001soonest um i've been doing a lot of math with that stuff i don't know by the way our phone numbers are out now on the website i got a phone call about that so erin's updating the website oh did leslie williams call you i know gotta tell ya good evening everyone i called to order the monday august 16th regular meeting of the river falls board of education this meeting has been properly notified i suspect i have a few remarks to get us started this evening i suspect all of us are aware of the tremendous anxiety and division facing our nation in the world while none of us can single-handedly end the division together all of us can prevent it from dividing our community and separating us from our neighbors to contribute to healing rather than
002further separation please number one remember that all of us care about the children in our community and number two treat each other with respect grace and good will i will soon turn to welcoming visitors and delegations to the microphone for public comment time now we have been really patient over the past weeks when members of the community have spoken for longer than the allotted two minutes but please limit your comments to two minutes a lesser known truth is that board members tend to turn into pumpkins when the hour gets too late since we have a full agenda tonight we need time for board discussion and decision making so please keep your comments brief and with that i will turn to any visitor delegations who would like to address the board you may approach the microphone
003please tell us your name and the school or schools that your children attend my name is roland harkey i have a child who attends river falls high school and i have a 10 year old with a chronic medical condition who won't be eligible for vaccination for several months i don't want to be here tonight there's a lot of people who don't want to be at these meetings speaking at a common microphone indoors a lot of those people understand the virus they understand the delta variant i'm only here because i find it inconceivable that some members of the board and school leadership are willing to risk the lives and future health of our students because of a minority public backlash based on misinformation intentional or otherwise i feel terrible for all of you i cry for
004you i literally cry for you so nice i know that no matter what you do you are going to be hassled and i am so sorry i really am but that's all the more reason to do the right thing to be ethical please every reliable scientific source in the united states is asking you baby you to require masks from the cdc to our local pediatricians to our local world-class epidemiologist if none of you have seen if any of you have not seen the letter from the secret county health department officer a.z snyder i have extra copies it begs the board to require masks there are not two sides to this issue it's not he said she said we don't teach the controversy of a earth-centered universe in my astronomy class there aren't two sides i
005know it takes courage to be leader please be a leader even if a vocal minority is going to hassle you even if it were a majority which it's not you need to be a leader just like during the civil rights movement people had to go through a lot to be leaders in their community and to do the right thing i received an email from my child this week that said classes are quote very full i guess that tells us about spacey sure only a few kids die from coven only a few parents only a few grandparents but who will that be in our community and do you want to pick i know that you want to follow the wishes of your community but you see a disproportionate number of misinformed people here because the rest
006of us are watching at home where we should be please please listen to the people who know what they're talking about the department of public instruction is begging school districts they can't mandate it but they are begging school districts to require mask as is the cdc as is easy as is our local pediatrician i contacted the department of public instruction to ask what i could do one idea for parents i know that you're worried about losing students to private school to homeschooling and i understand i really do understand that risk and what it would do to the district but we have to act too so i just want parents to know that if you homeschool your students for the first three weeks of class the dpi says that the student does not attend instruction for
007any part of the day before and on the september 17 2021 third friday count date that student will not be counted in the district and therefore the district would be at risk of losing some of their thirteen thousand five hundred dollars of funding per student please listen to the experts you have a self-selection effect happening at these meetings thank you for your service it takes hundreds of hours you guys but please do the right thing please [Applause] my name is julie wald shane i want to say thank you so much to those that voted last week to keep mass optional i promise we the parents will have your backs come re-election time having a mass choice is imperative as health options aren't a one-size-fits-all for the rest of you that voted for masking our kids
008please stop placing this burden on our children and stop protecting yourselves politically do the right thing keep masking optional for the 2021-2022 school year thank you [Applause] hello i'm sarah i spoke last week i have a kid in mayor middle and i'm a kid in greenwood um last week i voiced my opinion of what i would like to see i said i was not against masking i just would like a choice for my own family and children as if they wear a mask or not because they do have health exemptions and they do have health problems you don't know what you like what the final wildcat roadmap 2.0 looks like yet my stances still stand i'm not going to sit here and like bore you to death with science facts and everything but i have
009seen our town in our community which i moved here because of the community so divided i can go on any social media group and the comments are horrendous like all i saw all week was how can we sway the board to go our way how can we do like that's not what i want to look at when i'm going on those pages i want to see what's going on in our community i want to see us come together like tonight when i went to the the you know the free shoe thing and saw all those people actually getting along and helping each other and handing out shoes and all the kids smiles and everything that's what i that's why i want to live here and why i wanted to send my kids to reverse fall
010school district but my question to you let's just hypothetically say you do the math mandate and it pivots what are you as a board going to do to protect every single kid because i heard last week a lot of people say that you guys care and and you care about every single kid in this district which i hope is true and i i believe that but what are you gonna do about it what are like if if there are kids that can't go and i assure you there are kids that cannot go to school with a mass because they have health mandates what are you going to do to protect them like i i saw a lot of kids get bullied last year by faculty members by other kids and i get that you can't
011do it you're you're only you know a board you can't do everything but does that mean you have a meeting for you know have an assembly at the schools to talk about hey some kids can't wear masks or do you talk to all the faculty and just say hey some kids aren't going to be wearing a mask just you know they have the mandates to leave them alone or what it what is it that you as a group of people if you care about all of our kids not just the ones that are wearing masks going to do for all of us so my stances stick but i would like to know the other side of if there is a mass mandate what also is going to happen that's all i have to say thank
012you [Applause] um hello my name is abby van stone and my children are here tonight they go to west side elementary um i just wanted to say that like many parents in our school district i'm terrified of sending my children to school in person but due to a brain tumor diagnosis and an invasive surgery scheduled for next month i'm unable to assist them with virtual school you all have more power than i do as the mother of young children who are too young to be vaccinated to most effectively protect my children and you're not doing it the cdc the aap and dr morgan have all recommended that you mandate masks to most effectively protect all of our children and you're not doing it and all because the very idea of legitimizing the actual scientifically proven
013risks of this virus anchors those who have politicized it by taking the stance that you can't bring yourselves to compel somebody else to do the right thing and the only thing to most effectively mitigate the spread of potentially deadly virus you are in fact mandating that parents with children under the age of 12 that they're going to be put at an increased risk for being infected with the coven variant if they're unable to participate in virtual school as the mother of two students who are among those who are most likely to be adversely affected by your decision i implore you all to reconsider your why for not mandating masks [Applause] i'm richard sandstrom i have two kids here one in them going in the middle school and one in elementary school i never thought i
014would volunteer to stand up in front of a group to speak but here i am i couldn't stand by and say nothing when other parents and faculty members are trying to abuse my children by forcing them to wear a mask all day and say it's backed by science and facts the facts are the data from the american academy of pediatrics and the children's hospital association as of december 17th of 2020 two million children make up about 12.4 percent of total cases and only 172 of those children have died among only truth increases for that time period one point three percent have been hospitalized and .01 have died so that's a 99.99 recovery rate now as of august of this year formula children have been tested positive for code making it jump to 14 18 of
015total cases 0.02 to 1.9 percent result in hospitalization depending which state you're in and 0 to 0.3 percent result in death so that's a 99.7 to 100 recovery depending on which state you live in seven states have reported no deaths in children so saying we need to mass number to protect them is false is not backed by science the flu kills 600 children a year that's two to three times more than covetous kill them in any year now about the mass the only mass that may actually help the kids are the k-95 respirators but the general public aren't allowed to use those because of the supply shortages medical mass offers some protection against covet and then the clots mass not one study has shown they produ protect them in any way the particles are too
016small they just flow in and out the mass there's no protection there that's it [Applause] uh good evening hi my name is mike gardner i'm resident of river falls my particular topic is the the eid program was in your school district i have concerns that critical race theory is crept into that program and i just want to let you know that i'm kind of involved with a lot of organizations that are studying school districts around this state in eastern minnesota i'll just name a few no better friend corporation milwaukee frederick douglass foundation american experiment organization which is basically in minnesota but it's moving their investigations over to western wisconsin the saint cloud gop the sons and daughters of liberty out of wilson wisconsin and the take charge minnesota all these organizations are involved with looking
017at school districts and what's being taught in within the schools and their big concern is the issue of critical race theory i've studied your eid program and my suspicion is there's a lot of critical race theory within it i'll get right to the punchline on it uh the people that i know in this community that come to me about the subject they're basically saying we want educators within the classroom we don't want a bunch of amateur social sociologists we want math chemistry reading physics as being the top priority not necessarily the social justice programs we recognize those are important but they should not be the priority thank you [Applause] hi my name is martin kretzman got three kids here in the district i spoke last week as well um i just i find it interesting
018that the people that argue about whether certain students or their students should stay home have the same exact argument for my students and i find myself sitting in that seat saying wow i kind of agree with them until i actually hear their point of view well my kids should stay home because they can't wear a mask or they should wear a mask your kids should stay at home because they should learn maths or could wear a mask or should wear a mask and it just struck me that i could take people on the other side of my perspective and use their argument and we're all kind of standing in the same place and that struck me as interesting i'm not gonna use my whole two minutes tonight i do appreciate your time i've been really
019critical of this format before um and that was probably unfortunate um i feel i'm not gonna use the word sorry but i get frustrated that there's people that get so emotional that they say well don't make me send my kids to school because they're sick or whatever um if you have concerns keep your kids home just like i would at any time i keep my kids home if they're sick i keep my home my kids home if i think that there's a risk that's what i do as a parent i'm asking that you keep masks optional like you did last week and keep that in mind give us a choice not anti-mask i said that last week i'm not anti-vaccine i'm not anti-science which i get accused of all the time i'm just pro-choice for
020my kids and my health that's it [Applause] my name is mike thompson i have a deep appreciation for what you're going through as you know i was on that board for the last three years and i think the last speaker really hit the nail on the head which compels me to want to reiterate just a couple of things you know you hear all kinds of factors that people bring up and details but there's two fundamental things and one of them is around being proactive about creating a safe environment for our students for our staff for our volunteers for everybody who comes into our buildings and i know for the three years that i was on the board that was a foundational principle that we that we always followed when we made decisions far less difficult
021than what you're faced with now with covid but but i just implore you to maintain the the use of that foundational principle of what is the safe thing to do how do we create be proactive and continue to create a safe environment for our kids and i know you're thinking about that as you go through the decision-making process the other one is a lot of science gets thrown around um and as a person who has a doctorate in molecular biology i follow the science maybe a little bit more than than a lot of people and i'm not going to litigate the science here that actually is done in the scientific community it's called peer review um but i just want to express the view and and and encourage you to remember that the science science
022is not undecided on this issue i would challenge you to find a single issue on the face of the planet where there is a hundred percent agreement amongst everybody on all the details probably doesn't exist it's just like it doesn't exist with this issue but with this issue around covid around what what we're going through with respect to the virus and it's in fact infectiousness and it's in its impact on people with respect to masks immunizations and all of the stuff you heard about so eloquently from dr morgan last week the vast vast extremely vast majority of all of the most educated people in the world and all of the organizations that they belong to is in agreement about the about the details of that and i'm not going to reiterate what those are you
023heard very eloquently last week so i just wanted to remind you of that [Applause] hi my name is mary i have a son once on at the high school um i will definitely keep my comments to under two minutes mostly because i really still can't wrap my head around the fact that i even need to be here making a public statement urging you to do this one simple thing in order to keep my kid all of our kids safe i thought long and hard about what to say but i don't know what i could say that would be more compelling than what the cdc has said the wisconsin department of public health the wisconsin to public public department of instruction pierce county local pediatricians i don't have anything else that's that's kind of what you
024should be listening to anyways but here i am i guess just urging you to just take that one simple step um recommended by virtually all the experts um and just you know kind of see where things go and take that step and hopefully you know our numbers will go down and we can revisit it at a later date but um let's not be the cause for increased numbers in our community thanks [Applause] good evening my name is jan jablonski and i would like to make a comment from a former speaker i when i got the incumbent literature during the school board elections i had some red flags raised in my mind the former speaker who talked about critical race theory i felt had some points too i spoke with him briefly i would like mrs
025myers probably because i have spoken to her to explain equity and to give us an example of what that means because i feel people many people that i talk to think of it as equality and i would like a definition that is clear and probably some examples of how your school is using that or will be using that that particular term the inclusivity i would guess goes along with the with the with the e and eid and diversity um the same but i do think that the equity doesn't need a definition and we do need a couple of examples as to how the school is going to use it i'm concerned that that will be in history classes social studies classes civic classes classes that can easily slide into the critical raise theory i don't
026know if you can answer that during this time or if you will address it mrs meyers you know whenever but that was my concern is that all of the incumbents agreed that the eid was pretty important as a matter of fact there was very little about academics in your literature most of it was teachers staff not so much about kids and for me the basics are the real critical factor social and emotional development can be done in the home and i recognize we have divided homes the situation isn't the way it used to be 20 years ago when i talk and we do need to address those but they can't be a priority thank you [Applause] big time hi i'm emily keating um i have a nine-year-old and a seven-year-old who go to the montessori
027here in town um i'm here to talk about masks and um the decision that was made last week i have to express my appreciation for how the school year went last year both my kids were in school the entire year i think you all and jamie benson especially did an outstanding job it went completely well and i really have to think a lot of that has to do because of masks and i'm not an expert speaker but i'm also an er nurse and i have to say i didn't see any children um well i saw some but very few last year for any childhood illnesses that we usually see this year already we are seeing a lot we see strep throat right now in the er we're seeing babies we're seeing we're seeing kids with
028a lot of a lot of childhood illnesses that we didn't see because they're not really wearing a lot of masks right now in the summer time and the delta variant is a lot different than regular covid which i know a lot of people are probably reading on the news um it spreads a lot easier than copa does which makes me really confused and very frustrated as to why now mass are optional i understand that some children have a hard time wearing masks i think the school district would be willing to work with some of those children but i think as a whole we all want to protect our kids and we're all here to protect our kids from illnesses but i think also the um the the i guess it's the passionate nature of everybody
029with this i feel like you're either anti-mass or or you you're all about mass but i think we're all for our children and we want to create a good atmosphere for learning environment and we all know that in person learning is is where it's at and we all want them to be healthy and we all want to create a healthy community and in order to do so um i think we need to mandate mass right away otherwise i think that we're going to have a really hard time trying to backtrack and do that later on and it's going to make jamie benson's job really hard and i think that puts a lot on him and i can and i can see that as a part-time er nurse and a parent of two little kids so
030i think that's a lot to ask personally i think it's also a lot to ask of all of you with a really passionate community behind you not wanting a lot of choice it's our choice as parents in a community to teach our children how to be compassionate people how to be caring people and how to love one another and show them show up to school every day with a mask on their face because they don't want to make somebody else sick because you don't know who your neighbor is you don't know who the nurse is next door that's going to have to help your neighbor who's going to be innovated in the er the next day the numbers are climbing the numbers are climbing and it's just started so my job is getting harder i'm
