hey tonight is february tuesday february 23rd and we do have a forum i'll call this meeting to order 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 i will determine the order in which board members wishing to speak will 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 before we move into discussing the model itself i want to make sure both the community and fellow board members are aware of the process our district undertakes when shifting learning models because this can vary from school district to school district 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 additionally new and or modified learning plans can be approved in various ways from the state of minnesota and nick kelly who is our liaison with the bloomington department of health will be addressing the approval of our learning plan other school districts in our state might have their learning plans approved via a regional incident command team or control team sorry or directly from the minnesota department of education our district does not need to go through either of these processes i want to ensure community understands we are not missing any critical steps to implementing learning models these are just different channels to getting learning models approved 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 in the meetings i've had with governor walls with superintendents it has been clear that we are 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 secondly um jerry ellenberg alluded to the process we do have weekly meetings with our covet ins on uh nick kelly is our epidemiologist that sits on that he gives us great guidance along with bianca vernig who is also from the department of ed and helps us out with some of our environmental safety so 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 um nick of course we'll talk about it has been part of the decision making um regarding the um regarding the learning models um after that um we will uh uh i'm gonna ask jeff or excuse me eric to talk a little bit about some of the mitigation things we're doing in the buildings uh jeff jorgensen uh we're gonna begin uh rolling out uh some assessment evaluation around mental health and then uh give randy the opportunity to talk about the plan along with our secondary principles we also i want to just thank all of our students who are here tonight if you could all wave all the students wave it would have been kind of fun if you were all in the same row i could have called bingo all right dad joke um so uh uh the principles will introduce the teachers they're gonna give us a perspective on what the the week looks like um as in hybrid as well as what they see the week looking like when we begin our model that we're presenting tonight so with that dr nick kelly can i turn it over to you thanks dr schultz um i prepared a statement to to help kind of set the context for for where things are going and where the future is going so i'm not going to reread the statement that the board has but just to to reiterate that 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 i'm concerned and focused on is the variance that we see and so we see the variance moving forward in minnesota and around the united states it is entirely possible that that may may not be a major issue um it's also entirely possible that as the cdc notes it may require a change to how we do learning models and the the protocols and procedures we put in place we don't know the answer to those questions right now that will happen here in the near future 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 in addition to the the innovative testing tools that edina is rolling out for their students there's a lot of ability to manage what's coming with the testing for the teachers and the testing for for students that will help make things more uh on a regular basis but there's going to be some learning curves with that process so i would anticipate march having some challenges with additional quarantines or or disruptions in part due to some of that work but in the long term that is going to help make things hopefully more stable as long as cases continue to go down i think it's it's important too to just make sure people understand the more students that are back in the classroom that you're going to have more and more close contacts and it's going to be there's going to be we're seeing this in other schools uh other districts where the 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 so i i want to add one piece to this plan um you'll see in this plan that we've we're rolling this out beginning on march 8th inviting students back the week of the 8th week of the 15th the week of the 22nd we're doing that on on the uh advice of the covet incident command team because there are gives time for um immunization or vaccinations it also gives time for us to understand how how the population is going to respond when we bring them back into the secondary schools as we increase uh bringing kids back to see that we can manage any transmission of the virus i'm just in learning how how this is gonna uh roll out so i just wanted to add that uh as uh as the basis for the the of of the program and the model that we're presenting so i i did i interrupt you nick are you taking your take questions 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 so any questions from anybody for nick owen nick i have a question for you you're talking about some in-school spread in some districts could you elaborate on this i hadn't heard about that so 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 and 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 okay so it's greater close contact but we haven't had spread i'm just trying to draw a distinction between the two yeah it's it's close context okay okay thank you other questions for nick ellen yeah hi hi nick um 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 and i'm just wondering you know for example even you're in bloomington even the bloomington public school district has just announced that that on march 11 they'll open up um to five days a week and i'm just wondering what that process how me and how i can understand um and make sense of these this difference um that's that's there that um we're here what we're hearing from you and what other districts are doing thank you yeah 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 um 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 so that you may run into some of those issues you may not run into those issues and at the end of the day it became an operational decision of this is this is the best path forward uh for a dinah and that's what came forward okay thank you uh ellen maybe uh i'll share because your question uh pertained to what other districts are doing and uh we had had sarah call some school districts we call the noka eastern cover county eden prairie hopkins montemedie minnetonka osceola robbinsdale st louis park yzetta and white bear lake and um all um minnetonka um is yet to be determined um bloomington i think is is uh presenting theirs tonight um so i'm not absolutely sure these they might go four and a half with a late start much like