to me it seems that the templates are a tool to get us to the outcome of that student-centered and so i'm trying to think how can we move through that creating more plans creating more templates and getting to the student-centered outcomes so if you're talking about the behavior being you know trying to find alternative um reactions to students swearing at teachers like the outcome we want to get to as fewer students being suspended and fewer students swearing at teachers so how do we like how how is the process taking us there to get to that um and not just stopping at the template mode and maybe this is just me entering this conversation this has been a really um complex lots of years of work but um just wondering if you know we can
213see that in some of the planning too and then i guess i'll just throw out my last question um it feels to me especially when we're talking about students at the secondary level that we sort of treat students as passive participants in this process and how do we kind of you know look at students you know the students are the center of the restorative justice process and so how are we looking at how we're increasing their efficacy and how they're experiencing these processes along the way oh thank you um yeah sorry and i know it's it's the hard part about slides right and having a short presentation and wanting to connect um those actionable items that we are sort of trying to translate things into what does this look like in a classroom what can
214this look like and that's sort of that's what those templates are really and those are co-created with schools and and with student input and really um you know i wish you all could be with us in some of these meetings because i think you know what the mindset work that we're doing on ourselves with each other really trying to dig at so right you can you can plop down a template or a script and if it's not done with the right mindset it it won't have the right effect but if it does if it is it can be so incredibly powerful and it's hard to make that come to life right and i think that's what you're getting at um and so i guess i would uh i think one of the things i'll just
215see i think one of the things that we're doing with this cohort to look at restorative responses to student staff conflict is really taking that holistic lens looking at what is restorative and transformative justice mean and then how do we take these specific instances and and apply those concepts so that we are moving things forward um i'll see if anyone else wants to jump in but i also know it's late and you know it's it's a great it's a great question a great conversation rachelle yep um so hello everybody my name is rochelle stone i'm one of the restorative justice coaches for the district and also um was an elementary school teacher for a really long time and i think what's really important i'll try to answer your question but i also recognize um there
216are a lot of thoughts in my head um i think the biggest thing for me when thinking about doing this work and thinking about what needs to change is that we really need to think about dismantling the systems that are rooted in white supremacy and we also need to put youth and family voice at the center of that because at the end of the day it really comes to how can we work in service of black liberation and so how do we really take these systems that are harmful to black and brown students harmful to black and brown families and black and brown staff and how do we sort of restore our humanity to something different and not restore ourselves to white supremacy and i think when we look at these systems of behavior it's
217often rooted in white supremacy and so how do we really take this time especially during this pandemic where there are more more folks available on zoom we are able to collaborate across schools collaborate across grade levels to really think about what does this really look like sound like and feel like when we come back because i think what's happening in these conversations and what might not be um it might not appear like it on the slide is that people are really thinking about what we were doing before was not working we understand it wasn't working um they're understanding their participation in it and the harm that was being caused and so how do we really uproot that and take this time to not take what we were doing through the portal if you will and
218so how do we really think about eventually we will come back and eventually we'll come back in this way that doesn't won't look like before because it can't right we can't kick kids out because it's not safe when we're still in these um pandemic sort of times and so how do you really start to think about what systems really need to look differently and what can we really do in this moment thank you and and again i would just say if we can come back to somehow like when we talk about this again have some information on how students are experiencing the practices that we're putting into place and how the staff is experiencing it too so i i really appreciate you speaking to that and thank you for the resources too i did take
219a look at that slide and i have been um digging into the resources and so i i really do appreciate that thank you um thank you chris um and then thank you rochelle for your comments um you know laura there's something that gloria said around we're going to be 10 years uh in the future and we're going to be here and i had pulled up an article from scott gerard last year and we're having this same topic um and the title of the article was madison school district suspensions still disproportionately given uh to black students um those with disabilities and then had some quotes from some of us and then i know that if i talk to some of educators particularly educators of color in in our district they would say those were here 10
220years ago 15 years ago and 30 years ago um and i hear sort of this energy around like what is the thing what is the thing that we're going to do and i really appreciate the last couple comments from brandon and your comments particularly rachelle on really a really sharp analysis around we actually do know the root causes of disproportionality it's it's it's not a mystery is that we just really struggling saying that we have races in our schools and that's deeply rooted in also how we educate and how we discipline children and how we understand their behavior um so when we talk about being in an anti-racist district uh what is the policies that are going to support us to move it to that it's definitely not a revamping of the back is that
221it's definitely not uh you know doing you know additional research and i really appreciate you bringing all your research i really appreciate wins um framework that's the framework we're using at the department as well but at the root it's it's really around changing adult practices every adult in every building and i will highlight that there was a couple of sobering moments for me around implementation of bab one was uh in a feedback session around the back early early in its implementation and and i was sitting on the table with this educator and she had deep issues on and our goals uh for black students and i think for me it was like a good reminder that even though we are we are calling ourselves or we are aiming we're inspiring to be anti-racist and we