031adjusting the board and i'm addressing our community the numbers are climbing and they're only going to get worse school hasn't even started so i really really want you all to reassess how we're starting let's start how we want to end if we can teach our children how to be compassionate as being compassionate adults and caring about others in this world i think that's what we can do at home and that's our choice as adults [Applause] hi my name is liz allen i have a 13 year old in school i'm 73. this isn't just about protecting our children this is about protecting the people around our children and spreading this illness around you know last time i understand from your meetings you saw a chart that said 29 of the covet victims were me so it
032didn't really matter but that's species the people that we're projecting are the people on either side of our kids as well and our community and to look at also to look at the cova alpha documentation is going to throw us off we need to be have forward action on this and take a look at what's going to happen in the future we didn't do it the first time this pandemic hit and now is our opportunity to do it right regardless of our politics or what we happen to think is the last speaker so eloquently said it's about people and i'm here to stand before you and tell you that i have a weakened immune system i'm not looking forward to getting sick with anything whether i die or not i don't want to have my
033health which is robust to a point right now because i built it up undermined because of somebody else's decision and when you're placed on a school board by the people of this town you have an obligation to represent the majority of all of us and at least keep us safe when you're a position in a position of leadership all the way across the board no matter what that leadership is you know your you have an obligation to take care of people and so i'm here this is my first school board meeting i've raised two kids back to back and i'm here for the first time to speak up for my life and my health and everybody that i represent and you know i hope to hear that you're going to make the right choice i
034think it's really obvious thank you oh and i want to also say that i don't know what city it is it's a major city in texas at this moment their pediatric icu is full up with covenant [Applause] hi sarah bachman um so i i just heard what the lady prior to me said and please note that a patient going in with covent and dying of coven they're two different things right so keep that in mind please and i did time myself it's two minutes um jamie you've been laying out your case of why you're going to have masks case counts we can pivot we need to keep our kids safe cindy not to pick on you um i know you care deeply cindy states why we need to listen to the cdc and worse yet
035why we need to incentivize people to get their vaccine this way of thinking is so incredibly wrong parents who want parents who want to prove that they have been that they have had their vaccine or their kids vaccines don't have to quarantine you're just steps away from getting sued by parents for discrimination and next next segregation it was also stated that vaccinated kids get to be six feet six feet from each other and non-vaccinated kids six feet or three feet then six feet um that's insanity and how are you going to even enforce that back to this case counts i want to remind you again that case counts mean nothing we are always going to have cases the question is are our kids getting sick and dying right here in pierce county are they no
036they're not there is a vast difference between a case count and someone who is actually being getting ill and displaying illness more importantly again we humans cannot stop a virus you can protect their vulnerable like we do with any virus the sick and vulnerable stay home we should not be asking our children who are not ill to be doing any of this jamie you have a doctor here last time to back up everything that you want to implement anyone can find someone to back up their views do we get to have a chiropractor here next time talking i'm going to guess that their view is different back to the cdc this is not a reliable source the cdc has been flip-flopping since the beginning they're a privately owned entity beyond that they have not produced
037one peer review review study to back up any of their claims that's really important to keep in mind and i just wanted to ask you to take a step back for a second do you remember when this whole thing started two weeks ago or just two weeks is all that was said um you've seen people walk down the streets alone with a mask it's nonsensical have we forgotten how we even catch a communicable disease i'm gonna go on a limb here and say you've been played there's a bigger picture you have missed while being so focused on fears your fear of your child getting sick which is no worse than the flu your fear of being sued your fear of losing school fundy in jesus name fear is of the devil so in the name
038of our lord jesus i command fear to have no more hold here no more fear in the hearts of its citizens no more fear here in this district nor fear in this county no more fear in the state or the country jesus is lord of lord and kings of kings in jesus name this i pray for those of you up there who are genuinely concerned like cindy i can see that about fear i also want to remind you that there are private schools all over wisconsin who have had little to no mitigation efforts with comparative or even better statistics i'm happy to get you their contact information if you need please vote common sense tonight thank you [Applause] hello thank you for this opportunity um my name is marnie pocket i have three kids in
039the district um they're all elementary students i'm also a teacher in hudson at an elementary school and so i speak with the perspective of a teacher and also a parent so masks are not harmful to our students to our children they wore masks all year last year and they did it without complaining they um they were able to still run around and still make connections and still have friendships and i did not see it impact their well-being at all throughout an entire year kindergarteners even who don't know you know what school looks like they were still able to have a fulfilling year and and have a great time and stay in school and we know that the impact to parents is if schools shut down if classes shut down that is hard not all of
040us have the luxury of being home i don't so we want kids in school we know they learn best in school and to be proactive at least with our unvaccinated children the kids who are not able to be vaccinated yet it really makes sense to be proactive keep them safe do what we know was working last year as we saw your nurse erin emily sorry um she said numbers of everything else are down strep throat our superintendent we just had a meeting about this as teachers and our superintendent all the numbers struck through flew they're down we didn't have a single class that said i'm missing seven today because of the flu none of that we knew that the masks were keeping them safe healthy um so it's just it's proactive and until they can
041be vaccinated then maybe let's look at it again but i believe that there is no negative impact to wearing a mask thank you [Applause] hi i'm fisher and 8th grader going into my middle and i have a medical condition that i cannot wear a mask and every single day i was bullied and i just dreaded going to school because i couldn't wear a mask and the fact that all these other people are saying that you and they should be able to make choices based on my body that i cannot wear a mask and i just hope that you go with optional masks [Applause] angie krause river falls i just want to thank you for the votes last week the four boats that we got for masks optional the kids thank you as well a few
042afterthoughts that i have the three foot six foot is not possible in my opinion the teachers will find it very difficult i know you guys discussed that last week as well i just think it's absolutely impossible to keep track of that um case counts case stomach you've heard that too this is like just what jamie reiderated last week is saying over and over as the case counts i think we can assume maybe the case cases will go up we just have to acknowledge that it is the kids aren't getting sick i mean they went through school all last year without an issue with the ineffective masks obviously with aerosols being able to spread that the cases remained pretty low um i am concerned with sending my daughter because of your discussion to pivot i don't
043think that's fair you know that you choose masks optional and then in a month or two or three or four months you decide to you know i mean then what do i do i have to pull my kid out of school and figure it out it just it's confusing um another concern um is that you truly believe your mitigation efforts are going to do something to stop or eradicate this virus it is not going anywhere covid is not going to be you can't stop the spread of it with your masks or your mitigation it's not possible it's going to run its course so i just feel like that's a a really important thing to acknowledge um are we gonna mask forever i mean is that what we're gonna do there will always be a variant
044the doctor said last week the kids are in the hospital with kovid there's a big difference between being in the hospital with kovitt versus being in the hospital because of koben cindy last week was proposing that if you can prove you have been vaccinated you don't need to get sent home for the 14 days that there needs to be an incentive for us to get vaccinated um wow i just you all know that people are getting covet after vaccination so hear you sit on the board and talk about that it's blows my mind um and it's really ugly actually there are treatments for covid very successful treatments the district's doctor didn't talk about this last week the doctor also mentioned vaccine immunity natural herd immunity is more effective than vaccine immunity as the shot has
045been proven pretty ineffective at this point we do need unbiased doctors to help educate pcr tests are they still using these to determine cases if so then why it has been deemed an ineffective test and is being recalled in december per the cdc i'm still wondering if we're bringing the testing into our schools i've heard nothing there's no talk about it i don't know what's going on with that the pcr can also not distinguish between the flu and covid lots of false positives and last week i just wanted to mention um no clapping from stacy it was a celebratory clap and i don't think it was disruptive at all kind of ruined the moment actually um the audience got shushed it was just very disrespectful in my opinion last week the board did make masks
046optional for all of you begging and pleading to um mandate the masks so i just wanted to remind you all of that that they are optional right now so thank you [Applause] i will remind everyone that we are talking about issues tonight we are not making complaints about individual people would anybody else like to address the board my name is roxanne as you know i've been up here a few times and i have a high schooler here at river falls and i wasn't going to speak about anything tonight but after a few comments i just wanted to make a comment that in your discussions last week regarding the close contact tracing which is kind of near and dear to my heart i did hear the comments by the board of suggesting that maybe we [Music]
047have separate protocol for those with vaccines and those without and i just want to say that i hope that you if you decide to go this way that you've completely done your homework when it comes to segregating people like this regarding the hipaa law and things like that because we're trying to unify our community and our children and not separate them even further so we go mask no mask vaccine no vaccine and again the vaccine is not a hundred percent guarantee of any of this you've seen the numbers going higher and higher of people being vaccinated that are getting coveted people that have had the vaccine that are carrying the variant and again this isn't going away so i i hope that you legally have done everything you can should you decide to vote that
048way because i'll guarantee you will have parents that will be coming in here regarding the protocol and how their child is handled with a vaccine or not a vaccine [Applause] hi cassie howard two elementary school kids um i'm not really sure what we're doing here we're all pretending like we haven't been dealing with this respiratory virus for 20-some months we're not in the same position that we were in this time last year we know more we've learned more it's time to evolve the prioritization of adults irrational and baseless fears over children's futures must end this is not last year we need to stop reacting in fear like it is and realize our discussions tonight are not original not being trailblazers we are not uncommon this is not unprecedented regardless of what science you're reading or
049what political stance you're taking on the subject it doesn't matter the numbers are in across the world countries have put on mass mandates and lockdowns and countries have done nothing and let their adults make safe and common sense decisions across our country states have done mandates lockdowns mitigation measures slices of cheese if you will and states have done none of that heck even 10 miles north of here there's a school mask optional all of last year all of these have the same seasonal curve as their region they all behave exactly the same regardless of who's panicking and who's critical thinking it's not like we're seeing unusual spikes proven that these layers work the area under the curve is always the same the problem with restrictions and policies is that they cause more harm than their
050prevent for future masking discussions and the mitigations of swiss cheese tonight let's let parents decide their comfort level it's not like the idea of masked optionals going against the norm we have had half the country mask optional for many months now even in schools they have all had the same seasonal curves as their region these children get to breathe freely and see their peers and teachers smiles with zero change in their covenant trajectory public health depends on autonomy and medical sovereignty medicine has never been one size fits all let's leave all of these medical decisions up to the individual parents thank you [Applause] uh my name is levi gurrell i got two kids one a rocky branch one going into high school i like to keep it short i'm i'm for optional masking i would
051like everybody to be able to choose what they want to choose when they want to choose it that's all i got if we go full mask i'm going to taking my kids off that's all i got [Applause] would anyone else like to address the board all right we are now going to move on to informational items and we will turn to the superintendent's report with an update about the wildcat roadmap 2.0 i'm going to give some background about this update last week a majority of the board voted in favor of masks optional for our schools due to the late hour of the evening we did not consider other important covet mitigation strategies that are part of this wildcat roadmap but it's really important for the school board to make decisions not on an individual basis
052solely but how they are impacted by other decisions and so tonight mr benson is going to provide an outline of our comprehensive layered approach to covet mitigation and how those approaches would be impacted by the expectations regarding masks thank you stacy and again just for people to understand process for this particular meeting the way that we created the agenda is that i'll give this informational update um at that point there it's not listed on here for the board to take action later after uh early on in this meeting then there's a separate action item at which time the board the game plan is for the board then to take action on the wildcat roadmap in its entirety so it might take a little while to go through all this for what i want to present
053to the board there's kind of a two-part approach one i wanted to i feel that i have an obligation to bring some data in front of the board and you will see that i've gathered some data from different sources data specific to what i mentioned last week rather than us looking at new york or texas or florida i think that we should care about all of that but let's drill in and take a closer look here at home wisconsin pierce county our school district boundary saint croix county and so i feel an obligation and you'll see on the slides that there will be a bit of a picture that is painted here that says here are the facts here are the data points and you will see what i will use the word a slow
054increase in covet cases and so with that it's important i think that we also understand that our board to a person i think last week said that whatever action we take we are going to we are going to put a little asterisk in here that says this could be subject to change and i don't know how many more kind of public hearings we will have moving forward quite frankly i suspect that um we're going to get to a point where we'll make those decisions based on what what the data points are that we're most concerned with and everybody will not be short of an opinion on that i'm very confident of that with all of that being said first i want to show this brief powerpoint the data points and then i'm going to show
055the wildcat roadmap pause a couple of other agenda items then the board will take action on the wildcat roadmap so aaron you have that slide up thank you next slide please i listed just three of our really six main guiding principles i consider them to be kind of our values what are our values in relation to making all of these decisions and that second bullet certainly safety everybody cares about safety all of us do but that second bullet the in-school learning opportunities that's a real high priority that that one of the most significant learning lessons that we have from last year is that we didn't care for the number of days that our kids weren't here at school the number of weeks they weren't all here five days a week we wanted a goal is
056to let's do better at that let's get them in here more face to face next slide please so some of the data points you hear people commenting about hospitalizations it's really not all that bad i would say this slide says well i don't know if i would want to pin any words of my own to say whether it's all that bad or not all that bad but these are facts i don't believe the people that created this information are liars and so there it is you can determine from this data whatever you want to take from it does it show a massive spike nope i put a red arrow on the top right corner to say is it starting to climb yup and there's other there's there's other information listed there as well next slide
057please there's another website you can go to the wisconsin dhs i put the link on there it's a seven day rate thing it's something that we referred to often all of last year every time we put these numbers in front of the public in the board we this was kind of a go-to site for us and we were even comparing ourselves to surrounding districts i'm not going to get into that right now next slide please this is a pierce county website arrows on the far right side green arrow says that on july 17 we had four it's the number of new confirmed probable cases by week so in the week leading into july 17 the growth that occurred in that time span for a week there was four new cases today august 14th in a
058week there's been 39 cases am i an alarmist am i seeing that am i saying that means everybody's gonna die am i saying that no i'm not saying anything these are just facts you take it for whatever it's worth i feel i would be remiss to not provide some of that information to our board next slide please this is a saint croix county website lots of data available there you'll see the bar graph indicating some growth next slide please lo and behold there's another data source for you cdc tracker data tracker you can go into this website you can pull in specifically i grabbed pierce county only for purposes of this slide i could have also added saint croix county this shows you an indicator again a seven day total the rates percentages and the
059the percent of change over the last seven days is essentially what it shows and so they're saying there was a 59 change over a seven day period death date is available there there's there's more i just did a screenshot there's more if you go to that website lots of data to look at next slide please there's the harvard model we've all heard about it depending on where some of those data points are you apply it to a harvard model and you follow it to determine if you're green yellow orange or red one of the criticisms is quite frankly green i don't think we'll ever get there you gotta you have you have to have less than one case per hundred thousand people it might be decades before we get to that point criticism of the