orono has also done kind of a four and a half day um why zetta is doing four days but their middle school's going five days and the reason they're going five days is because they don't have teachers teaching in both the virtual and in person so that's why they are at five days so i think all the other school districts are have a four day week julie did you have a question i did i just want 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 that's really a discussion for teaching our teaching and learning part of this agenda i would i would think because it's more of an impact on what we're asking our staff to do and with our students in the learning models our students are in is that a fair assessment that i'm understanding 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 got it no i think that makes sense i just wanted to make sure that i understood that and then the four to five day discussion i know there's a lot of different factors that go into that so i assume i know we're going to talk about that a little bit more with the principles speaking so okay thanks nick owen nick my question for you earlier was based off of the sensitivity that we'll have for contacts and what that'll do for quarantining we received an email this afternoon that i thought put the the concern that i have pretty well i described it pretty well let me read just a portion of it here importantly the cdc has found that longer quarantines place increased burdens and hardship on people which reduces compliance the shorter quarantines optimize outcomes by balancing potential for transmission with odds of compliance in other words a 14 day quarantine may result in fewer infections on paper the short teen the shorter quarantine results in better health outcomes in the real world because people are more likely to comply so can you talk a little bit about if we're going to be changing our quarantining compliance our quarantining thresholds um and i'm just a little concerned with are these are you seeing a lot of outbreaks say in osseo are are there outbreaks in roseville um and it is it it's not outbreaks it's people having contacts and so the contact were they're airing on the side of great caution culvert is serious but they're airing on the side of great caution so there's sort of two two parts do you know more specifics about that and then secondly could you describe a little bit more about where we're at with our quarantining thresholds so 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 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 and so i'm looking at it from a we want students and staff to be healthy and safe and and yes there are situations where you could potentially shorten it but those are very caveated when in a school environment the other challenge becomes from an equity or a capacity standpoint you to do some of those things you have to provide testing and so you have to be able to provide testing on a rapid routine basis for anybody that is in that exposure category at a certain time point most places are finding that to be a challenge to be able to do that on demand so the the most protective way is to keep that 14. 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 it's a trade-off the the public health recommendation is to stay the 14. um that's the preference of the state and ours too and to your other question on on outbreaks 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 makes me more confident that we can do school for a longer period of time uh 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 okay and then just to confirm something i think i heard you say is we do as a district have the discretion to go with a shorter quarantine if we elect is that correct it's always a choice um and that's not 14 days is not where public health would recommend okay thank you alan yeah i um 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 um the the cdc and mdh provide a lot of guidance and direction for how you the best practices and how you should be doing things um 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 um many schools are have decided just at one time to start um start up again and there's there's no guidance on that anymore i just wanted to make that point the other one was and i'm sorry i i am only speaking to the fact that parents in the community have received letters from their school district so i mentioned bloomington receiving a letter from their school district saying that they had intense intentions to open up five days march 11th and um so that um is and i i'm i'm i i have seen that email so i know that that's part of it it may not have gone before they're bored yet um but uh there are other districts similarly that are contemplating that whether or not it has been seen through their board janie yeah i have two i guess they're two questions so first 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 well i think my major point is that i would recommend a seven day quarantine rather than a 14 because of the the reality principle if you will that you're going to get better compliance out of it that so compliance of the quarantine or compliance on testing or you know because it's testing is voluntary but is it which one is it do you think it's a bigger issue compliance with the quarantine okay and compliance exactly compliance with the quarantine okay um all right i just wanted to get clarification on that and then erica i don't i feel like we're kind of dipping our toes into the conversation about the whole um philosophy of the staggered approach and i i'm just curious if we are going to talk about that right now or should we wait to talk about that um when nick is done because i know he has to leave for another meeting so we should attract this question okay so anything people have questions related that only nick can answer we should ask now okay great thank you then i'll hold up jane julie did you have another question yeah i just wanted to um yeah just really quick off to off of janie's question is there is there data that supports that we get there's less um cooperation with quarantine at seven days versus 14 days is there data to support that claim from scientists from our state from our guidelines that's where i guess that question's for you owen since you stated it like where's the dat where's the support from data to back that up okay i don't know who you're asking apparently it's a cdc and there's a link in an email that we received this afternoon that is uh talking about it so it's um directly from the cdc but that's not but then 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 um 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 um you you run into some challenges with uh you know you can't you can't be part of a family unit um you can't have some of these other caveats going in and there need it's very unique very specific circumstances where that applies so it may not even be applicable to many of the situations that you're talking about in a school setting got it okay thank you i just wanted some more clarification thanks um lenny go ahead nick quick question cdc guidelines for secondary that's still at six feet the cdc guidance