Due to the current federal emergency declarations and guidance about limiting person to person contact due to the covet 19 pandemic this meeting of the dinah public school district school board has been conducted online in accordance with minnesota statute 13d 021

Participants are reminded to mute their microphone or phone when they are not speaking wishing to speak should unuse your microphone or utilize the ray's hand feature so i can see who is waiting to speak and then wait to be recognized

Tonight on our agenda is an update to discuss a secondary learning plan the administration is planning to implement secondary schools comprise both the middle and high school the elementary schools will not be impacted by this update

In july our board unanimously passed policy 308 which basically states that the board needs to be informed of learning model changes such as what we are receiving tonight but we do not vote to approve learning model changes if the board disagrees with the change the district wants to make we can give direction to revise portions of a plan or ultimately we can vote to change the model suggestion

We are still in a pandemic and we do need to think differently about how we do school what our plan that we're presenting based on new guidance from the department of health as well as the department of education where we can decrease the six foot distance of the three foot distance however that's qualified that if we can do six feet we should do six feet

What we're about to try we haven't done before bringing students in during a pandemic and i believe the plan that we are presenting today is ignite is a balance between providing a great educational model at the same time keeping students and staff safe but i do want to emphasize this is a new territory a pandemic is is a very challenging situation in nature and it's also unpredictable

I would never promise that we would stay in this uh and it may be as the how that virus behaves it may require us to change again so i just want to put that down as a as as the context that we find ourselves

We are still dealing with a lot of variability things can go really well or things could go much more challenging in the coming weeks time will tell what's actually going to happen and how that's going to work

One of the things that is going to help with that is the the reality that more and more educators are going to be vaccinated so by mid-april i think we will see a large chunk of edina staff with their second dose and therefore no longer subject to quarantine

The more close contacts you have means that some of those exposures can result in much larger numbers of students that need to be quarantined after an exposure so that's not something to be surprised by that's just part of the reality of some of this process moving forward

The the quarantining process the you're correct the the cdc does have capability they've provided that to states that you you can reduce the duration of quarantine with certain conditions in place the state of minnesota has reviewed that and their recommendation is the the best thing for public health is to still go with 14 days

The the guidance has not changed the on what is it close contact it's that six feet less than six feet and a cumulative of 15 minutes over a 24 hour period and that's where i get to there's likely to be some larger quarantine sizes because of that

You're talking about some in-school spread in some districts could you elaborate on this i hadn't heard about that

I just have a question i'd like you to try to help me understand and the community understand when the just the process that's going on here our district is taking your recommendations and your guidance and there are other districts that are in hennepin county that are currently making the decision to open up for five days a week in person

So really the purpose of the rollout in bringing students back is to really get a better feel for how the our population responds to the layered mitigation efforts so that we have a really good handle on things as we bring in more students and we're doubling the capacity at the schools more so than whether it's four days or five days

I kind of want to go back to what you said owen about um the longer quarantine possibly having less compliance and i just wanted to get clarification on that are you were you suggesting that we would have less students and teachers testing because we'd have they wouldn't want to go into quarantine say they were an asymptomatic positive is that part is that the compliance piece that you were curious about

Don't kids have a longer incubation period than adults do is that am i is that true is that also part of the i'm guessing the cdc study about compliance had more to do with adults and i had always thought that we had talked about kids having a longer incubation period

Do we need additional health services workers if we are contact tracing way more than we were before because it sounds like that we probably will be and i'm concerned about the ability of our health staff to keep up with the contact tracing that they might have to do

I am now going to turn the meeting over to superintendent schultz who i believe is going to then turn it over to nick kelly but right now i'll turn it over to superintendent schultz

Thank you ellenberg hopefully everybody can hear me is that right okay um so first of all just to provide some context i don't want us to forget um the context we're in um we are still in a pandemic

And i believe the plan that we are presenting today is ignite is a balance between providing a great educational model at the same time keeping students and staff safe

Tonight i'm going to give nick the chance to give nick the opportunity to share where things are at with regards to the virus and the vaccine and then uh we will uh nick does have to go to another meeting so i think we'll stop after nick is presented and see if the board has any questions of nick

I am happy to take questions and i think the dr schultz is absolutely correct the part of the the challenge with march is getting those those systems and processes in place we know that as the the testing starts ramping up we're going to find asymptomatic cases and that's gonna the more lead time we can give into that before it's part of our routine process the better off that process will be

It it's the similar kind of process that we see where if you have a close contact then you you if you have a individual student or staff member that tests positive what you end up doing is identifying the close contacts what we're seeing with some of the school districts that have already started back and there's there's more students in the classroom than there were before there's more close contacts

So because we're you're constrained a bit on the the physical distance uh that means there's going to be more close contact so if a student test positive previously you'd be able to say oh clearly you know they're 6 feet away they're not close contacts that's going to be more of a challenge and what we're finding is other districts are finding there's a larger number of students that need to be quarantined as a result of that

So the the the process works very similar so i i sit and support this the school districts as you mentioned bloomington and edina when they have incident command teams we come in and we talk through the process we go through operational details we go through the reality of what's coming and and i provide the the same public health advice

It's based on the safe learning plan it's based on cdc's guidance and it's based on our case rates and then the the team comes to an operational decision of the best way to move forward