060harvard model move to the right whether it's one to nine cases you should be in the yellow or all the way over to the red it's 25 cases there's debates over whether that's a legit model to use or are the cdc people being overly conservative too cautious everybody's got their opinion on that next slide please this is a accounting of our local data right here in our school district it's our school district boundary so to be clear that's all ages this is not a data point of students only this is off of the state website point i wanted to make is in december it shows 46.9 that was the seven day average rates and then in january we were still at 25 and you can see it kind of starts to taper off when the
061board made a summer decision on may 27 those cases were 1.7 one could argue that maybe made it a no-brainer that we should try optional masks over the summer two cases in the district this summer two kids club summer school that could be an argument to say see you tried it this summer not many cases but the delta it's different it spreads like wildfire it's it it it as contagious as chickenpox yes it's contagious but that doesn't mean everybody's gonna die i understand the arguments on all side of this i'm just providing the data points that shows the red arrow slowly would be my word slowly we can see the numbers in our front yard are slowly increasing for whatever that's worth however that whatever that means to you next slide the wildcat roadmap last
062disclaimer last slide is again i'm going to go on record to say it i don't care what the board decides tonight it doesn't matter this board has indicated that there might be some changes i believe that that's a possibility moving forward district matrix that last question mark so with those previous slides when i said you got a harvard model you got a state model there does the do we want to get into defining our own matrix that would determine and tell people ahead of time okay if and when we get to this point this is when we're going to say the mass come off or the mass go on i know that the the board has entertained some of those thoughts and the the debatable topic there of course is why wouldn't we just be
063following some of the other entities that have already created those kind of matrixes like the harvard model and so on that's all i have for now on on just an overview of some data and aaron if you would pull up the wildcat roadmap please i don't intend to go through word by word line by line but if you would scroll forward aaron first parts talk about some of our guiding principles some miscellaneous narrative keep rolling please keep rolling please keep rolling please all the way to there you go so last week as the board made their uh last week's decision we're going to be try to help ourselves refer to optional masks using some term a little better terminology that says highly recommended we highly recommend mass slash optional is what that means but it
064means we're highly recommending it a little word change is all so the board at the end of that meeting got to be 10 o'clock we were here for three hours and 15 minutes we the board said okay now that we've finally made that decision to say it's highly recommended slash optional mr benson we're directing you to go back to the shop talk to your colleagues come back and put in front of us as a board more definitive details on close contact tracing quarantine and related to that is a cohorting element that largely affects elementary not so much middle and high school so before we go now into sliding through all of the rest of the details in the entire wildcat roadmap for me the hottest topics of all fall within the mass debate board made
065a decision on that last week and now this piece that they said benson clean this up i've cleaned it up so on the left side where you can see the highly recommended slash slash optional probably too small a print sorry you can't can't necessarily read it but it basically says we're going to follow the six foot rule that's what the cdc recommends public health recommends dpi recommends all the professional organizations say if it's optional you got some people wearing a mask you get some people not wearing a mask you're going to find yourself in a bind as a district trying to decipher who was where when on what day did so and so have a mask on not have a mask on and we're saying the only right way that we can do this with
066some level of accuracy is we'd need to follow the six foot rule on the right hand side just wanted to paint the picture because the board directed me to do this was and if we had required masks how might that look different and in a nutshell it's basically says that it would be a three-foot rule if everybody had a mask on because someone had inquired about this earlier and also i think in fairness to process i should clarify that under both that this recommendation does say that vaccinated persons will be advised by public health providing their regarding their protocols i.e quarantine expectations the district would also continue to collaborate with public health and basically what we know right now is here's their party line if you were identified as a close contact you should and
067you've been vaccinated you should put on a mask for 14 days however you can get back in school pretty quick if you after this three to five day window if you can test negative you can come back to school you should keep wearing your mask for 14 days but you could come back to school logistically how we our administrators our school nurse our health aides how we would logistically keep track of let's see now who got traced out uh but had their vaccine they should come back to school wearing a mask and then we've got to find out when did they did you get tested are you negative that logistically we're just calling it the way it is to say that's going to be pretty challenging for us to really do that right this says
068but we'll try to try to follow what the recommendations are but admittedly we're going to get on with some other work sometime pretty soon in this district we're going to focus on how we're going to have our priorities around curriculum instruction i'd like to talk with the board about the amazing summer school uh professional development that our teachers have been been engaged in we're going to talk about our strategic vision moving forward for all things non-covert related we've got to get on with some other important things we're going to have to make a decision and we're going to have to move on now soon so before next slide we'll go one more quick slide here because i think there's a bit of a relationship and i want to make sure the board understands this cohorting
069topic so we had a lot of conversation again as recent today with our administrative team and we wanted to make sure that how we kind of paint this picture out you see the boxes that are green and cream color on over to the red shade and so on the reason the middle one flexible grade level cohorting is in bold is because we're saying right now that's that would be our approach we're also trying to paint this a picture and aaron i don't need i don't want you to click on the link but if you were to click on that link to the left it would explain more details on what that what do you mean by flexible grade level cohorting what do you mean by flexible cohorts within a school what do you mean by
070flexible cohorts within a classroom so again without getting into the weeds too far and frankly i've asked our elementary principals to be prepared to see if the board has any other questions of inquiry about this whole cohorting i'm saying we would come out of the gate based on the current masking plan as well as if it was masking for everybody we think we got to loosen up a little bit on i'm going to say loosen up i i should be more guarded and not use that term i'll try to correct myself that there's some things that we would do to further mitigation like not having first graders mingling in a closed space with fifth graders but we might be able to say it's important educationally for all of the third graders at times to be
071intermingled with their other third grade classmates some that are in their classroom and some that are in a different third grade classroom so the cdc by the way says you don't even have to do cohorting the way we recommended it last year asterisk if you're all masked cohorting is irrelevant and so it gets complicated i'm not trying to to dance around it it's just i wanted to explain a little bit about the cohorting and then i'm not going to go on with any other pieces of the wildcat roadmap until the board has an opportunity to discuss the two big pieces that i have presented so far here with the close contact piece and then this cohort piece so i would ask if the board has any questions regarding the way this is presented to you
072here tonight all the discussion will wait this is just questions of clarification can i ask a question of the elementary principles about the cohorting or do you want me to wait on that is it a clarification question about the plan or is it asking an implication i'm wondering if they've determined how they would move or what would determine a move up and down through each level like they're starting at the flexible cohorts did they determine a process for when they move up or down i can say generically to that not to step in on the principles but i think in our conversations we have not yet attached ourselves to any specific number that when the case numbers grow this high when the hospitalization rates grow this high when the whatever goes this high that would
073cause us to shift we have not defined a number to that at this point anything else are there any other administrative reports from anybody we're good all right then we're going to move on to academic and career planning updates and we have our friends from the middle school as well as our college and career readiness coordinator melissa hansen welcome hey gary campbell um my middle school counselor next slide that was easy right i'm going to talk a little bit first about the academic career plan which called the acp students in grades 6 through 12 in the state of wisconsin are required to have an academic and career plan in place the acp provides opportunity for students to compile a variety of information to plan for their future education and careers my middle school uses the
074software program zello to help implement the acp process in my middle school our plan provides a process for students to participate in ongoing activities for self-exploration career exploration career planning career management and goal setting each year students will be expected to complete a variety of activities to include in their portfolios that will enhance their knowledge about their interests and skills as well as create the opportunities prepare for their futures um there'll be a little bit more about the acp and stuff that melissa will give you guys next slide please um it gives you a kind of real sixth and seventh grade career focus um the things that we are doing as far as sixth grade starting out the process that sort of thing um building upon that into seventh grade um doing some more as
075far as with was kids starting to look and starting to think and kind of look at hey what fits for me what what my interest areas that sort of thing not so much the thing going hey here's the direction take it but getting them to start looking at hey what fits for me what what are my attitudes my abilities the things that i do well what things like find interest to me that sort of stuff next slide please my turn um hi i'm sam dusek i'm one of the other school counselors at meyer middle school uh so we are fortunate enough now to have three counselors and we that allows us to be in the classroom with kids every day so we teach a careers class to all eighth graders so all the eighth graders
076get this class at some point throughout the year in their exploratory rotation and so these are some of the topics that we cover in our careers class in order to meet those acp goals i'm not going to read through all of them the general gist is we use the zello program they take a lot of interest inventories surveys they find out their learning styles their personalities and then it matches them to some good different types of careers some specific careers it just really gives them an opportunity to explore a lot of different things and then we also focus some time on looking at how do you apply for a job how do you what's a job application look like when you're in middle and high school and beyond and resumes and references we do interviews
077um we teach up those skills and then in a non-covered year we set up mock interviews for all of the eighth graders and then we do a little bit with the high school transition and registration in this class as well next slide we use a platform called zello i linked it there for anyone who wants to look at it later but basically it is a platform that all of our students in the district of river falls have access to we introduce it to them in sixth grade they use it in seventh grade and then they use it almost daily in the careers class they it's an interactive site so it's really nice that they take these surveys it matches them to different things and then they can click on careers that sound interesting learn about
078it then find out how to get to those careers like what kind of education they need what kind of training and things like that next slide the the main thing that we create out of the careers class and then they bring to the high school which melissa will talk about a little bit is an ecp portfolio so this is an academic and career planning portfolio that all the eighth graders have they take all of the different inventories they did in careers class and put it into a portfolio can you click on that link for me real quick this is just a blank document of it and i won't go through the whole thing um but each kid creates a slideshow um and it has an about me section where they're adding their interest and personality
079styles you could just click really quickly through it and so we put some character education in there you can just keep going so they're putting all of their results into this plan they're setting goals they're looking at their career future their skills what would be good matches for them they do a career research project and presentation to their classmates on a career that seems interesting and then they figure out how to get to those careers and what they want to get involved in in high school we have them upload this onto zello so that they all have access to it when they get to ninth grade and they can build on it as they get into high school alright you can go back to the other slides next one the last thing we do in
080our careers class is have a student and parent acp conference so the school counselor that's teaching the careers class meets with parents and students and groups and then we're able to show them that portfolio that the eighth graders made and they can talk about their different career interests and paths and tie that into what classes they pick in high school and how it will help them figure out their future ideas all right next slide i'm jordan seifert i'm one of the other counselors um i did want to just mention the really cool thing with zelo and i don't know if melissa will mention this is that everything that they do goes with them so like the interest survey if we have them do it in sixth grade they can go back and look at it
081in seventh grade or eighth grade or they can retake it and i always find that to be really cool because students are going to be like oh my gosh i wanted to be a race car driver or like that's completely changed or it stayed the same so that's what's really cool that it is a 6th through 12th process and how we can kind of transfer that to the high school one of the other things that we do in the middle school is we are able to teach that connect class and so we feel strongly that students have to have those social emotional skills to be successful and to achieve things in the future so learning how to make relationships handle stress figure out like how to organize their school work all sorts of things like
082that and so this course um sixth seventh and eighth graders take it as one of their exploratory classes and the main areas we talk about are you know decision making so how can you make good decisions how can you build those relationships that self and social awareness all things that can contribute to them being successful skills that aren't necessarily academics but are going to improve their academics if they have those skills you can click to the next slide so we just kind of put up the competencies it kind of breaks them down but again just a lot of different social emotional skills and the classes designed for them to practice learn i know that a lot of times we assume kids just know how to listen to others or handle a conflict but as our
083job in the middle school we're trying to teach them those skills and how they can move that to their future next slide so that's really all we have no melissa's going to go more in depth but did you guys have any specific questions for us i have a question how does a middle school kid react when you tell them you want them to know what they're doing with the rest of their life i'm old and i'm not totally sure yet um i think that we do a really good job of explaining like we're not asking you what you want to be in your life what you want to like what career you want to do but we're asking you to figure out like what are your interests what are your strengths what are your abilities
084and so that's what those surveys are designed to do um because like you hear people say like i want to be a like a car mechanic but then they absolutely like hate math and then they learn like oh i actually have to do math in this career and they're learning that through those surveys so we really really like emphasize like we're not asking you what you want to be we're just asking you to think about the different careers out there interesting thanks while we're transitioning i just want to say thank you to this team at meyer middle they've done a phenomenal job as i came into the district three years ago and was able to listen to a presentation that was shared by them at that point in time they really had a lot of
085things already put in place and they've just kept going with it and have done an amazing job so thank you and i know that at middle there's also a team as is in the high school that really works around designing these activities and helping to promote not only what happens in the classroom but those other experiential learning opportunities like a career fair and things that they have designed so i'm here at the high school i'm here tonight representing our team for academic career planning we do have a compilation of our administrators special education representatives some of our teachers who toggle between our student services who toggle between both the renaissance and the high school as well so we really feel that we have a good representation and voice for all of those students we have
086and will continue to offer an opportunity for students to voice their comments and questions too in the process as we continue to to develop what you're about to see tonight so aaron would you move it forward please so tonight i would like to just briefly look at the framework again kind of we've been here before we have some new members but just to really put some context around what you have been seeing over the course of the last couple of presentations and how it all weaves together we have presented at the last two at ride i guess at the last two ed program committee meetings and just want to wrap that around to give a good perspective of where we have been and where we would like to go all right so let's take a
087look at framing our work um i when i took this position i think even myself i had to ask myself college and career readiness what does that mean and oftentimes i get asked what does that really mean and wisconsin has done a good job of providing a framework for that definition of college and career readiness essentially wanting all of our students to be academically prepared and be socially and emotionally competent having that knowledge the skills the habits to navigate their journey through life and and be immersed in a rigorous rich environment where we're offering just a broad spectrum of experiences for students to experience while they're in high school i did share with you as i mentioned redefining ready so in july we talked about that data and what that looks like so wisconsin the
088association of school district administrators has adopted the redefining ready measurements that are brought forward or researched by the american association of school administrators where they put a lot of time effort and energy into what do those indicators look like for college and career readiness so that we really have some measurement that we can look at ourselves and mirror up and see where we fall here this graphic is very powerful it shares with us the work that we do week to week day to day and professional learning communities we define that as being the entire high school or school and we may have various teams within those professional learning communities that look at various components here you'll see some common themes you've heard us talk about social emotional readiness academic readiness career and life readiness you
089should hear this over and over i offer that if you were to draw a line around this graphic or circle around the graphic you'd see acp or academic career planning and that redefining ready really helps to measure that next slide airing we in the district have put language around college and career readiness we have things enveloped in our strategic vision and we'll share kind of some other linkages to the vision here in just a moment next slide aaron so we've shared before and you heard tonight the process and the product that is present at meyer middle school we have been working at the high school as well to help students navigate the components of no explore plan go knowing that they can enter and exit there's on-ramps off-ramps but really give them giving them the