is at six feet it uh it becomes is required at six feet at a certain threshold diana is under the threshold now where six feet is recommended but not required and it's it's the very similar language that you see in the state guidance where it it's required until you hit a certain threshold where they drop it down where three feet is the absolute minimum you have to have and so as we look at this though we should be balancing all of the factors so for example if we're going to go less than six feet then we probably want to have a larger quarantine time period versus if we were going to stay at six feet we might be able to then go to a shorter quarantine period because you at least have a greater distance is that a fair statement certainly one way to look at it it's you're basically looking at layers of mitigation and and the the more layers you have the the better off you are right so if you take the most aggressive layer at every single point then you're more likely to have a problem more likely not that you will i i guess it depends on if you if you're if you're taking a more aggressive and staying at 14 and mandating six feet and you know aggressive on a public health intervention you're i would say you're less likely to have problems oh yeah i meant more aggressive as in seven day quarantine three feet apart that's what i meant by more aggressive yep i would agree with that then uh and also i think that the bloomington email does not say they're gonna go to five days it says they're gonna do it traditional and that the actual details are still being worked out i actually just pulled it up again it doesn't say five anywhere uh and irrespective of that the model that i would choose to follow isn't what another district has chosen but i would choose to follow a model that makes the most sense for our district janie yeah nick 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 yeah the 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 okay thank you before i get back to alan and owen i want to go back to something that we talked about at the very beginning that owen was asking about and 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 then 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 so i just want the community to understand that it's not edina public schools making decisions about quarantining and sending students home that's a definition that has not changed and that's another reason that i think from my perspective that it's important that we phase in and understand the effect on our student population the number of students that are close contact and a follow-up question i have to this john is that do we need additional health services workers if we are contact tracing um 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 i 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 thanks dr schultz i am on um i do believe that um that ms hyman has been had an opportunity to do some interviewing but i do need to check further with her on the status of hiring for those few positions so i can i can provide the foreign update as soon as i've had an opportunity to speak with her thank you so we have that uh in process america okay thank you ellen yeah hi this um we've been getting an awful lot of emails and so i am referring to a couple questions that were asked of the board by some teachers and i just wanted to run them past um dr kelly uh because i i i just wanted to understand a little bit more um first uh was is about transparency and that's a big issue for me and also for these teachers they were wondering why is the district not publishing covet information on our website stating the number of students and staff in a building who've tested positive and are quarantining because of covid and in the past there had been discussion about hipaa and i just wanted to ask this question of dr kelly and then we can talk about this later administratively within the district if it is not a hipaa violation to post numbers of um cova covid positives per building if it's hipaa really is going to depend on whether or not you're a covered entity um the other things to think through are the minnesota data practice act and ferpa there there are are ways to share data that is not identifiable but it presents additional challenges right so um when you go to other districts websites you can see these things are being reported and i'm just wondering if you're aware that if there are violations because of that or if if there's anything that would hold us back from being more transparent i've not heard any conversations about dashboards that's not something that we're normally not talking with on our our public health calls with schools it's data sharing it happens at various levels um we're not great great thank you um ellen we are uh partnering with the city of edina and um we are uh providing them with data to post on their city uh dashboard covid dashboard is has that started again we're we're getting it started again so it's so it's not important and and do we report that the teachers wanted to know if we're going to be reporting by building so let's move this to the next section here for 15 more minutes okay so and so the other question and something that that the teachers had brought up and i just i'm curious about this i had never heard this and i i don't know maybe it's not being done but um it has to do with uh teacher vaccinations and are you aware of any clinics that have been set up to in by certain districts to vaccinate their educators i'm aware that some districts have partnered with local public health or other healthcare entities to vaccinate most of the vaccination of teachers in the metro has happened through state sites right okay so that that might be just another question for later thank you thank you nick owen erica would this be the time to ask about testing or will that come later in our meeting i think that will come later okay are there any other questions for nick sorry this is matt real quick oh and is it about the state testing programs or what we've been looking into the committee you've been on both and if if if that's going to be affecting if nick if you have anything to say about that matt and nick have you been talking at all since we do have nick here and he's taking off in just a little bit i was just wondering if there's anything relevant regarding our testing program and and nick being here apparently not so i'll i'll bring it up later well erica i don't i don't i don't want to if erica made a statement of portrait i don't want to jump in differently with with nick here i wanted to make sure we answered it so just from my standpoint one sentence is we continue to move forward the program we presented to the board last week um i think we're getting close there's a lot of different things we have to get right with consents insurances dollars all that stuff so i would say that's close and still progressing i would say one myth that should be completely debunked is that anything related to a testing program we would implement would slow or reduce students getting back to school nick anything from the state level not that i'm aware of that impacts that thanks