222are doing a comprehensive body of research and practices and whatnot and bringing all those framework to fruition uh there are people educators in our and i say with a lot of respect to our fellow edu my fellow educators that deeply believe that there's something inherently wrong with black and brown children and until we really can say that very explicit that we still have folks in our district that believe in superiority of race and and maybe they're not framing in this way they're just calling inferiority of race uh it's going to be extremely challenged for us to be you know in a meeting and and and see uh something different so i appreciate you all's work and if you have anything else to add about how do we what is the pursuit of of anti-racist policies
223an anti-racist budget an inter-racist uh collective accountability process i really would like to to hear that or uh just to ponder i did see dr jenkins unmuting so i wasn't sure if he was wanted to defer if you were wanting to chime in dr jenkins no why don't you guys go ahead and finish up i'll close okay thank you thanks well rochelle d do you want to chime in on ananda's question i mean i think it gets at the heart of transformational justice and restorative justice um sure and then i saw that i think ali has a question too ali do you want to go first or phil if you want to speak directly to um anonymous plan i don't think our points are necessarily related but thank you for the opportunity um so i
224agree with what was said before and i don't remember who said it so i apologize of um this internal work that has to happen because i agree with you ananda i think we you can't lessen away racism you can't you know have a curriculum or a toolkit that you give teachers and then it's really weaponized and harmful within the classroom and i also think we have to really consider that yes i believe in restorative justice and i believe in racial justice and i think that there um even with restorative justice in place at a school we have to look at all the other systems that aren't rooted in restorative justice that aren't related are aren't rooted in like love and care and wanting a sense of belonging for students because you can have a sort
225of frameworks and conversations but you still have suspension within your school you still have curriculum that's really harmful we still have how we're talking to students and how we're talking to families so i think that has to be this really deep internal work that we as a district really look at and say there are teachers and there are staff and there are people in buildings that are harming black and brown students and what happens when that happens and then how do we hold people accountable for those actions um because until that happens we will continue to harm students and people can do all the pd's and all of the workshops but if you're not taking that back into applicable practice and actually shifting the mindset of how your community is within your classroom or within
226your hallways or whatever um we're just going to perpetuate the same thing so i think it's us as a district taking a really hard look and not just us like also involving community organizations and families and youth um as well because we can't just do this in a vacuum we can't look at ourselves and do the work we also have to have that feedback um in connection and sort of co-liberation and co-design together i don't know if that answered your question but those are you no it was great thank you so much i think there's enough energy on this board for some really bold approaches i'm really hoping to have a different meeting when when we talk about the death again ali yeah i just wanted to say that i think we have to acknowledge
227that black students can't afford for us to pat ourselves on the back along the way um and black students can't afford for us to be uh impressed with minor or slight improvement we can't be impressed by going from being one of the worst districts in in the country to being the second or third worst district in the country for black students that is not what we're aiming for here um the other thing i i want to highlight is something that julia said which i think is really powerful what is the alternative and oftentimes when we talk about what is the alternative we forget that we use the alternative for other kids already right um we don't suspend every student who swears at a teacher right we're more likely to suspend a black student who uses
228an obscenity in class than a white student who uses an obscenity in class whether they're directed at teachers or not the alternatives exist we we have had ways of of mitigating the damage that punishment causes to students for white students the entire time we as a district have existed that's why white students are the largest demographic of young people at our district and one of the least likely demographics of children to get in trouble so if we can avoid uh you know criminalizing our white students we can avoid it for everybody else there is no shortage of young white people who use drugs or underage drink or engage in theft in this community i grew up here y'all um i i've been around too many of our children to think that that is the case
229um and so when we talk about what the alternative is we talk about restorative justice options when we talk about uh routes to community service or different ways in which a young person can be engaged and rebuild community when we talk about access to mental health support who gets to go to therapy right um those are all racialized conversations and we have to be honest and transparent about that if we want to navigate a different future um and so i think we we have have had the opportunity to have a pretty candid conversation this evening and hopefully we continue to have this conversation um and emphasize the importance of doing what's right for our most vulnerable young people our young people who sit at the intersection of race and poverty and disability um and what
230it means to be a part of the lgbtq community and acknowledge that those are our students who are the most likely to be arrested most likely to get in trouble at school and also the young people who have historically been denied access to an education michelle or brain thank you no i have i totally agree so i have nothing to there's nothing that um i think needs to be said thank you um yeah julia yeah thanks um thanks for everyone who's spoken already i just wanted to bring up a presentation in my homeroom class that i think we had last year and it was some statistics from west that showed the suspensions had decreased drastically in the last couple of years and frankly people didn't take it very seriously and students and teachers alike both