090tools to get to know themselves kind of mirror up having that mirror looking at having a compass to help maybe navigate that that pathway that they're that they're taking and then also to have a map create that map as they're going to guide themselves through high school and beyond again we're not talking about declaring a career we really want students to explore and be immersed in that process so that whatever point in their life they need to come back to that process we want them to feel prepared i did put some other links on there not to dive into those tonight but certainly for those listening at home or those present here certainly can take a look at those as well acp so when i say that it's kind of it is wrapped around all
091of those components what research has shown us the wisconsin education collaborative had done a study on okay we put this in place to put this mandate in place now how do we know it's working um so they did some research and these are some of their findings that they saw that it increases that self sense of belonging engagement and learning we see that students are more academically motivated and most importantly i think is that all students have a plan for success after high school whatever that may be we're not necessarily we're not saying that everyone needs to have a path to a four-year degree but knowing those on-roads and off-ramps of how i can get that continuous learning when and if i need that so really looking at where's my my first step my plan
092a and my plan b and how can i pivot for what i need when i need it moving forward um i put some not all of the ways that acp connects to all the things that we're doing in our district and here i i did not include and i should have included um the connection to our co-curricular activities or athletic activities it's really everything that's housed in our buildings everything is connected through academic career planning all of those links there too are live so you can go and see connections to all of those so yeah go ahead aaron so let's take a look at where we've been three years ago this is very hard to see for those who are in the audience but i encourage you to take a peek at this when you're
093at home so the last couple of years the first two years that we worked on acp looking at connection connecting to meyer middle and the work that they had done we framed ourselves in different categories looking at what we needed to do you saw some of the evidence of that work as was presented in summer of 2019 and that evidence of what we had done is also present in our academic career planning guide so our guide shares with you all of those experiential learning activities different things that are connected we have pathways we have lots and lots and lots of great information for students but it's there and the next question becomes what do we do with it right so you can have everything at your fingertips but it's teaching them how to use the
094resources we have the interruption of covid at the beginning obviously or the end of um 20 19 20 school year when we were about to really immerse in a lot of our activities that we had designed so we had to get creative and really look at how do we continue to offer this for our students regardless of the learning environment so we chose to divide ourselves our team here at the high school chose to divide ourselves into two groups and we called ourselves now and later what do we need to look at what we need to do now and then how can we look forward to continue moving this work ahead so those items there that are listed in 2021 share with you some of the things we've done and if you move forward through
095the slides erin this is the question we asked ourselves so we share with you just a couple of the things that we did in the next slide not only do we have the academic career planning guide and we strengthened a lot of materials there we offered a launch academy and just a plethora of opportunities for students to connect to industry professionals that were live or they could see recorded events and we saw some college fair events um and excuse me our local colleges offered a lot of different opportunities for them to to see what to see inside the four walls without being being there so doing the best job that we could there looking at student services newsletters to both students and families um trying to reach and really envelop everything that we possibly could
096to share our message and really build that connectivity for a while when our students were out we um completely off campus we did a wildcat minute just sharing them with them just like here's what you might want to do today sometimes we couldn't think further ahead and it was just that that moment's moment moving forward erin we did also have some fun things that we had students do a virtual coffee house i know the middle school also has a virtual calming room we did some virtual pet parade schoology et cetera so lots of different things that we did to connect with students go ahead and aaron we also had we've built an acp website so we'll be leveraging this and utilizing it for our students this year to bring a digital format interactive format forward
097for our students when they're looking at planning those that course planning portion for our outcomes all right moving forward thinking about our next steps so now how do we continue to engage in the acp process we know that while we want to say that everybody currently all of our lessons have been housed in our focus we haven't necessarily seen a tremendous amount of engagement from day to day depending on situations so i think that we are really our team really looked at how can we foster that engagement and get everybody on board to really continue the work that there that they had done at meyer middle and not just to let that fall we know that getting that dose for six seven eight isn't enough we need to continue that through nine through twelve we
098also this is taken directly from dpi and it is on their flyer for social emotional learning so we know as students are engaged in a relevant comprehensive curriculum that they have shown that they can increase their percentile points for academic achievement on tests in reading and math but in addition we look at what our employers are saying on the next slide for those skills that they're needing what do we want them to know and be able to do and a lot of our employers are saying these are our desired characteristics that we want our students to have and while this can be practiced day to day and curriculum it also is housed in our lessons strategically and purposefully moving forward erin thank you so what's next we plan to actually today we did a lot
099of work with our team to put together those first steps for um as students step into our building how can we really wrap our own and support them and leverage the time that we have in our new focus which will be now wind time so very structured environment for our students to have that inclusionary factor and celebration factor so they are we are going to be using the learner profile that was created from meyer middle tweaking it a little bit so students again see it wasn't a one and done it's something that's gonna be continuous throughout their um their journey here at river falls high school or at the renaissance academy or perhaps in that virtual learning environment we do plan we have one to three lessons per month that will take place and you
100can see the different types of lessons that we will be designing and then we also have a focus on our character traits that we've kind of let go in some capacity but just now really put a heavy focus on those we want to stress with students too that there are additional opportunities outside the classroom that they can get involved in so it's not just those scripted lessons but how can you personalize it to get involved in other things like our college fair and things like that moving on erin so just a peek at what we have proposed for our portfolio we've given this a lot of thought we have really designed it to be a summative of their high school journey and a collection of reflections so as they navigate that inquiry into self and
101are engaged in that productive struggle in some capacities trying to figure out their way and figure out who they are and how they connect to the world and to others around them really trying to bring bring it full circle so helping students to have some of the tools they need to step into those environments after high school and teaching them how to reflect and then having them reflect continuously throughout also have a collection of achievements that every student we designed it purposefully so that every student would have something to showcase regardless if they have maybe a certification or it's something that they'd like to celebrate it for something they did in the class and then have additional things some project reflections that they would like to include as well i mentioned this already um shared
102this with ed programs too that really when people ask often times i say that acp is about connection and reflection and we saw that demonstrated in what you could see in the acp portfolio and the work that meyer middle school has done um so connection to self others community and world and then looking at that growth mindset and just that continuous reflection moving forward here so this comes out of the buck institute project-based learning and really gives us evidence for it gives us the research behind why we would want to think about that public product of that portfolio and that that what it provides for students it does show us that motivating power increases or encourages high quality work looks at making our learning tangible and is really a great way for students to connect
103to parents community members in their world we have not necessarily designed and really decided how the exit interview will take place but we're looking at the next three years you can flip the slide aaron to really have as we step into that process look at offering this as a graduation requirement or requiring it for graduation certainly we have options for how we can do that we could come to you and ask for action on a graduation credit we could envelop it like we do the civics exam and put it as a portion of our portion of our transcript too so we would like to bring ideas forward to in ed programs in september we will continue to follow the scope and sequence of our lessons and we are hopeful that this process if if required
104will also help us to build that accountability we know that accountability will foster the engagement and self-reflection um really is kind of that foundation um for engagement as well so um what i put the arrow for here is that students who are entering into ninth grade if we were to say that we wanted to require this for our students who are entering into ninth grade that um we would use the opportunity that the time we have built in already for win but our students really would be honing in on that piece of collecting those artifacts from their freshman year on those items that they are proud of and can show tell and celebrate with their parents and with their peers in that very protected inclusionary environment of wind all right so that's what i have
105for you tonight i would like to come back to you again um and add programs and share additional details but i welcome any questions that you may have any questions or comments thank you for all your work on this really appreciate it this has been an evolving process it's a lot of work a lot of talent going into this so i really appreciate your leadership especially melissa thank you it's exciting work melissa do you do you all talk a lot about a kind of a growth mindset when this feels like an opportunity to talk about having a growth mindset with kids right and how much they grow and develop and learn and right how much of how much of that is incorporated with this work i'm just curious is that part of the conversation yes
106it is part of the conversation and i think you know we've really looked at some um authors too most recently sean akers work with the happiness advantage and big potential in some of the work that he's done and framing some of that growth mindset work as well so yes so as we weave in the social emotional we weave in i mean there's a constant conversation and you know they're immersed in that environment so we are hopeful that as we've redesigned that that's continuous awesome thanks i wanted to say thank you as well it's been informative and i mean the the work is great um it's nice also for us to i would say have a reminder you know and just some of the things that are going on beyond a lot of the topics we've
107been discussing so i appreciate it from that side of things in addition to all the work so thank you i did want to make mention of the learning profile as we share that with you that will contain a lot of the things that you saw here in addition to a student's owned navigation of those redefining ready indicators so they can start to put that to their common practice and reviewing where they are in those measures as well i look forward to seeing what some of the artifacts look like and how all of this would come together i imagine it will be very unique for each individual student so thank you for your work i know that there's more ahead but thank you for what you've already done well thank you all right um we are
108going to hold off on an eid committee update until next um the next time that we meet as a full board because we'll have a chance to be more comprehensive when the work that was started last thursday is completed at their last meeting so now we are going to move on to action items and at this point we have minutes from the july 19th regular board of education meeting we have minutes from the august 2nd special board of education meeting we also have minutes from the special board of education meeting held on august 9th we have bills that have been submitted for payment we also have employment recommendations so at this point do we have a motion to approve minutes bills and employment as presented second thank you cindy who moved and thank you todd
109for the second any discussion all those in favor aye opposed the motion is carried so now at this point we are going to move on to the wildcat roadmap 2.0 that outlines the comprehensive mitigation strategies related to covet and at this point is there a motion please before we have a discussion stacey i'd like to move that we accept option the second option in the column on the wildcat roadmap that jamie put together so the column on the right option be the mask option match required for students the closed contact quarantine that's recommended so that i'd like to move that okay i will second that motion discussion time this is the board's chance we've had a convert we've had a presentation and now it's time for discussion yep stacey i want to um throw in
110why i'm why i wanted to make this motion i think as we look at the whole coven plan holistically i think when we here's the bottom line for me i think that we need to support public health recommendations the aap recommendations the cdc recommendations those are all in line with the with the mitigation plan on the right side option b i don't know it doesn't have a label but you all know what i'm talking about that's right in line with the cdc i think it also emphasizes when you throw the mass required in there along with the other mitigation layers you can see that the other mitigation layers we have to go we have to push further and harder into the ones that exclude students from school and if we're going to align our with
111our mission and our values and our priorities and our goals as a district then we have to align our action steps so just even based on the two plans the two mitigation plans laid out option b aligns much more with our with our goals and values as a district so i think that's important to look at it holistically and not just as individual steps stacy i got a few things that that i'd like to say um too it i've been trying to i wish i had a counter in my mind of of the amount of time over the past week or a couple weeks that uh that this is a difficult topic for for me to get out of my mind um regardless of what it's been that i'm doing and and i don't expect
112that to change regardless of of what was decided last week regardless of how we move forward regardless of what the final plan looks like i i regardless of where everyone sits i hope they can at least appreciate that i sense the same thing from from the other board members and they may not always agree they may not understand something in terms of a decision but people are are trying to find a way forward and we're trying to balance a bunch of different interests and it it feels impossible to me it um i i am pretty optimistic person this has felt almost impossible to me it's it's been as difficult a thing as i can imagine in terms of making a decision like this so it's not taken lightly i do appreciate hearing the stories that
113we've heard in in trying to figure out what some of the impacts or implications of different decisions look like i i've tried to reflect on my own decision and what led me there and so i i've i've gone to places that in my mind support that i've gone to places that question that and and i think that's the only appropriate thing for somebody to do in all of our situations with with that being said i've got a couple things i guess that that i'm still wrestling with when it when i look at option a or option b or whatever we're calling it here um you know i i agree completely with cindy's point to if if you rewind this meeting if you went back to may and probably prior to that i've said that i
114do prioritize having the kids in school as much as possible for all students and i'm willing to admit or look at the fact that optional masking is likely contrary to that in in some regard so i also am wrestling at the same time with the idea of ages who have a choice to be vaccinated and still can choose to wear a mask and pushing pushing a mandate on them um and i'm not trying to disregard any recommendations and and um i i understand that if if we went with some of the recommendations a year ago we probably wouldn't have had the number of kids in school that we did to start last year or we wouldn't have done some things in terms of athletics so i'm i'm very conflicted about those things especially when i
115when i really at the core of me what do i want this decision to reflect for myself for our district those are the things i'm still wrestling with the most in addition to a number of what i'll call very difficult situations on both sides of things i would hope that we regardless of which way we go that there could be exceptions and considerations on an individual basis with the idea that people in our buildings teachers other students can can be made to or or at least help to understand why some of those situations might exist um the gentleman who is i believe going to be in eighth grade and shared about you know his own experience with with not being able to wear a mask versus some of those kids who their their family situation
116might dictate that it's imperative that someone is wearing a mask so i i have faith that that can be done um and and i'm not sure that we can wrap one policy around all of those things but i i continue to be conflicted about what optional masking for all grades means in terms of exclusions and keeping kids in school on the flip side of that i'm i'm terribly conflicted myself with how far do we push that in terms of populations that i feel have one more layer of choice um for their own family in terms of a vaccine if they so choose and also choosing the mass beyond that so those are the things i'm i'm going to say i'm not terribly settled about it at this moment and and uh some of these things
117will have to play out i understand but in regard to just weighing these two options i'm still i i still would like to vet that out further beyond what cindy has proposed um and i understand that is messy it it leads to people being upset on one side or the other and sometimes both but um i'm trying to to look at what what i see what i hear what i feel to be our values and and um throw all that together and it's it's incredibly tough to do so um i like i said i guess where that leaves me at this point is is willing to consider something but i i would like to see there be a step between all optional and all mandatory if we're going that direction um and i would like
118to vet out what that means for for close contact quarantine and excluding i don't think we're settled even with the the motion as it stands personally so which part of the close contact quarantine um let's try to break this down so that well i i'm sorry that was a lot of comments so i somebody had to go first and i'm sure others have something to say too so i'll let anyone else say something first i just um it's been a tough week of of reflection and trying to sort all this out indeed other comments um like uh todd's descriptive word was probably the best messy last several weeks all of us have been kind of thinking and they've been thinking heavily about this not just during this meeting and preparation from this meeting but 24