does that help owen yes um so mick are you in any way counting on our testing program to be a part of our compliance part of the metrics that you're looking at it or is it just completely separate i think it's it's going to be very important and helpful in the process and i think the the more widely it's used especially among students and and teachers with the state testing the the better off the the district's operations will be in the long term okay okay thank you so it's one of those hopefully it's a net positive but not not a um a destabilizing factor if it's not done widely sorry eric i just wanted to hit that long neck was here too nope um anything else nick before you go i i'm very glad to see the the board is continuing to talk with the district on ways to work and support mental health and well-being nobody asked to be making these kind of decisions or or dealing with a pandemic like this and keeping students health and safety along with your staff health and safety at the front and center is is something that i know you've done a good job at and i am glad you're continuing to do that erica can i see one thing real quick just wanted to thank nick nick just for public awareness nick's put in a tremendous amount of overtime with the testing committee and a lot of his efforts so agree or disagree with recommendations from me the board anybody else you can't disagree with the amount of work nick's done um so i just wanted to say thank you nick really appreciate it yes thank you nick we appreciate all your help so thanks it's my pleasure all righty well thanks thanks a lot nick um so john if you want to continue with your presentation about the learning models yeah eric eric can you uh jump in and talk about um just some of the mitigation you've been working on with facilities certainly thank you dr schultz um listening to um uh nick kelly and layers of mitigation is really what we're talking about here so just back up a little bit so seven years ago we seven plus years ago we started doing mechanical upgrades to our buildings and over the last seven years we've touched every building and when we touch those buildings we improve the the filtration system we make sure that the system's balanced so that air is distributed evenly throughout the building we've been improved control of the building so when we say that we're bringing in outside air we prove that we're bringing in outside air um we're running our buildings on extra time so we're averaging about 20 hours a day to flush the buildings before people come and flush the buildings with fresh air after people are out we're maximizing the outside air that we're bringing in and getting away from those negative 20 degree days is makes that much easier on the buildings and the staff operating them we meet ashrae and mdh standards for air ventilation systems we've purchased 574 hepa machines standalone hepa machines been placing those in every classroom we purchased over 400 barriers we received over 2 000 face shields from the state of minnesota including on top of that cloth masks that we distributed we put hand sanitizer in every single classroom and we and we put them at the main entrances when you come into the building but we still encourage or highly encourage hand washing with soap because you can't beat that we've um authorized custodial overtime for additional cleaning for both elementary and secondary buildings and that overtimes direction is given by the head engineer at the building so that they can determine what needs to get cleaned and how to get cleaned beyond the regular hours of the custodians and then we use a few different products we use a disinfectant that the custodians used and are trained to use and then we put a green product green certified product that's hydrogen peroxide based in every classroom for as a cleaner so that the staff can clean surfaces regularly so those those are just a few of them the layers that we talked about um that we've been working and seem to have been working well with staff so i don't know if you had questions or that was my pretty short list of items we've been adding since uh since this and dammit started thanks eric just had a quick question when do you think you'll have all the help hepa filters in for teachers i was uh i don't have a firm delivery date for the secondary um i was told that they were going to ship them on this friday okay and if that's the case um if we're lucky and they don't hit a storm or anything i'm hoping we'll get them by the the following friday they're being shipped directly directly to each site so once they arrive it's a matter of a couple hours and they're placed in the classrooms oh and many of them there's there are several in secondary buildings because we were placing them based on requests so this will just fill out the building thank you any other questions for eric okay um another uh piece of our presentation uh as we look at the at the edina public schools in the system is to talk about uh the mental health and how we're um how we're going to begin to address that and begin to learn more about that so i'm going to ask jeff to give some background um in that so mr jarginson all right thank you superintendent schultz for dear ellenberg steam board members so just pleased to be with you tonight and be able to just uh comment a little bit about what we're doing what we're planning on doing around student mental health and about our system wellness overall i wanted to let you know that uh we've been prepping for this for some time but we've also been in action uh during this time period as the school year has gone on we have been following a road map that has been laid out by by castle which is a collaborative for academic social and emotional learning which is a recommended program both from the cdc and from minnesota department of education as we try to as we try to really focus our efforts on again student wellness and environmental wellness within our schools so with that we have we've always maintained a full continuum of services uh for mental health especially at our tier two and tier three levels that tier two is when something more is needed from our students outside the classroom and tier three when we need to refer on to additional services which is our co-located mental health programs we've been focusing a lot of our efforts on really trying to classroom a little bit more and that's what the roadmap is designed to do is try to work from the bottom up uh which is trying to support our teachers and their support of our students whether that was in person or whether that be virtual so we worked to on that on that process and we're continuing to refine those processes as we're going through uh this year and as students are returning we're really putting a high emphasis on that again that first step that we take a look at is really taking time to cultivate and deepen those relationships to build partnerships and to to plan for uh things like social emotional learning but also student wellness but it's about relationship we recognize that uh the second is is really focusing in on again you know giving the teachers the the tools that they need in