The one of the the challenges that i highlighted that edina has an opportunity but it also is a bit of a challenge is you have an ability to do some testing among your students which i think will extend your ability to do school but there's going to be a challenge with testing that rollout has never we've not done that and so as that builds up and the capacity gets there you don't want to rush that as fast and so i pointed out that if you roll that out super quickly you want to be very careful on how you do that so there's value in doing that a little slower more methodical so that you can go longer versus trying to rush and push things quickly

I just wanted to make sure that i'm understanding nick so really the purpose of the rollout in bringing students back is to really get a better feel for how the our population responds to the layered mitigation efforts so that we have a really good handle on things as we bring in more students and we're doubling the capacity at the schools more so than whether it's four days or five days

Yeah it it there it became down more to the the operational realities of it it presents an opportunity for the kinks of the challenges those things to be worked through very similar to when teachers started to be tested you knew you're going to detect some asymptomatic cases and that it's nice to be able to do two weeks ahead of time to get all that stuff out of the system if you don't have the ability to do that you have the potential for some initial disruptions in that process booing a little slower helps you mitigate that it it doesn't mean you you have to do that but it it provides more stability

So can you talk a little bit about if we're going to be changing our quarantining compliance our quarantining thresholds

The cdc does have capability they've provided that to states that you you can reduce the duration of quarantine with certain conditions in place the state of minnesota has reviewed that and their recommendation is the the best thing for public health is to still go with 14 days that's the recommendation of local public health my peers in the metro that 14 days is is the most protective thing we can do

We also have seen studies that show you know up you miss up to 20 percent of cases by not doing uh the 14 day and so it's it's a trade-off as the cdc did articulate that you get higher compliance by having less quarantine time but you also run the risk of actually extending the quarantine time so if you do it for seven or ten days and then people come back and on day 12 somebody develops symptoms that whole classroom then goes back out for quarantine again for another ten seven days so it it's a trade-off

We we're seeing the same kind of things we saw in the fall we're seeing uh outbreaks associated with sports teams and and people eating out in in restaurants we're gonna continue to see those those clusters of cases show up that's just something we're going to see more more occurrences of as students are coming back in and having a lot more contact with each other and staff

Is your concern allayed by the fact that community spread has gone down significantly in the last few weeks both in the county and in edina itself

It it doesn't really change the the quarantine or the the likelihood of seeing cases popping up there when case rates are down in the community we're going to have less of that introduction into the school but the the response on the other side once that introduction happens is going to be the same

And i i kind of want to clarify something about the um the phased-in roll-out that we were just talking about i know that that used to be part of the minnesota department of health's recommendations for schools that we would only be able to roll out two grades at a time and i believe that that was one of the things that governor walls changed in on february 17th and i don't believe that it is a part of any cdc recommendations so i um so the the the way that and manner that we uh bring our students back into school that is totally at our discretion without any guidance from the cdc or the mdh is that correct

You're correct that the rolling start was removed as a requirement

The cdc and mdh provide a lot of guidance and direction for how you the best practices and how you should be doing things and it's and it's just it's not they're just not they're silent on that now and they they used to so many schools are have decided just at one time to start start up again and there's there's no guidance on that anymore

I just had a quick question um correct me if i'm wrong but don't kids have a longer incubation period than adults do is that am i is that true is that also part of the i'm guessing the cdc study about compliance had more to do with adults and i had always thought that we had talked about kids having a longer incubation period

The cdc's quarantine guidance didn't go into age groups we do see a bit of variability in in kids uh there i wouldn't not necessarily say incubation period is something that we focus on much but the more likely to be asymptomatic especially at younger ages is is definitely holds true

But that that was so that was really and this may be a question for nick then so that that probably went into if the cdc suggested it went to the minnesota state guidelines who or the minnesota are minnesota state um experts to evaluate the guidelines and there wasn't a switch there wasn't a change and their recommendation is 14 days is it fair to say that they considered that and that is not a factor in whether or not it's important to do it or not i guess

Yeah i think there there is uh a few different ways the cdc evaluated that data and then mdh evaluated it you do have uh you know we we hear it now where people say i don't want to get tested because then i don't want to you know test positive and be out for 14 days so you you you have some data that suggests you'll get an increased compliance with testing uh it's it is a uh not clearly defined process

We do see that some people struggle with the 14 days nobody wants to be told you can't do things for 14 days and they're mdh did look at it and the best public health guidance is stay with 14 days there there's some caveats where you can do it in shorter time frames but you know on the school nursing calls and and the information the state's provided on the school side a lot of those situations may not even be applicable

And i i just want to make sure that um the community understands and please correct me if i'm wrong nick but that even though we we're uh proposing reducing social distancing by three feet the cdc and the mdh definition of close contact still is six feet and so as a school district when we are making going through the decision tree for quarantining and making a decision about what is a close contact that hasn't changed and so it's not up to the school district to change who we quarantine and what the definition of a close contact is because that hasn't changed we're still following the same guidance which is less than six feet and more than 15-20 minutes is that correct nick

Yeah it the the guidance has not changed the on what is it close contact it's that six feet less than six feet and a cumulative of 15 minutes over a 24 hour period and that's where i get to there's likely to be some larger quarantine sizes because of that

And so at our incident control team this morning um we were it was articulated to us that other schools that have reduced social distancing have seen a market increase in students that have had to be quarantined especially in the secondary because over six or seven periods you're in close contact with multiple students

I agree with that erica and that's one of the reasons we are rolling this out slower so that we can um determine what is needed and to see how the population is going to respond to being together so we have in the process of getting more health staff we've i don't know how the hiring is going for that nikki are you on that you can comment quickly on that