1197 just like our family members have as well but just a little closer little closer okay i don't want to blow you out of the speakers there um i've been highly disappointed with the rate uh the increase in numbers and that type of thing to go from july 17th when things were going well at four down to 39 on august 14th that's that's very high growth and we knew we would probably experience that and and tests positive tests are a lagging indicator as opposed to a leading indicator since our meeting our last meeting i've spoken to more teachers more more parents more principals and a couple local physicians thought more about the close contact tracing and quite honestly that's one of the things that highly concerns me are we value in person education we want
120that we all want that but we also we also do not want students traced out that that especially if we're going mass mandatory and that type of thing i think we could be more more liberal there i last year we didn't follow every letter of the law with cdc public health and department of public instruction so we did well but this is a different game but i want to make sure to point that out and like todd and actually doing a little research between now or yesterday or last week and now there has been some flexibility given to certain students that aren't not able to mask for whatever reason that type of thing i do the issues i have with the right side proposal as opposed to others is that those older than 12 or
121older than 8th grade wherever we decide to cut it those families have had the option to to evaluate the risk and take action according to their appetite for risk now one could say yes that that's true they have siblings that are younger and that type of thing and if you're vaccinated you can transmit the disease it doesn't matter there's no 100 percent foolproof way to to protect ourselves so i think we need to understand that the other piece for me is the contact racing so those are the two areas that i have issues with in terms of the right side i my decision is is different than it was last week and but i also don't i'm not prepared to go to full masking close contact as it is described here so so what would
122you like to see or maybe i should say are there other people who would like to get some general comments out and then we'll go back on keeping track of these things that people have raised you know i don't know what more i can add from the last two or three weeks i've been saying this i've been been talking about so it won't take a lot of time other than to know to repeat once again that we typically are preventative and not reactive to what we do todd has said it there won't be one answer to this and we knew that a year ago when we were making plans for fall and we know it now and we all know from the tons of email that we've been getting whatever decision this board makes there
123will be a significant number of families who will feel that they have been disenfranchised and if we put their kids at risk i've been really struck by the by the number of emails that have personal stories and anecdotes that speak from deep conviction and this happens with almost all positions on the mask there are some really good stories anecdotes whatever you want to call them that sort of explain people's situation so i get it and i get why people feel so deeply my larger concern whatever we do tonight and going forward here is that this district continues to be divided and my question for any families out there is how are you going to get along what are you going to do to get along this board can make a decision we can come up
124with something but what are you going to do because you're deeply divided deeply divided and we heard some of it tonight but a lot of that was repeat from what we've heard before but the emails that we're getting i think explain that even more so so just general comments there are other general comments another concern i have is that when do we and and we've talked to jamie we've asked jamie we've begged jamie about some type of matrix as far as evaluating as to where we are you know we know where we're at now and if we arrive at some decision tonight or soon at what point in time do we start start dialing some of this back because it's probably easier for us to say you know completely mask everything you know you know
125contact trace everybody to whatever extent but at what point in time do we pull some of those back when do we feel comfortable at what number at what instance i guess i'm concerned about that too so i don't know what matrix um is the appropriate one i have no idea but i'd like to have some kind of indication and also i think it would lend some transparency i think it would also give parents a a feel as to okay we're moving the right way or nor we're clearly not moving the right way but i think it would lend some transparency to the whole situation uh yeah i would say i would say there's been more conversation of late around that possibility of creating kind of this matrix for a lack of a different word for
126tonight a district model if you will that we would attach it somehow to whether it's our internal case numbers of students and staff or whether it's county numbers or school district boundary numbers i showed you a bunch of different slides that represented various websites that you can find that kind of information and the hesitancy has been in trying to sharpen the pencil scratch your head and come up with a district model for doing that when meanwhile there's been other organizations that know more about the science of this than i do who have said here's our green yellow orange red based on these numbers um the if the board would direct me to come back next week with such a matrix or model we can do that we can we can bring that to the board
127um i'm just adding to the and i i will tell you if we did something like that i would be more inclined to not lean on just what we see inside the walls of our district we we would attach that to data related to our two county area our school district boundary have the mathematical formula that associates it some way you know with some less nebulous narrative that says we will continue to monitor monitor various covet related data that you're asking if we could pin that down and be a little more specific so as an example one of the slides i showed earlier was this seven day average so it gives you snapshot of every seven days here's what it looks like in in relation to the number of cases and so on i'm in
128the interest of complete transparency jamie and i have had between the two of us we've had conversations over the course of the last week or two and this is very easy for me to sit here and ask jamie for that task it's tremendously easy for me to just ask that it's extremely hard for him to produce something that is he's not a public health expert nor am i nor any of us and are we um how do we weigh risks because not only is it the numbers that are associated with that but it's also the weighting if you're if you're looking at a matrix and so um it's a very difficult task and i i i made the request but i know how difficult it is but if we can we can if we can't
129i guess i completely understand yeah and again it did just just to try to add i guess i gave a long answer the game summary for me would be we would still try to attach some kind of a matrix like that to these secondary sources that are out there such as the school district boundary which is a state website that you can go to and the benefit of that is that it would can combine saint croix county pierce county to our school district specifically versus county level data how would we melt together two counties piers and saint croix and so on but we would if we were assigned to create a matrix it would be attached to that data as well that makes sense i'll speak of why i'm supportive of this motion and several
130things first of all in our experience last year the in-person learning seemed to be key for our students i'm really glad and proud that we had the virtual learning opportunity because i think that was important and that we're keeping it up we also know that for many many many of our students being in person was critical it all it enabled us to help and protect their academic success it allowed us more tools to be able to work to support their social emotional well-being it's also true that in my recollection we had way more concerned parents and comments about the close contact quarantine when then masks when kids were out for those days it was difficult for those kids it was really hard on our teachers to be able to then meet their needs and it
131seems to me that if we were to have masks it would actually give us more freedom in the academic day to meet the needs of our kids so those are some of the reasons why i support this but also it seems to me that there are two important things about being an educated person the first thing is that we have confidence in what we know and on this board we have a lot of expertise represented some people have expertise in education we also have many other expertise that's represented but i think the other side is humility and the humility part of it is to recognize when we aren't experts none of us here is an expert in we are not scientists we are not physicians and i think we have a responsibility as educated people
132and as people who care about education to rely on those for whom this is their area of expertise we can't come up with a better matrix than they can this isn't our area they do this so i think for those reasons i am in support of this motion stacy can i add one thing about developing our own model or our own matrix i would really our administrative team especially jamie has spent so much time trying to create a new model a different model from from public health and all the recommendations i would really like to give our administrative team the green light to get back to school right these are this is the this is the guidance that we have how do we how do we work with curriculum instruction our students our staff and
133get let's get back to letting them spend some time on how do we do school and supporting our students and our staff so the time we're spending on it doesn't it's really um i don't know that it's frustrating for our district administrators but i can't believe that it wouldn't be so let's let the experts come up with those models and matrixes and then let our administrative team find the best and most effective ways to follow them for for the best situation for our students not only that but let me say one other thing about that if for us to create our own model and our matrix we have to say that we trust the exact data that we're saying that we don't we're not going to follow which to me that's a little bit that
134doesn't make any sense to me we either trust the data or we don't so i i don't i don't know i guess about it cindy i'll add a little bit and i'm i'm i'm not trying to say this to disagree i'm just maybe shedding a little bit more depth on on the reason i you know i i i've been like i said incredibly conflicted with with the idea of just here's the recommendation this is what we do but i i can't help but think that i'm not trying to be defiant about it because it feels terribly uncomfortable for me regardless but there there was we've we've picked and choose a few areas where we have done that and we've we've had what i would consider be fairly you know it's all relative but but the
135athletics the activities some of the things that were able to be done last year there there's a value to that and that's that's my desire for searching beyond just a a blanket recommendation and i i i understand the optic of something like that but to me there there can be a little bit of an in between and that that's what i'm trying to search for i'm not trying to be in any way defiant of of something um i'm just saying that i there's there's there's something to me beyond it and i i don't know if i can explain it the right way but what what's applies to every district in wisconsin or every district in the in the country there has to be some nuance beyond it for me and and that's what i'm trying
136to find and and that would be my reasoning for wanting something and um i i like the idea that we can stratify by our district in in in terms of cases um i will admit that for somebody who has expertise in numbers it's pretty easy to look at it and say um okay 5 7 9 11 13 you know whatever those numbers were per 100 000 within our district border if you develop a metric it's it's trending in the direction of being tripped no matter where you set it if you set it exactly in line with i'm not telling us to reinvent it uh but i'm just saying maybe let's not apply it as a as even a county guideline or or even a um state guideline or but as a district um you know
137what's happening in our immediate area so that i i think it's easy for somebody to say and and it has been said and i don't fault people for thinking this but there's a recommendation just do that these people are smarter i'm not debating that i'm not trying to pretend that we know anything different but to me there's a little bit of a nuance beyond it and i'm just trying to find something because i i sense our that there's a strong desire for that within our community too i just wanted to say one thing really quick too when we talk about our school district i also i really would like to look around at the other area school districts and what they're doing too and to me that i'm it's it's okay to compare and see
138what others are doing and how they're doing it and uh and so far right now in western wisconsin in our big rivers conference it seems like most of the school and i'm not arguing either way but most of the school districts are mass masks optional right now is that correct that is correct other eau claire eau claire is a little bit different but we talked about it earlier eau claire does have that matrix of the hard numbers where they're going to shift and pivot and and i will say again with the masks optional and i am not i'm i'm more concerned about the 12 and unders than i am about the 12 and olders who have that extra layer of mitigation but i do again i would like to see us to be able to
139start masks optional but have that number in place where it's just a hard line and if we get to that number we dial it up and then likewise once we go past the peak or if there's a peak when we get back to that we can dial it back down our board right now tonight right you see how masks optional work and how we've all made choices and however there is going to become a time where we're going to have to dial it up and so i suggest that we do a look at what other school districts are doing as well and and and find what works so see so i i tend oh i'm i want to echo some of what both todd and bob have shared tonight that there is a heaviness that
140i have felt over the past um certainly the past two weeks and that's due to a lot of things certainly in watching the local infection numbers here in our area gradually tick up that doesn't thrill me at all um it's disappointing in my mind i was hoping we could get a few more weeks under our belt where we're sitting at pretty low numbers and we can continue some of the stuff we were able to do over the summer in our summer school programs but i think really the heaviness that i have felt is due to um just the fact that we are in a place where there is such uncertainty about so many things and i think jamie summed it up really well in the intro part of the wildcat road map that he shared
141today um and he said the volumes of opinions and research on all sides of this debate are conflicting to say the least and i think for me that is what has made this process so challenging and so difficult um when i went back and considered what my priorities would be in making a decision i kept coming back to the value of having in-person learning and that's something that i think we would all agree to last year this board went against some of the recommendations of the experts and allowed in-person learning i think to the great benefit of our students and our community and so i said a couple weeks ago keeping our schools open and having that in-person learning and keeping kids in school as much as possible is still at the top of my
142priority list i don't have to close down a school because our community numbers are so high that we've got kids bringing covet in and it's spreading to the point where we have to tell kids to go home so as we see our community numbers rise i'm not in denial of the facts i understand that's the trend that's where we're headed i get that i lament that i don't love that but the bottom line is the more infection we have in our community the more infection we're going to have in our schools so um so in my mind keeping our schools open and giving kids a chance to be in person is top priority for me the other thing that i think is very important is that we do everything possible to reduce the impact of
143close contact tracing i know last year we ended up sending a lot of kids home needlessly hindsight's 20 20 right we didn't know where we didn't have certainty but i think there was a lot of harm done unintentionally because we were being acting out of an abundance of caution and so as we move forward whatever we decide to do regarding close contacting i think it is extremely important that we follow up with those kids and families that have been close contacted so we have information to tell us are the mitigation efforts that we have in place doing the job are we keeping this from spreading in our schools if we've got a three foot close contact and after three months we see that very few if any of those kids that have been sent home
144are actually getting sick then i think it is imperative that we make a shift and we get rid of that close contacting radius so that we can keep more kids in school so however we proceed i think it's important to keep good data and keep track of those close contact numbers don't we already have some of that data from last year though i believe go ahead you can speak to it i've asked that question and i have not gotten a certain answer it appears to be a little bit more anecdotal but perhaps you can see that i can hear dave bell screaming in his head inconclusive inconclusive is that right no um yeah uh no dave and i dave and i like to talk numbers sometimes and and um i've asked the same question of
145a.z snyder i think i made the same comment last week is it's it's hard to know if two kids inadvertently happen to be sitting next to each other during school both wearing mass i'm i'm maybe just past six feet from stacy right now if we both showed up with with kovid and and happened to test positive that could to one person give the appearance that we were in school together she was a close contact to me because i tested first and she had a positive test that's i think would be defined by pierce county health as a as a school outbreak potentially and there's no way to know if stacy was at a gathering that had 30 people that all tested positive the day before and and if i had the same or so i
146i i'm speaking for myself i don't know that anyone provided a ton of data that said there was a whole lot of evidence of transmission but it's it's more or less impossible to dial it down far enough to know exactly unless you can track that spread 100 percent back and and i think the other piece of it is without universal testing you know every person who is a close contact being tested there's there's unlikely any way to know either because because of asymptomatic carriers so i um my personal suspicion would be that we did pretty well which again has had me reflecting quite a bit on the fact that if things seem to go very well in that regard does it make a stronger case for their being mass it's hard for me to deny
147that honestly in in my reflection so the the other thing i would say maybe to piggyback on on your point is and i said this earlier that leads me to want to have the conversation about the close contact quarantine a little bit deeper in terms of in terms of a value there for myself let's get to that but lindsay i wasn't quite sure if you were done did you want to say anything more um i did yeah well i had yeah sure i have i've got pages of notes here stacy so i could i could go on that here um i think um i think something significant for me i've been kind of screaming about social emotional academic impact of masking because that seems to be the topic that that we've landed on most in
148the past couple of weeks but i think today when the elementary school principal sent out their position statement and talked about cohorting and the impact of cohorting our students based on masking or not masking in my mind the social emotional and academic impact of trying to keep kids so tightly cohorted that if someone does get sick then we have a very small group of kids that are close contacted we've eliminated or prevented the spread there there are there's an impact there we can't put kids in differentiated reading groups we can't do tier 2 interventions across grade levels we can't do some of those important community building activities within our school buildings like buddy groups and things like that and so that's where i really am stuck on the social emotional academic it's like our masks
149are nothing no i still stand by the fact that there are there's an impact of putting a mask over a four-year-old's face and telling her to go to school and learn there's an impact there there's an impact on speech language development there certainly is an impact on early literacy development particularly 4k through second grade however if we look at the flip side of that and we look at trying to cohort so tightly there's an impact of that too and i think that was eye-opening for me to read kind of how the elementary school principals are thinking about what a an optional mask environment might look like at their building sites i also just i've shared this before i i really value parents being able to make decisions for their children and when i hear parents