order to be effective in their practices uh third is to create that safe supportive and equitable learning environment uh and that's when we're more in person i've got to tell you that there's so much you can do virtually but when we start coming more in person that's when we really start to focusing more on that safe uh and supportive and equitable learning environment and so that's that's a step again that we're taking by equipping teachers our primary people that are working on the equipping are our social workers our psychologists our counselors and also our deans and assistant principals out at the sites now we're coming up to a point in this road map that we've been following which is really the fourth step which is to utilize data as an opportunity to share uh and empower and deepen relationships and continuously improve and support our model i think we've got good things going we've got great community relationships we're working with the ed fund on a number of mental health initiatives right now we've got the heal together campaign going on uh the ed fund has been working on the mental health minutes which is really focusing in on our providers at each of the sites to just really assure students that we're here for you and then we're going to take care of you and they're also working on development of a video that will be hopefully shared out at the schools that that will really again focus on the fact that we're here for our students that that there are resources available to our students and we really want to emphasize that they can help each other as well and so there's going to be a focused event on that coming up very soon but as i was talking about the data portion of being next in this in this lineup one of the things that we have really not had a really good snapshot of is is how our students are reporting how they're feeling their overall mental health their wellness how they're coping uh with the whole covent crisis whether that be in a virtual environment or whether that is now in the return we know that we've seen some spiking anxiety in some cases where students have been coming into school and some parents have chosen then to hold on bringing their students back because that anxiety level was perhaps too high in their students but we're also taking a look at other coping mechanisms and wanting to get a feel from the students first hand on how they're coping in the past we've had the minnesota student survey that has given us that snapshot from a very high level but it's only at specific grade levels and that only comes about every once every three years so we don't really have an opportunity to to really take a nice dipstick about where we're at right now with our students and that data is not necessarily something that we can say oh i know i can track that back if the student is in crisis or they're they're they're expressing thoughts of suicidal ideation we really didn't have the ability or the or the nimble uh ability to to really track down and say who needs to support right now and how can we flow those services too to them so we're partnering and we've contracted with an agency called panorama panorama does uh does surveying of our student populations from grades three all the way through grade 12 12. we're excited about this opportunity because we will be surveying students on just their overall social emotional learning competency what that means is how well are they able to regulate their own emotions how well are they able to take care of themselves and then what is their overall level of wellness uh so it's so it is asking students very directly questions just about how are you coping uh what are your coping mechanisms and and and how well do you can you find resources when you need to find them another element of it is is really students talking to us about the support that they feel from their school so from the classroom or from the supports that are available to them within the school or even socially so this tool will help us get at a first-hand opinion of the students that we serve and it's it can be can be seen as a as a mental health screener in a lot of ways but largely is really talking about the skills that the students themselves feel they possess and it gives us a measure of how well they're doing and applying those skills so these are this is information that we can utilize obviously within the school district to help focus our efforts on the areas that really need the most attention it's easy for us when we're talking about mental health concerns and mental health issues to identify those students that are presenting in an overt fashion that means an externalizing condition where they're demonstrating a lot of behavioral difficulties whether it is crying in the classroom or whether it's defiant and oppositional behavior we can we can find those students that's easy but the largest percentage of students struggling with mental health concerns or even just wellness concerns are actually highly internalized conditions that do not manifest themselves easily as a matter of fact a student can go through the entire day and we would not see them impaired in any way shape and form and then they go home and they absolutely collapse or they have a private life even from their parents where they're not sharing that with anyone in their lives and they're just keeping it to themselves and it's it's a worm that can turn inside them until they get to the spot where it just becomes overwhelming and now there's a mental health crisis the students that we want to reach are those students that you know are are internalizing that are that are holding it together during the course of the day but that are we're really concerned about because they're not sharing that information with a lot of people so we're hoping that this survey again will help identify more students that may be struggling so that we can again focus our efforts on the needs that are being reported by the students themselves as opposed to utilizing the national or state norms that we've been forced to utilize because we haven't had our own internal data this will be the first step in helping us to identify how students are doing and give us the opportunity to intervene where there is crisis but also then develop capacity in the areas that our school needs us to develop capacity the most and so the emphasis here is is that you know this will this is a survey that we want to be able to provide to uh all students grades three through 12. it would be something that would be done in a digital fashion it would be something only takes about 15 minutes to do it both the elementary and the secondary schools parents can opt out of this if they choose to do that with with their with their student but at the same time giving us the opportunity to measure like this will give us data that will help us in again our formulation of the services that we need to provide yes in a tier three sense yes at a tier two sense but most of all it's going to inform teachers about what it is they need to do within their classrooms to make that classroom a warm welcoming safe and inviting environment and can help students to engage