231kind of laughed at it and the reason is i think well yes it's critical and it's good that students are being kicked out of classrooms less that's extremely important and the reality is that we haven't seen learning improve and we haven't seen behavior in schools improve meanwhile suspensions have been decreasing and it hasn't shown those outcomes and i think the number of students reporting feeling safe at schools has even gotten significantly worse in the same time that suspension has been decreasing and i don't think that those are causing one another but i think it is true that decree suspensions aren't fixing the problems that we're talking about in these conversations and i don't know if that's because we're having the wrong conversation but again i'd just like to highlight the importance i think of comparing
232data across schools across the district to find out why things are working in places that they're working and then also working with families initially to just teachers and coming at it from a place that keeps students trauma and experiences and identity at the front because i think that that same conversation has been happening for years and it's not really working and then gloria very sick gloria i just have a question for julia what what what are you reading from what was that those are just some of my thoughts from a presentation that we had had last year in our home room where okay it was i think the school district or the school put together statistics on on suspensions and it was supposed to be kind of a testament to the success that it occurred
233but that's not really what we're seeing in the outcomes and i think it's important that the conversation makes sure to kind of differentiate those those two things great thank you thank you so much julia um i want to give folks an opportunity to do uh some closing remarks so i don't know um lisa if you or like sorry brain um oh sabian do you have another question or has nikki gone yet yeah she was the first one oh god okay never mind um thank you savion for making sure that i call everybody um so i wanna make sure that brynn or lisa have any uh final comments around the presentation and then give dr jenkins an opportunity for some closing comments thank you ananda i will allow dr jenkins to have the final word on
234this anything else brian no thank you thank you both for uh the presentation and and for taking notes and um and staying attentive to my colleagues and my comments uh dr jenkins i know you're going to say something really good okay well actually where i am i sat purposely and just wanted to observe and this time last year scott giroud had the article and i remember before coming here and just looking at the various reports the ocr report which we haven't talked about you know this whole consternation in the community around the bep and when i walked in to the district i heard that we were a district striving to be anti-racist and i asked that question everywhere i go here what does that look like what does it smell like what does it taste
235like what does it feel like and i watched this board meeting tonight i've watched us earlier we were talking about reopening and i mean every one of us because you can't call it unless you call it out every one of us when we're talking about reopening we talked about athletics we had a degree of excitement and a degree of questioning of one another just gonna find a way to make it happen but it's always a drop in the conversation when it comes to talking about eradicating those policies or practices that have since the emphasis of america that has held down black people listen when you go look at article two section one and it talks about three-fifth of a human being you talk about property you talk about someone's self sub human that is still
236the attitude we carry today so it will change when we get ready for it to change not a day before and if we don't acknowledge if we don't acknowledge it as a group then we can't get any better i also want to point out when you heard from your african-american staff member who's taught in this district she called us straight out she didn't even play with it there's two conversations going on in madison right now and we all need to get to one conversation there's one conversation we have publicly and there's one conversation we have privately it's time we move forward i'm straight up in the movement for anyone who wants to know okay oppression anywhere is a threat to oppression anywhere it's a threat if we allow it to happen and dr king said
237it best right injustice injustice and that's what we got to be talking about injustice but really what we need to be talking about is justice we want to have justice for all children in our district we have to even govern ourselves better when we have these conversations i want to be excited to talk about advanced learning and all of our children going in advanced learning i want to be excited about talking about we can get rid of this seclusion i want to get excited about all of our children having alternatives to something better and if it's for 10 years we won't be here in the same place because trust me there's already a plan to do away with public education and all they want us to do is to continue to do what we've done
238why don't some black and brown parents want to go back to school right now they said will it be better for my child this is the lowest suspension rate ever in the history of american education and the children some of them a lot of them are doing better so i'm just telling you if they don't get suspended in virtual why do they have to get suspended in brick and mortar comes back to attitude of adults and yes children have adverse childhood experiences and those are not just children of color who have it adverse childhood experiences those are not children who who are born how they are born and then we're judging them differently once they come back and break brick and marta so i'm just telling you i think this is a pivotal conversation tonight
239i think it's recorded and we all need to go back and look at and see what where is the enthusiasm and it is unacceptable to not be prepared on this topic this is what we're talking about we said we want to be bold this is bold take it on if we want to be the model take this on this issue right here take this on i talked to mti and they said that they want to be an anti-racist organization they actually have kerry right now who's leading that work and i say really really then let's see let's take on these things guys this this is not acceptable by any means what we just had this conversation on and everyone should be enthused to do something about it that's all i had to say dang oh
240thank you so much dr jenkins it's really hard to follow that so uh how about a motion to adjourn so moved thank you so much nikki uh julia your advisor thank you ellie uh julia your advisory vote oh yeah you heard yes sorry thank you julia all those in favor say aye uh 7-0 motion uh past and uh meeting adjourned thank you everyone and thank you again dr jenkins i have to process everything that you just said no thank you