150speaking and are concerned about the school district mandating something that just doesn't sit well for me so that is constantly in the back of my mind just on a fundamental level i really do struggle with that um that's it just to back up one step i would confirm some to your question and what todd commented about what kind of data do we have as a district do we know the number of students i say were dinged out under close contact tracing put into quarantine do we know how many of them actually tested positive the answer is no anecdotally our principles would confirm that however many of them when the rules change from 14 days to 10 days you could go get tested and if you tested negative instead of being out for ten days you
151could come back on day eight we saw that happening far more than not so that anecdotal evidence suggests to your point that more people were getting quarantined traced out than what really tested positive so let me ask a procedural question here we have a motion and a second on the table we're back to where we were last week option a or option b masks or no masks last week jamie presented to us a third option which i suppose still could be viable it's not in front of us tonight but he couldn't get a motion or a second on that there's no support in the board seems to me we have a couple choices we voted up or down right now cindy's motion if it's voted down is there a second motion and what's the nature
152of it does this motion get amended and do we act on it tonight yes i think i i i just one one more thing we've been talking about this for three weeks with this kind of intensity an hour upon hour of listening to people and scores and scores and scores of emails here um we need to decide as cindy said we've got to let the teachers and the administrators get to run in this building so i'm not it i'm not if we don't come to total agreement tonight i'm not in favor of waiting for another week if if we ask for more information or something then we come back in a couple of days and and act again but we got to decide something and if it's option a or option b whatever we got
153to decide this and move ahead with it i would prefer we would do it tonight and let everybody know what we're going to do yes we have a motion that's been moved and seconded and i hear you alan that it's time to move but i i don't want people to be voting until they feel as if we're ready and todd has made has asked a question about close contact and quarantine so i'm wondering jamie would you be willing to outline for us where it stands right now in terms of close contact and quarantine for the motion that's on the floor not for all of the options but for the motion that's on the floor right now which is everybody wears masks three feet three feet three feet close contact and then what would the quarantine
154period and what would that structure be same as last year it changed from 14 down to 10. and then the option is if you were tested you could come and test it negative you could return to school on day eight and does that is vaccination status taken into account at all vaccination status is taken into account that you would not be included as a mandatory quarantine that would be the approach that the county public health department would take that's not necessarily our unique rule that's the rule that is in place with all of the guidance that is out there the the added layer that i alluded to earlier that gets complicated for us to manage is that in addition even though you've been vaccinated you don't automatically get traced out you are supposed to wear
155a mask for 14 days after day three you can get tested if you test negative upon return from school you should continue to wear your mask and for us to figure and sort all that out that that becomes now we're not spending our time on teaching kids how to read write and do math we're spending our time on this other stuff so i was trying to be transparent to say we'd support the cdc guidelines on this but we're going to ask our teachers and our administrators to spend their time on some other really important work i don't know how much we can we're going to get into monitoring all of that but but in fairness if we're universal masks that student will be wearing a mask anyways and it doesn't impact them at all it
156only impacts we're only keeping track of it if we're mask optional correct right we're if we're universal masking that kid comes stays in school and continues to wear a mask they don't do anything yeah they don't do anything different true yep so so that reduces the risk of or reduces the likely number of students who would be close contact quarantine out right jamie do you know the percent of students so i have the pearson croix data in front of me but the number of percent of students in our district geography that are between 12 and 17 that are vaccinated that are age 12 to 15 it is roughly 30 percent for pierce county and a little higher than that for saint croix county and i reference that 12 to 15 age group because that's how
157they separate the data do i have the other 16 to 18 group memorized no i do not but i can find it well the reason i ask is because if we're if we're a universal mass then that's 30 of our students that would not be screened out at all well it does you don't know how the county the county percentage is going to apply to our district but you know within a certain factor that's about it so i'm not giving you exact math there's nothing that's exact math right now i feel like so so stacy maybe it's appropriate time i know you were kind of leading back to to my initial question in regard to the contact and and so i i i'm i'm trying very hard to find a compromise and still be in
158line with what i what i deem to be our our values and and where i've reflected for myself personally and um what what i keep coming back to is is is there a way that we could move off of three feet and just say that we're going to give it if we're going to do anything in terms of hey we're going to put one mitigation back in place but we're going to we feel there's more value in a notification of something in regard to a quarantine and saying you were you you had a child within your class whether we identify i guess i'm not sure the logistics of how that works but is there a way we can get to a point and i would even be willing to make a motion to amend your
159recommendation or your your motion um sorry that if if we could get to a point where we started with um the notification and and we're not trying to then draw a line between who's vaccinated who's not what the county guidance is in regard to those kids keeping kids in the classroom i i reread so many emails from last year just to refresh in my mind what felt different about this debate and what we've been talking about versus where we were at last year and once you moved past the learning environment decision which was sometime in july of of last year it was she she left but i know she's probably spoken five times um her she had a son in high school roxanne who who had been excluded multiple times um those were the issues
160and and if if i'm somebody who wants to compromise in and look at what could potentially be coming in front of us trying to define a pivot point for for masking not masking i'm willing to put some of that aside if we can find a little bit further you know more more of what i viewed to be a compromise in terms of some of the contact tracing if if we can keep kids in school that would mean a lot to me and i think it would be somewhat reasonable to consider you know todd i i really think that as good leaders that compromise is always a good idea to seek that so i i appreciate i also appreciate that you have clearly spent a lot of time agonizing over this and i can tell it
161and i i i'm appreciative of that i'm going to push a little bit here and say that already if we go to three feet that would already be better than last year when it was i agree yeah and so we've already done something so especially as that those numbers are going up it makes sense to me that we would hold steady with the three feet with everybody wearing masks when that's the recommendation and when we see it peeking and then starting to come down and we have some more data this we can always come back and change yeah if we have some compelling reasons some empirical evidence to suggest that the the landscape is different but it feels to me personally as if there are so many unknowns that we would should stick with the
162three feet recognizing that this the the tiny little silver lining here is it's a lot better than last year stacy weren't we at six foot at one point yes we were six feet all last year this is 50 of what that is and hopefully that means at least 50 fewer students would be close contacted quarantined out perhaps even fewer than that and i wouldn't disagree i i don't disagree with with what you're saying i i'm i'm looking at it and saying we made a decision last week that went against the overwhelming guidance from from national associations and and i i i don't know if i'm too real looking with with how i was basing a lot of my own decision but the local numbers do have to mean something i feel like and and we're
163not i mean 13.7 per 100 000 for our school district is an average over seven days of three point i think two cases per day um so i'm trying to balance that and i'm not saying that there wouldn't be a point where three feet would be more appropriate or or it's just easier to do it that way but i'm compelled to try to say that there's something that we're considering locally with those numbers and trying to make sense of what does that really mean and and ultimately i i could probably understand why we wouldn't do it that way um and i don't know if i don't know yet if in my head if that's a deal breaker but i'd at least like to push to find out what others think about it um if if
164we're gonna push somewhere seeing what we've got in front of us i'm gonna push that direction probably more so than i i did for the optional masking prior to it okay so i'm gonna just ask this question so now we went from last week for masks optional to everyone and now i'm feeling like we're going to masks mandatory for everyone so is there no wiggle room on that because now all of a sudden we're talking about people who are 12 and older who are eligible for a vaccination i i feel like this is yeah really swinging this is quite so it is a so for me where i arrived at this and i think to allen's point from earlier is i'm going to apologize to jamie for for the way things went down but i'm
165looking at and saying maybe that was compromise what what we had in front of us you know we we had a split vote and and it didn't get support and and i would be the first at this point to apologize and say maybe maybe it takes something like what happened and the reflection of it to look at it and go i'm sorry that is palatable to me and i i didn't maybe know it at the time but if we're moving somewhere i would prefer to move towards that and and whether jaime needs an apology or not i guess i don't know but no i don't that's where i end up and i think that's maybe what alan was saying and i think that's maybe what amy's saying i think that changing a decision and seeing
166new ideas is part of a good leader i don't think it's something that you need to be i'm so concerned about apologizing for todd but i appreciate that i have a question quick about the three feet versus six feet jamie being actually being in the schools from an administrative perspective screening students out at six feet close contacting students at six feet versus three feet how different is that in an actual classroom it it seems like it would be an enormous difference three feet to six feet because we know in the classroom six feet is not going to happen right but how reasonable is three feet yeah maybe principal or two could help but i would say one thing to keep in mind is that like last year we would continue to have basically have seating
167charts and you know over the years pick a typical high school classroom you don't necessarily have seating charts in the high school come to my class sit down where you want last year and into this year we would say seating charts across the board every grade level every classroom and the reason is to help us with close contact tracing because then we can look at the seating chart so the math is it fair to say that if you go from six feet to three feet that it would cut down the number of closed contacts by 50 percent i'm thinking of that seating chart principles thumbs up or thumbs down is 50 percent your best guess or would it really not turn into fully 50 because of the seating chart issues anybody else want to weigh
168in it would reduce it but it's hard to say exactly how much fair enough fair enough ma'am i'm really sorry but i'm just going to keep the order here and say that this is the board's meaning but um so we have a lot going on and i'm trying to figure out the best way to navigate this so todd you're the one who's bringing up close contact so i'm going to ask you again what i um what would you if you could just decide right now what would you like to have for close contact in the context of the motion that's on the floor so in the context of notification a notification you would like to have no quarantine at all um regard i would i would say the the way i would personal choice if
169if somebody feels better about that and i think that the definition would then be if you start to show symptoms and you were notified of a close contact quarantine you know if you were notified of a close contact and you have symptoms then i think that's that's the way it would work for i'm basically copying the the the vaccine yeah yeah jamie's what prison was presented last week and i think what would what in my mind applies to somebody who would meet the definition for the pierce county health of being vaccinated um that that you would be notified of it there's there's not a mandatory unless you somehow start to show symptoms district does the contact tracing notice notifies the family your son or daughter was in a learning environment where a student recently tested
170positive we are hereby advising you to please monitor your child's symptoms get them tested if you so choose and if they're home if they're ill please keep them at home so but would that be for every child in the classroom or only those children who are x number of inches or feet away well in some cases at an elementary back to the cohort topic if we want to be a little more loose than tight on cohorting is there a likelihood that we might if we had a case in the second grade that every second grader at that particular building for that particular teacher is going to get the memo yes high school middle school the way we had again presented it last week was you know we'll make uh every effort as we did last
171year to do some level of contact tracing it's just that we're not going to force the quarantine piece we did it all last year yeah i see that being probably my biggest issue at this point in time yeah and so um i i'm not exactly sure procedurally either but what i'm what i'm i guess what i'd be prepared to do is either amend a motion you know move for an amendment um to match last week's recommendation potentially or or to modify the the what's in there for close contact so i i think that first procedurally to amend cindy's motion to do that um i can't think of the parliamentary um term but it's not in the spirit of that motion so i don't think you can amend it that deeply so i think that the
172two options that i think we have is to either vote cindy's motion up or down or the person who moved it and seconded it withdraw their motion and second and we consider another option it seems fair but one of the things i'd like to do in this conversation is not separate out certain parts right so let i would rather not have the conversation solely about are we going to modify the close contacts when we haven't even decided if we're looking at are we talking about modifying 7 through 12 or not are we talking about what i would like the whole thing together right so part of the problem that we run into is we we aren't considering how much each one impacts the other yeah right it's a whole stack which goes to amy's point
173that i wanted to underline when amy said it's it must seem to people like it's a big change and i'm not disagreeing that the motion that's on the floor right now is a big change it's come to the floor because we are looking at all of these layers of mitigation and how they fit together we did not have a chance to do that thoroughly last week which is why it's back in front of us today so at this point we do have a motion that's been on the floor that's been moved and seconded are there other components of that that we need to understand i mean cindy it's your motion now so you were just asking let's look through each thing is there something specific well two bob and todd both mentioned the concern about
174separating out seventh seventh grade and up right so i'd like to talk through that part of it if that's if that makes sense for us to consider that or not okay so what would be the reasons for considering it i sure um those families had the option to to evaluate the risk and and they've had the option they've had many months to do it or vaccinate or not and i think they've come to some agreement or some decision as a family and um i i don't necessarily think that we should impose or have mass on people that have already made the made the uh choice to not so so in a nutshell it's this idea of the vaccination makes a difference in terms of masking so what would be the reasons for not supporting that
175idea well i when i look at it the one if if if vaccination matters then vaccination matters so we can't have the conversation that vaccination doesn't matter for close contacting people out but it does matter for i mean we have to have some consistency here and whether we're considering something or not and and not cherry pick that part but the issue for me for 7 through 12 is that based on dr morgan and some of the things we know is the vaccination prevents students from getting as sick or being as likely to die it does not vaccinated people can still can still transmit the disease to other right to the virus to other people so because because they can still spread it to other people that student is still bringing the that virus home right
176if our 7 through 12 is not mass so and the way that i think about it in my head logistically is bob you're sitting next to me so we're going to use your family and my family and i frankly don't even know your family but work with me so your your kids in high school my kids in high school right and your kids in elementary school my kids in elementary school you're hanging out doing things that i wouldn't necessarily do socially right because we know how bob is i'm completely kidding that is a smile on my face so i apologize if you can't see us so you're making certain social decisions as a family right that your students your kids are impacted by your social decisions as a family i'm making different decisions as a
177family social decisions because i'm going to choose to wear a mask when i go shopping i'm going to choose this whatever you're going to choose something different the only cross that your family and my family has is at school it's with our students so we're not going to cross our elementary kids but we're going to cross our high school kids so now all of your family decisions are in my house because we chose not to because we chose not to mask 7th through 12th grade so the only the only separator the only connection that our families have is our kids at school so i want the layer between our kids at school right because i don't want your decisions in my house it seems to me one of the other implications of this is if
178we were to do the mask optional for the older kids who have the potential to be vaccinated we also then run the risk of having more kids who are going to be close contacted out and don't have the opportunity to be in person as much and we know that's a problem nobody likes to wear a mask nobody likes that but to me it's the lesser challenge that we could bear in order to protect in-person learning yep if we go mask optional seven through twelve then we need to stay on that side of the close contact quarantine the cohorts the other mitigation things that we just don't we know knocks kids out of school and impacts their relationships go ahead stacy sorry no that's fine is there an let's just put it this way is there
179an interest in an amendment and then cindy as the motion maker would have to agree if it would be in line with her amendment or not well i'm curious if that shifts does that i mean does it make any difference when we talk about the seven through 12 is there some openness to that or so i i have a no i have an openness to it i i understand stacy's point i understand your point um i'm still looking for a little bit more of them what what i'm going to say is a middle ground between optional and fully required and and um i i don't know if we said i don't like it if we go back to six feet um honestly and that that's that's where i sit with it i i don't like