in their academic activities and to actually achieve at the level we know that our students are capable of so just wanted to make you aware that we're at that step and it's an exciting step for us we've been looking to to do this for some time we are now in that spot where we can move forward and it is part of the pathway that is recommended as we move through um this this castle playbook so to speak uh as as we're moving towards a better system that can meet the the social emotional needs of our students and at the next at another level our staff as well okay i think i'm going to uh consider you chair ellenberg i'm going to ask randy to i know the board's read oh i'm sorry um okay that's fine go ahead um jeff this is this is thrilling to hear um i believe ellen you and i maybe erica talked about this two years ago um adorama is an outstanding surveying organization and uh they have a variety of tests and not social emotional and so this is thrilling have we actually contracted with them yet or is this a okay so good the ink is dry when are we when are we going to be actually using it uh so we're taking a look at the survey being sent out to students the the two weeks prior to spring break okay so that and and the the marvelous part about this is that as soon as those surveys are done literally panorama turns that data around first next day uh so there's not this long computation process because they're an established entity uh they've they've done this with a number of school districts around the area that i've gotten great recommendations from uh and it gives us useful data at a very in a very um friendly teacher interface this is thrilling um it's on so many parents minds right now and so the timing on this is really good um now i can there be a test for the parents too to talk about what their child is doing is are the parents involved in all in this what kind of confidentiality with the parents is there if um and i suppose it's age sensitive to a third grader's reaction may be a little bit different from seniors can you talk about what kind of information the parents can get and if the parents can be surveyed themselves yeah so i mean obviously if we recognize that there's a concerning report uh from from the students and and there's there's indicators we we have we have certain uh questions on the test that would be considered more red flags uh that would be immediate attention necessary uh then then we would obviously be in communication with the families uh this is data that is collected on their students so they would have access to that data at some at some level uh and so we we just want to make sure though that's we're also wanting our students to participate fully in this and that's where we really want our parents to be engaged in this process is to encourage their students to take the test to be able to answer honestly these are questions that typically just don't get asked of people i mean one of the most powerful questions that is asked on on these tests both for third graders all the way through 12th grade is do you have one adult within the school system that you feel comfortable going to and talking to when you feel stressed out or you just don't feel in control that's what we aspire to do within our system and we can very quickly assume that we're all very approachable but that doesn't mean the student in their mind believes that they have anyone that they can trust with this information or go to with this information um so just asking that question alone is a great test on us as a district to be able to answer the question of whether or not we are reaching the population of students that we believe we're reaching we we believe again that we're doing a good job the test is in how students perceive uh and so we want to get those perceptions so that we can do better in the work that we do timing is great on this ellen yeah well um jeff i i really get excited when i hear you talk about this survey but i would i would differ from owen saying the timing is great on this because i really would have liked to see the results of this survey before tonight's meeting and the reason is and and and even earlier than this because it would have been very useful as a board member when we are making strategic plans to understand exactly what our students are experiencing and how they are on this very important social emotional level in the middle of a pandemic so yes definitely i am happy to hear we're doing it but it would have been very useful for me um to have that survey at this meeting as we're trying to figure out is there greater urgency or not so greater urgency to roll um to to get more students back into the classroom and it's um so for me um and i'm just going to say that i haven't requested survey information before and i have requested academic progress information before both all of these things are important for us to understand and um and be able to really assess the state of our district and effectively respond with appropriate learning models so and i understand we're going to be getting this type of information next month um but thank you uh for um the plan to test for this i i would want this to be more than just once a year in march no and so i i just what i'll say to that is when is the most important time to have the information it's always two weeks ago um and then that will be at any point in time right so again with the moving nature of of how we've worked this this school year we were looking for an opportune time to do this um and and so this this isn't the obviously the best time in retrospect we could have done it two weeks ago yes but we weren't ready at that point in time to roll this out and so we focused on some of those preliminary strategies so apologize but uh this is a first step that we're taking and as you said as now as we encourage this relationship with with panorama we see this being a measure that we can do on an annual basis great thank thank you jeff jay thanks i just wanted to make a quick comment jeff and um i wanted to make sure that it was mentioned too that even though this survey will help us identify more students you and your staff that the staff in our schools have already started identifying students that need that extra support and needed more time in front of teachers or intervention or whatever that is and that has been going on so i agree that with what you're saying is that more information is always good and you know we can always say we should have had it two weeks ago but i want to make sure board members and community members understand that there has been a great deal of work already in place to help identify these students and this is just an additional layer on top of it that's going to give us more information but it has not been us kind of going in blindly all the time so i just wanted to make sure you're recognized for that work because it's been really important to a lot of families i know yeah thank you for for bringing that up jamie we we have we have been doing work and we said a special education level 504 level at risk level and all of the sites have been engaged in this type of activity to get our our most vulnerable