180six feet and and that's probably a bigger sticking point for me than a lot of things um i i have been somebody who made motions in in may at i can't remember how many different times but to say we're at the point where we need to try this with mass optional um moving forward and and i i want to rely on the experience we've had with some of those things but i understand that it's probably not the most prudent thing to do given what has changed in the last month specifically so [Music] i i value just for me i probably value the some give and take i on on the the close contact and and getting to a point where we're not excluding as many kids um yeah i i'm wrestling with it i'd like
181to see there be three steps with masks optional all the way through middle ground for for those who have a choice to take one extra layer of mitigation for themselves if if they feel like it um in regard to the vaccine and then third being all the way through and and so that would be my personal preference but i i can see why it maybe couldn't be that way too todd say that again what your personal what your personal preference would be for three layers um optional all the way k through 12 or pk through 12. um second would be to define a second you know a middle ground uh basically what jamie had out there last week in terms of mask optional pk through six because those people don't have the additional step if
182they so choose to mitigate with the vaccine if that and i should also and then the third one would be what you're proposing um pk through 12 all the way through and and part of the reason if i reflect on a lot of the comments that i've received emails the the most impassioned please the majority of the feedback was my child does not have the choice to be vaccinated yet i keep hearing that over and over i didn't and that's not to say i mean there were some very specific cases in regard to people who have split custody and differing feelings between family and those types of things at the high school level but i come back to what jaime had out there last week as trying to wrap my hands around some freedom of
183choice with it for those who have the option to vaccinate and a lot of the pleas from people who don't have that choice for their kids yet and and so i i do think there should be something in between and that's the reason that's mainly the reason why so so you that would mean that k through pre-k through six would be mass required the three foot close contact no cohorts but high school would be mass optional six foot close contact and cohorts as much as you can in high school which is virtually not and then the the other part of it um i mean honestly i'd probably like to see both if we're going to say three feet um three feet across i'd like to be across the board i guess if if you're saying
184what's my personal preference i would say let's make it don't draw a line between the two just call it three feet across the board and and say that way and the way to do that is with everybody wearing masks i think that the challenge is we still want to be able to have our key game it too yeah if we're saying that the biggest thing that we want to do is keep kids in school it seems to me that it argues in favor of three feet if we want to do three feet we need to have everybody wearing masks that's the motion that's on the floor right now i think maybe we need to take a vote see where we are figure out what figure out where we are anybody everybody okay with doing a
185vote on this let me ask one more question and one more question when we close contact jamie when we close contact in the schools can i don't know how micro it is i have never been on a close contact team can we tell if the close contact is in a class when students are mass versus at lunch when they're not i mean is it that micro or is it just you're close contact or you're not the role yeah first of all i think i know that we said this a couple different times last year full transparency is we never claim that the contact tracing is perfect we we probably miss some people along the way but our principals health aids nurse staff members work really hard to um you know literally follow that six foot
186rule so they look at the seating chart and they determine okay now based on where so-and-so was sitting would they be included in the list the the line list of people we identified for contact tracing okay what about lunch hour let's see lunch hour we middle school in high school would find ourselves saying you know we we don't have we didn't have a seating chart per se but we tried to keep kids in pods or groups and tried to control it that way so that we would also have a way to go back and say well who was sitting by each other at the lunch table who was you know so there was it wasn't perfect it was sometimes messy there was a lot of it that was done to perfection to be clear i
187don't want to send the message that contact tracing is a joke we're horrible at it i want to convey the message that we we did extremely well with it but sometimes admittedly we might have missed somebody along the way and it was extremely time consuming what other thoughts do the principles have that are going through your mind on that particular topic the reason i'm asking is because if the to talk about compromise what what todd's talking about if we were if we had spaces that we know for sure are universal masking other than exemptions and all of that stuff which we are i think everybody's on the same page with we already have that um if we're talking about spaces that are classrooms or learning environments where we know there's universal masking right for the
188most part that's one thing if we're talking about spaces that we know are really probably not universally masked that is a different question for me so if todd when you talk about going to um not close contacting people out if we wanted to say we're not going to close contact people out when they're in a classroom and there's universal masking that's one conversation different conversation when they're at lunch or i don't wherever they would be where there's very few students that are going to be masked if we're going to do three feet in those spaces if we know any if we have that information anyway when we're close contacting it makes sense to me to split it that way it's not going to be a perfect science but i would hate to see us go
189no close contacts and quarantining in every space so would you on your motion would you enter would you how would you feel about some variation within the three foot expectation if everybody's wearing masks well i want to know if that's even possible in actual school because i'm not in your school all right principles give us some feedback would you hop what it would be like to delineate the difference between um places where everybody has their mask on compared to the places where people are likely not wearing their masks which i assume is pretty if it's mad if everybody has to wear them i'm assuming that means lunch right and recess and recess but that's out that's outside and we didn't i mean we're not expecting to close contact outside right so it would be lunch
190so in terms of your the burden to measure all this out and contact it would that be different would there what would the significant difference be how significant would it be to only do it at lunch i i can't see asking that to ha i just have such a hard time asking any sort of differentiation well between lunch and everything else how is that harder how is that harder a lot easier wouldn't it i i'm what i guess i'm saying is if we're going to call it we're going to call it you know the compromise of to me it's one situation or the other and and i don't think last year we were drawing lines between here's here's what we're doing when it's mass here's what we're doing when it's not masked i i i'm
191less excited about that honestly okay so i'm i we're trying i'm only speaking from one i mean anyone else can i would agree todd that's that they're we're not interested in this differentiate if we're doing three feet we're doing three feet when you're in school or if we're doing a notification we're doing a notification yeah a notification would be much easier i think it'd give the teachers a huge amount of time back that they didn't have last year and actually teaching our students and instead of you know taking taking measurements and such i mean i don't know if we're 100 masks and we're sending notifications out if your child was in this classroom may have been may have been exposed the parent then can make a decision as to let's see if they're exhibiting symptoms
192and we list off the various symptoms and they certainly are able to take a test if they wish if it's in the high school area you know maybe there's a certain layer of security if they've already been vaccinated in our pursuit to try to figure out where we're going to be here um one of the things that we've just gone down the trail of is that we are picking a little bit in choosing a little bit on these sides but that's okay because you know what we did that all last year we did do some of that so okay and i also yeah i also think that i think todd had mentioned it too there has to be some local um [Music] flavor to this because not everybody not every county school district or whatever
193in the state in the united states is exactly the same no way and so if we're i think that's one of those things that we need to have some type of exception or change to i think if we can make a decision if we can make a decision though about where we're going to start that gives our administrative team a little bit better picture of where when do we pivot why do we pivot i think jamie has shown over and over that he's looking primarily at local data right local information so we need to find a place to start okay so is the starting place the motion that you've made and it's seconded that has everybody wearing masks the motion right now is three foot quarantine should we take a vote on that let's take
194a vote on that we can always go somewhere else if we want to yeah it's three foot are you going to summarize what the motion is she just doing just make sure she let me so it's everybody's wearing masks pre-k 12 yes and we are the major parts and then we would be close counting contacting quarantine at three feet same guidance for everybody regardless of if you're eating lunch or you're in reading yep so it's exactly the what's on the right side right column on this yep so there's no cohorting right yep okay okay i'm voting yes cindy yes bob no alan yes amy no todd no no okay so the motion is has failed three to four so now at this point we're going to go right into having another motion what who wants
195to make the next motion so um here let me give this a shot i'm i'm going to make a motion that we would approve the right hand side saying masks required pk through six and that would be the only change i would make is there a second hold on wait a minute a second no other change to that other side and so it's going to be six foot quarantine no no i'm saying three foot three foot so right hand side same side cindy was looking at i'm gonna i'm gonna say mass required for all students and staff pk through six and the the yellow box below that would read the exact same so you're okay we need a second second discussion yeah so you're gonna take you're gonna make masks optional so you're what you're
196saying is that that you're more comfortable with people being contact traced out than you are with requiring masks at the secondary level because that's what your motion just said um yeah let me i i'm gonna respond to maybe i i'm viewing it as a little bit more detail or nuance than that so uh at three feet it's it's less than it was last year at six feet so i feel like there's there's something to be gained there i mean um and i should say i i would probably prefer it to be the notification still at that level um but i'm i'm saying three because i feel like that does represent compromise so if if i were making it a hundred percent i'm i'm saying myself i would say pk through six um and and call
197it a notification at least to start so i three feet for me represents a movement towards a compromise there and and i don't love the exclusions i feel like there is at least a layer beyond that but i i really would be in favor of it being still the notification in terms of the quarantine but okay so just to clarify too if um 7 through 12 if they're vaccinated and if they have a mask on they won't get traced out i don't think it would depend on a mask for for those i i don't think the mask piece of it per the pierce county health i don't think my understanding is it doesn't matter whether there's a mask or no mask for that situation amy asked i think in regard to somebody with a vaccination
198the pierce county guidance right now is is that wouldn't you weren't referring specifically to vaccination only you know you're vaccinated and you have a mouth say your question again please amy if you're 7 through 12 if you are vaccinated and you chose to wear a mask will you get contact traced out no you're exempt from that based on the based on the recommendation you would if you're if there's not universal masking everybody is contact traced out so the contact racing exam exception only applies if there's universal masking in that space so that student would still get traced out yes at three feet or whatever that that was not my understanding um so i i would probably need more clarification there i was under the understanding that regardless of the masking environment that the stance from
199pierce county health is no no no contact um that that's my understanding of how it would work at the place that that i'm employed and and that's the assumption we've been making too i maybe i'm wrong there but so i'm positive it's universal masculine all right go ahead somebody willing are you friendly amendment mending your motion and your second to include that in it no not yet no but how looking at the left side of close contact quarantine cindy where it says exception yup verification of vaccination will allow students and staff to voluntarily quarantine at their discretion but will not be required so that was in our plan already if we were saying regardless of how we're saying optional or required for masking that statement is the exact same in both situations it is the
200same on both the recommendation is actually if it's universal masking and i don't know if that was an accidental miss or if that was unintentional to take the universal masking fluid or say it again i'm sorry todd do you want to on the road map i have seven websites up hold on on the road map the exception under close contact quarantine says verification of vaccine allows students and staff to volunteer quarantine at their discretion but will not be required so that exception based on actual aap dpi cdc all the letters guidelines is only applies if they're in a universally masked environment look at the top of the grid look at the top of the chart because it says they're required mass then close contact at three feet right on the right side and on the
201left side it says that if it's going to be optional mass then we've got to trace them at six feet they're not the same that's above it yep so i wonder if i'm in the a middle school environment what it would be like to have one class have to wear masks and two classes of students not or have the option that sounds really challenging to me i would agree um that would be one area where i would maybe look look for a little bit more feedback from staff so i would fully say i i don't pretend to know how that would work out but i'm i'm be good here only going off of what we had last week in front of us so and i don't know if that question can be answered immediately either
202so i don't like to put people on the spot who are you prepared to to give an opinion if if this passed could it be with the understanding that that decision is at the discretion of the school administrators i i would amend it to say yes pk through six or pk through eight at the discretion of um administration what's at the discretionary administration if it would be pre-k six mandatory masks or pre-k eight the thinking being meyer middle school has sixth seventh and eighth graders and i don't like to put people on the spot when they haven't had a chance to think about it so then alan is suggesting that that become part of the motion that either for key six pre-k eight at the discretion of administrators when they've had time to be just
203a reminder we did split up six and seven eight last year where we added sixth grade to go all year long but but that's what i'm just saying is that we it it was we did split that up last year yeah but that was for a virtual not all that's right and and that removes the universal masking part of the rest of the mitigation layers no but i'm saying sixth grade went every day every day but i'm saying was based on in person or virtual not wearing masks or not wearing masks well and if we're if we want to go by the universal masking mitigation parts then the it has to be everybody in the school it can't be just sixth grade so it would have to be through eighth grade my other question about
204this is why if given our district's vision goals priorities our mission statement even says right that we're going to have a safe environment for students if we want to have students in school face to face we need to protect their their school environment why are we talking about if if there's going to be a compromise it should be on the cohorting and the and the close contact course quarantining why would we kick up the close contact quarantine and leave it that way it is and take mass away i mean if if really we're going to be in line with our goals and objectives that's backwards to me the masking should be in place and then have the compromise be in the closed contact quarantining it just doesn't match what we're trying to accomplish what we're
205saying our priorities are as a district yeah valid yeah it's valid so robert's rules of order are really here to help us keep a good meeting on the other hand let's just make sure that they don't just get in the way of a good meeting too so that is one compromise that we have yes we have it moved that we would be pre-k six pre-k eight three foot yep right if if you could go other option okay and we have to figure out the logistics on this pre-k 12 everybody wears masks and then if the compromise is we're going to back off on the close contact quarantine i i would just say i would hesitate the seventh and eighth grade to be lumped in with pre-k through six just because there are certain amount there
206a lot they can get the vaccination so yeah but cindy's point and i think i think what what and here here's where here's where the struggle comes in because i have a personal feeling lindsay has a personal feeling you you do you know everyone's everyone's feeling is somewhere different in that spectrum and and cindy's not wrong for saying no cindy is not wrong for saying the people who who whose their truth on this is this only works for me if if it's universal in terms of in terms of the masking the vaccine does not prevent me from getting it and potentially giving it to my younger sibling at home because i was next to somebody in school without a mask on and there's there's deemed to be some layer of protection from that and again
207i'm not trying to debate whether there is whether there isn't what i'm saying is that that that's cindy's point and and so she's not wrong for saying that and the the vaccine does not preclude somebody from potentially getting it and spreading it unfortunately so yeah and that's great i mean i'm sure that even in our own families right not everybody agrees and then now trying to put this together for a whole school district is but we are doing it right yeah we are conversation and respectful and this is so right so let me can i can i ask one thing because i'm willing to admit for the sake there's a couple things that that matter to me one is is allowing people to understand what our decision is going to be before we ask them
208to make a decision about their plans for the year and i feel like now is the time to do that it's important to me that would be helpful to have a um that was part of the motivation i think in asking for some numbers that are going to dictate when we might pivot one way or the other it would be helpful for people to see that in front of them i had a lot of people ask me for that the next piece of it is to say we're stuck we are stuck in terms of where we're at i don't like the idea of putting a mandate across the board but i i i like even less than that the idea of of excluding kids and trying to determine who's vaccinated who's not all of the
209stuff that goes along with that to me is is a bigger priority and so as as as much as i don't like it and i voted for it last week if if there's a feeling from others that pk through 12 masking can get us to a point where we're not going to exclude people to at least start the year and we're going to notify them across the board i would make an amendment to my motion at that point i think todd what you should do then is withdraw your motion okay i will withdraw it and then make a new motion that we're going to go pk through 12 mandatory but we are not going to be excluding other notifying close contact just go with notifications yep notification thank you is there a second i'd second
210that thank you bob discussion so i have a question how do we know if the masks are working like how do we know if there is spread in the school and there's how do we track i'll answer the question for myself um i am i would love to have something that tells me it does or doesn't i've had multiple people send me multiple studies on both sides of it and i think for myself i have to have that's somewhere where i'm going to say the guidance tells me this is a preferred option it's hard for me to to arrive at a different place than that based on all the reflection i've done for myself and and so that i i don't have it i don't have a different way around that unfortunately i've seen i
211mean i've i've been in circles in circles and circles for myself and i don't know a way around it i'm willing to take that guidance as as part of the part of the overarching back to school plans that have been laid out by dr morgan who i weigh more than a national recommendation and also all of the the recommendations that people keep giving over and over i also sense that is where the majority of the anxiety from parents and and kids and people in the the community lies as well so um that whether it's perceived or real or not i don't know but i'm i've arrived at a place where i can't determine that for myself beyond what's recommended to i'm looking at the time i don't want to cut off conversation i'm also thinking
212we have other things to do alan um so if if we do this at what what would trigger us doing away with mask mandy i mean again we're asking for specific metrics but we would be of the understanding that at a certain point if those numbers don't get any higher if they start to drop that at a certain point as soon as we could we would drop a mass mandate and that would be an administrative decision wouldn't necessarily have to come back to the board um i've looked at a lot of numbers and it to me it would be it would i don't know how you do it other than case numbers i don't think hospitalizations i don't think death rate any of those things can be applied i think it i don't know how
213you can do it other than case numbers and i would challenge us to to continue to pursue something like that to further define it but i don't know that i can do it right now or that we would be able to do it right now but it would be our understanding that this policy wouldn't necessarily we wouldn't be locked in stone for the entire year that this would be monitored correct that deserves to be underlined no we aren't making any decisions about this but it's also true that the board all board decisions can be adjusted and last year we also each week we approved the wildcat road we we approved it each week so it could be an administrative thing that they need to make a pivot right away for instance we did a rocky
214branch i mean that was a they didn't consult us i mean the admin they had to act in the head act now but last year we did it weekly but we confirmed the plan confirmed it yeah i guess maybe so that's one way that we're keeping monitoring this remember that we may have to we may have to pivot either way right we may be able to go to mass optional but we also may have to go to close contact quarantining sure so keep in mind that that could shift either way and it can shift really fast yes i have two other things that i would really like to be considered at the same time as this one is um todd brought up plant uh being able to plan right and um my question is if
215students are they gonna our students is every student gonna have to choose whether they're gonna be in person or whether they're gonna go virtual before they know i mean they're gonna know they're gonna know where we're starting right but if we don't shift as quick as families need us to they really don't have the option to move between in school and virtual they're locked into what they start with right till the semester or trimester is done that is how that we set those parameters last year correct that that at semester they would be able to or are we saying you're in this for the year or you're in that for the year trimester yeah so there's some experience with allowing some shifting and flexibility between the types of programs which creates a whole disaster mess
216for staffing right for in school and virtual so i just want to keep that on the plate that that i'm hopeful that that doesn't happen but i want to make sure that we're clear with families about how long they're locking into with air quotes something so that's one thing my other question is um and i don't know if this is a separate conversation or if it's already i don't know um the access to testing right so if we're not going to close contact if we're not we are going to close contact if we're because we're going to notify which means we are going to close contact trace people right if we're not going to quarantine students out have we made a decision on whether there's going to be easy access to access to testing so
217if i get a notification i can really easily get my student tested without having to miss school without having to pay for a doctor appointment without all of those things yeah we get tested we've given an honest comment to that in the past to say we're still waiting for more information we're still waiting for more information we got a little more information on that our position um is that it would require parent consent obviously and so there's there's no no test that we would ever ever consider without it being parent choice that's that's their individual choice we would be facilitating a connection a way in a site in a location that was convenient for their son or daughter to take the test it involves an independent a vendor if you will that i need to
218meet yet again with our school nurse who had a meeting recently who did get some more information on that but it is looking more promising that the answer to your question is yes we would be able to provide testing for families who are interested we're getting closer to knowing more details okay foreign so um if we vote in masks mandatory right now today and we are talking about a number which we've been asking for a number for when it clicks up or clicks down i just want to know is this going to be the baseline then for when things click back you know good question so i so again what's the number going to be so here's the way i look at it lindsay has you know talking about other districts eau claire has a
219metric they recently pivoted on theirs and i believe it's it's um once they cleared an average of 10 new cases in the district over per 100 000 they they went to their next level so um you know we are basically just crossed that point sometime in the last week or two as far as our local number um for our district so um there is a point to me and it mine's probably a little bit more loose on that guideline than other people's but i understand that there that's not a universal um agreement piece and and somewhere we're probably not going to get universal volume but i would still like to see us define that as opposed to last year where we just kind of um you know we kind of wait about it what's that
220we feel pretty good about it let's uh let's try it yes and and so but and i'm not saying that we would have to do that now but i i would really like to see us define what that does look like um question to your question if we in fact vote for masks mandatory today as of august 16th this would have to be the baseline or at least i mean it wouldn't it wouldn't be higher than this in other words we wouldn't say wait till we get four more cases if we're deciding today for it to be mandatory this would have to be um the baseline or i get a little bit comfort com or uncomfortable when we think of this has to be there are so much about covert that we don't know one
221is unpredictable so i'm a little nervous about that i'm also nervous about well what i would meant is it wouldn't be that the case load goes higher you know in other words it wouldn't be any it wouldn't be lower i think that jamie and our administrators have heard loudly and clearly that we recognize that whatever decision we make tonight and other times it's not once and for all yeah that we're going to expect and participate in ongoing monitoring that we have a track record in terms of understanding that they will do that well and that we're going to keep that up which means that we don't have to identify a magic number tonight because that's going to elude us todd i'm pretty sure if there were one to be found you would have found it
222i really think so i've got a couple ideas yes and we'll keep that so we have a motion that's been moved and seconded we've had considerable discussion anything else please respond i will restate it the motion is that we will have masks for everybody pre-k 12 and that we will then sending out parent notifications for close contact and we will not close quarantine if at a some point we realize that that's not wise and we need to shift we can make a shift either removing mass or expecting to have close contact quarantine so basically the right side of the chart but with a switch to the close to the con to the quarantine to that box i have one other question though what are we required to do by the county jamie we're required to
223close contact and report that but we're not required to do the quarantine is that right the i talked with a.z snyder again today on that question and a few others and her comment on that is that she she wouldn't want it to have to become her decision to close down an individual school or to close down an individual building or a district for that matter but if she perceived us to be my words not hers you know reckless and just allowing the coveted numbers to run rampant in our building that from a legal standpoint those are measures that she could take but i don't i also don't want to say publicly and she's endured enough pain over the last couple of years with people's perceptions of her role and responsibility with all this she wasn't
224seeing that as a threat she just i was asking the question what if we do it different than what you're saying we should be doing it and you know could she take it to a judge and have a judge issue an order yep she could do that is that something that she's saying that out loud to threaten people is that something that i can see her doing at five different districts in pierce county frankly no i don't see it coming to that okay i didn't know if there was a county requirement to close contact we're going to i want to make sure we have the verbiage of this right we're going to continue to close contract contract i would not say i think for clarity i don't know that that you would say that it's
225a county requirement just like right now with the cdc public health dpi and so on they aren't requiring us anything we we would have saved eight hours of our life together here over the last two meetings had one of those other entities said this is an order it's a mandate none of them have done that right they all are highly recommending stuff to us and we're here to figure it out right this is lovely that they've done that but i want to make sure we're we are close contact tracing but we are not quarantining out because if we don't if we don't keep track of close contacts we have no way of gathering any information or data on if this is actually yeah we'll have to some level we have to do some level of
226contact tracing otherwise we'd just be sending a letter to everybody exactly yeah okay senator everybody in the building and so then we could follow up those students that were notified could follow up with us and say oh i got a positive and then that would inform us and say oh the three feet isn't mitigated i don't know that we can make them do that but they could hopefully have volunteers hope they'd be good partners okay i'm looking at the time but i don't want to cut anybody off all right so we have a motion that's been moved and seconded i am voting yes lindsay no todd yes cindy go ahead i'm sorry go ahead baby ellen yes bob yes cindy yes the motion is carried yep all right everybody now we are going to you
227know what i just want to say thank you to everybody on this board who have different we have a variety of opinions we had really good discussion can i say something to you so i respect that yes todd i would i would hope that somebody or or people would at least recognize that no one's happy with with everything that's decided i'm i'm not entirely happy with my own personal view on some of these things but i it's important for us to move forward it's important for us not to have to rehash this and have it over and over and over and i just feel like at least it gives us some way forward beyond beyond complete gridlock with it i'm not sure anyone is completely happy with this decision right i i if they are
228that that would astound me so but it is a compromise on many fronts we need to move forward we need to get kids in school we need to educate them we need to get on with other things that schools do other than tracking covet and we just need to get moving on we have many other things to do so all right we are going to move on now to the personnel committee and i will turn that to amy okay yep so um we're going to have two recommended actions tonight um after our meeting on july 19 2021 the person that we met and we heard a certified staffing update we approved the 2021-22 employee handbook revisions to co-curricular advisor compensation and also to approve the virtual e-school teacher program coordinator teacher job description and review
229the 2021-22 personnel committee goals so um i would make the motion to approve the 20 21 22 employee handbook revisions to co-curricular advisor compensation thank you is there a second second thank you any questions or comments we had good discussion about this we have a good system all those in favor aye opposed the motion is carried and secondly i would approve the virtual e-school teacher program coordinator teacher job description is there a second second second thank you bob questions or comments all those in favor aye aye opposed the motion is carried alan i'll turn to you for ed program please we have two action items and i'll bring up those motions at the end of this summary but we had a really jam-packed meeting here a week ago normally our ad programs meetings as you
230guys know tend to be thorough and as the principals know we tend to be thorough and keep them a little longer but we had some really good updates here couldn't spend as much time with them as um as we would like to have but we got some good updates and some of these some of this will come back to that committee in the future but first off we had jennifer present to us the assessment calendar for this coming year differentiating between what was what were state mandated assessments and what were district chosen assessments and how those are scheduled and laid out in some of the background on each of those we had an update on summer school and summer school was going really well nate sherman was running our summer school and thank you nate
231for all of your work with that really appreciate that we talked about new teacher orientation in the august end service the teachers are starting new teacher orientation starts the week of the 23rd everybody starts august 25th and i would remind everybody here that we have a new teacher meet and greet on august monday august 23rd at 4 pm at juniors gives us a chance to meet the new as board members to meet all the new teachers we discussed with the bell the substitute rate and we've been trying to figure out how we fit their substitute rate pay rate and we also talked about the other staff positions bus driver custodian kids club assistant all those our teachers and staff don't make enough especially in this economy but it's nice when we're able to make some
232adjustments and we've boosted the substitute pay i think there's only one school district maybe david that's more for sub per day it's really important that we get good teachers in front of our kids even on sundays mark gave us a good update on the middle school standards based grading system that they're going to be working on this coming year that will be sort of an extension of what's currently going on in the middle school so parents can watch for updates and information an extension of what's going on in the elementary and the elementary school thank you stacey so parents who are whose kids are moving into the middle school right now or have experienced this already in elementary we'll be hearing something about this middle school parents this year they also presented to us on
233the 8th grade student leadership program which we'll be starting this year teacher john witt principal mark chapin and mel hoffman who's a community member are going to be running that and it sounds very interesting and good good work there mark appreciate that we had an update on the e-school for fall and we've had an increase in enrollment there um headed into fall and what that is going to present for an option there and then as you saw the presentation tonight on acp again i want to thank melissa hansen for her leadership and the staff on that and we talked about that as much as we could we had more of it tonight so that's a summary a lot of stuff we covered in an hour and a half but anyway so the two things for
234approval tonight are the assessment calendar for 2122 and a substitute teacher pay rate of 160 per day unless there's interest in separating the two i would move approval of both of those thank you ellen is there a second second thank you amy discussion questions or comments i know dave's done a lot of work to try to get us to this recommendation about the substitute teacher pay rate so thank you for all of that anything else all those in favor aye opposed the motion is carried and i'll turn to todd for financing facilities okay um gosh was it just last week um it so we we had a finance and facilities um committee chad has a a couple more clear items in regard to the budget and there's still a couple areas that are to be
235decided and i'm going to say overall decent news as far as the district is concerned in the next two year period there there's some question about a lot of unknowns for what that looks like down the road but um based on some of the formulas that they're getting and conservative estimates for how those impact our district in regard to number of hours of instruction for in-person learning we should come out in the good but also that is at the expense of some districts that maybe weren't in that same situation as far as in-person learning so it's not um you know there's there's a baseline and and we're above that but that means that there's other districts in the state that are probably going to be more negatively impacted by it too so there there will
236be a follow-up to that in september and we're getting closer to nailing down some of our items for the annual meeting um coming up as well but the the overall report would be decent or maybe a little bit better than where we were the last time in terms of our our two-year next two-year budget so thank you todd do we have any proposed or suggested items for future meeting agendas so one thing i'm i'm going to keep talking about is the conversation about the baseline numbers and and some of those things i still would like to find us in a way to quantify it 13.7 is the number now jamie has referenced how how can i invent a metric that's better than the the harvard model or the the cdc and and i don't think
237we're saying to do that i think what we're saying is let's find the criteria and maybe our decision tonight implies what that criteria is to say you know the the transfer point from yellow to orange is 10 cases per day over a seven day average per hundred thousand people we're effectively in that range you know maybe our number is somewhere in the range of where we are now and that is the point where we look but i i would like to further that discussion um i i don't want to beat it to death in terms of the discussions we've had the last three weeks but i would like to quantify that in front of people unless the board is opposed we'll bring something on monday for your review yeah we don't meet on monday unless
238we're going to call a special meeting um i i'm not saying even immediately i'm just saying you know even even at the discretion of of the the administration but just quantify it with something so that it's not a ev you know when when the time comes that that we've we've we've potentially absorbed a surge that we're not sitting waiting you know that we have something that people can tie to because that that to me would be important also too the 12 and unders you know the vaccination will be coming for them too yeah and that would be so that's another huge factor so how about if those things how would you feel if those things were incorporated into the likely ongoing yes um coveted conversations we're gonna continue to have at the beginning of board
239meetings much like we did before and so when when there's something that we can talk about it we can even talk about we don't know what it is yet but we're still talking about it in the corp in the context of that okay anything else all right we're going to schedule meetings and we have the new teacher meet and greet monday august 23rd 4 to 5 30. that's at juniors there will be the next educational program committee monday september 13th at six o'clock in the district office finance and facilities will meet monday september 20th at 5 15 at the high school media center the next regular board meeting will be monday september 20th at six o'clock here in this location the annual meeting will be monday september 20th at seven o'clock also in this location
240following the next board meeting and in the interest of time and the approaching pumpkin hour we are going to leave the executive session until another time so that is a coming attraction later on and at this point we are adjourned thank you