students back as quickly as possible and we didn't put a listing of you know characteristic signs and symptoms together saying you had to have an identified disability in order to be eligible for that early return or that that supported learning environment we i think every site has had that that opportunity to bring in students as as they saw the need arise so thank you julie and then i'll go back to owen um thanks jeff that was really insightful and it's a really just um smart next move for how we address student needs so i thank you for all your work and your team's work um just really quickly you know we had listened to a survey i know that it was just a grade level survey you talked about from the state last year and some of those learnings key learnings from that feedback that we had gotten are part of what went into the plan for this year covet or not covet right there were needs that were identified can you just talk for just to share a little bit of insight on that and how you were able to use that data to kind of address student needs over the last year up to where we are right now yeah so so once again when we we took a look at at the the data that came in from the the state department and then even our own internal test we had we largely asked the same questions so that we could define whether or not we were at a state average or whether we were at a dyna average right and so the state average that we were seeing anywhere from 40 to 50 percent of households reporting increased stress and concerns about child mental health and then we took our survey in in edina and we saw the numbers actually tick up a little bit with the number of parents reporting concerns about their children's mental health so what that did for us is obviously solidified our process and saying we needed to do something within our system to ensure that we're addressing the social emotional mental health needs and wellness needs of our students and so that's that was a great impetus it was it was uh it was that catalyst that pushed us forward into that next step of saying we need to focus some stats on professional development in this area we need to organize our tier 2 providers our psychologists and our social workers counselors and the like and we also enhance our relationship with our outside providers both our chemical dependency provider and with our extended service provider in fraser uh so that was uh that was a common commitment that we made across the board this is that we needed to be affecting change at all levels so that we could reach those students that parents were identifying that would be in need but it also then begged the question and this is where how that evolution took place is it begged the question that parent perception is is valid it's it's an amazingly valid tool because they're seeing some of those overt symptoms that that students are showing at home and sometimes they're seeing even those more internalizing the students withdraw as students are more quiet and they're not talkative or they're not wanting to socialize those are the softer signs but we weren't getting those things firsthand but we had we did start hearing you know anecdotally as our as our tier two providers were reaching out to students that were maybe less engaged and so forth we've started finding out more and more of those students we're struggling with those internalizing conditions those quiet types of concerns that can lead to to larger mental health concerns and so that's what again the next catalyst there was to push us forward towards saying we really need the student survey information so that we can now again take that next step and actually develop a continuum of service that is unique to edina and edina's students what they're expressing is what we need to serve rather than a generic form that really is trying to aim at casting the net and hoping you catch those that are that are having concerns the survey doesn't necessarily isn't necessarily going to allow us to catch all students but the survey is going to be able to allow us to catch more students in terms of and give us an idea of what students are reporting as their greatest needs so that's the evolution great no that's great it's great work it's it's intentional it is aligns with the strategic plan and i think the partnership with the ed fund has been just an incredible source for community members to get involved and to be part of this so um part of the solution so thank you thanks for all your work jeff that was a that was a helpful explanation thank you to jump in i guess i'm next uh jenny i'm really glad you brought up your point because we already do have many mechanisms in place to do these sorts of tests this is more granular and it's more topical so um so very good point and jeff you're going to be giving us an update in the in a month is that what you understanding would you also be able to give us an update on the response mechanism you find that there's a student who is not presenting is having any problems but lo and behold we find out that this student has significant emotional issues i'd be very interested i think most of us would in tracing uh how you're how you'll be handling that um so and then um this may not be exactly in your domain but um it may be more of a randy question but it i would be interested if we could have a voluntary survey of parents on what they perceive to be their child's learning loss um the the students may not be very good at self-reporting on that i can see that in my own household and the parents have an insight you talked about the overt presentation that that parents can pick up that the kids can't um is there any discussion about something regarding the parents and putting them into the feedback mechanism here so the only example that i really have of that uh right now owen is that you know in special education our teams are going through that engaging the parents and that in that process and that dialogue about any concerns that come up with with learning loss that's not something we're doing broadly as there's there's definitely been a loss of traditional learning environments but not necessarily learning our students have continued to learn and i think that's something that that everyone would would continue to emphasize have they learned in the same way and have they learned exactly the same things probably not but we we have we have supplemented that with some some marvelous life experience too so so maybe that's a point for a different discussion but i'm hearing reports of you know kids are feeling like dunces and uh they feel like they're the deviant and they're the imposter and uh they're not picking things up very well and it's more now with with the current situation so that will be picked up a bit in the survey as well with some of the questions that we're serving about how they feel about themselves at this point in time okay okay great thank you ellen did you have another question yeah just a quick one um and this is to clarify for people that were reading the um the background material for today and it mentions tier one and tier two students coming back on march 8th and um and i'm just wondering um if you could in our discussion here you were using different tiers and i'm just wondering if you could um define what is what is being talked about in this proposal that's out online the tier one tier two and then there's an there's also some some something called a go yeah so so what i can what i can tell you is that doesn't really bear a lot of resemblance to the tears that i was i was referring to and so that will be i think discussed more in the plan that will that will come up here in just a little bit so i will defer uh to that the tiers that i was talking about is our tier level of service not our tiered level of return and so the the tier level of service is saying we you know that all of our students are entitled to tier one which is access to our general education classroom and the environment that they're in tier 2 is available to another section of students another slice of students so they would get both tier 1 and tier 2 as those students need a little bit more support or additional supports from the outside of the classroom and tier 3 students are those students that need more individualized support again they have access to everything along that continuum but the tiers just represent levels of service available to specific students and they don't and and and so the 200 students mentioned in here are not are not the same students that you're talking about so we we have so the some of the tiered students that came back early so we we didn't bring in our tier three students uh initially right away a lot of our tier two students also came in within the system and now the the larger return is really talking more about the rest of our students coming back in those that would require largely just the general education access so uh and then that's largely in-person service they've been receiving tier one services in a virtual environment they would now be receiving tier one services in the in-person environment i think we're mixing i think we're mixing two things up here i think we are and if we're going to get to this later i'll i'll let them explain um who they they're proposing to to roll back in what phase thank you thank you thank you jeff okay um question oh question or is your all right okay thanks so i'm gonna turn it over to uh randy um for for his comments randy i think uh the board's read the report and it's out there so we can um give a uh um you know a brief presentation and then um so we get time for the board to ask questions of our our students and our teachers so but i know you had some things because i know we're in the midst of this planning and still planning for it so randy take it from there thank you uh chair ellenberg superintendent schultz our board members community members staff and students who are here this evening we so appreciate your time and have an opportunity to discuss this a little further in a few minutes i'll turn it over to andy shawn and tim our secondary principals who have some teachers and some students who com perspective on what a typical week looks like for them both in the hybrid and as we're anticipating this return for more in person time of course you know the report has a rationale in their current case rate data mitigation strategies um we will be we are planning to ask you know to kind of follow up on some of the questions that were just asked of jeff we are planning to ask stakeholders to provide some feedback through our winter check-in survey which was similar to what we did in the fall and that would include staff and families and students and it's a variety of questions but one of those is around academic progress too to your point on we we know in the report we had some changes in social distancing guidelines from mdh the learning plan is the proposal from administration and we have these four important dates february 16th of course our students have just come back into the hybrid model about a week ago and then the eighth the go students are sometimes referred to as our growth and opportunity students it's more of an internal term but what we have basically done is tried to prioritize some of the academic needs that students have we're facing some more in-person time uh for those prioritized students and uh both andy and tim and sean will be able to speak to that uh march 15th of course phasing in great six nine twenty second phasing in grade seven eight ten and eleven so what's the rationale for the phase well we we still have some remaining challenges and tasks to do and to complete we know that vaccination for staff is not complete and in some cases it's not even started we know that we still have some busing challenges that we're trying to work through with our high school students we have about five buses as of last friday that are over our legal capacity and so we're trying to resolve that working with david white we of course have the installation of the hepa filters to complete scheduling organizing of lunches balancing some classrooms and adapting students schedules to make sure that we're able to balance students out at a minimum of the three feet of social distancing we know that we had some high school and secondary custodial staff that have been supporting the elementary model and we'll have to move them back to secondary and so we'll have to rework some of the cleaning schedules a bit as many have mentioned we are unaware of the impact of the variants because we can't foresee the future on this but that's just something for us to continue to monitor and consider and so what we really put together in this phase-in approach is a ramp up to do this in a way that doesn't overwhelm our system doesn't overwhelm our health professionals doesn't overwhelm our ability to continue to deliver the services day in and day out we'll ask in a few minutes for our teachers and our into the structure of that week we do have a proposal to continue this at home learning day we would argue that we have been doing school all year sometimes we do it at school sometimes we do it at home just the location varies but learning has been the constant and our goal for learning is the constant some of the rationale for that at home learning day is just the necessary preparation time that we've asked our teachers to do to prepare to teach in a multi-mode delivery model they're teaching kids in front of them and kids who are online at the same time and they're continuing to do that for the first time as they continue to work through this one year of curriculum experience doing it this way we asked a lot of our staff to increase the percent of time um we're asking i'm sorry we're asking a lot of our staff in terms of the uh percent of time for in-person services and this is this is a big load this is a big lift we are asking our staff to provide you know valuable intervention and support time during that time on those wednesdays that's something that occurs we also ask teachers to collaborate across the district because we know when we pull all of our brains together we're going to be better for kids than if we're working in silos or working independently so that's a cultural element that we're continuing to grow we do feel this is pretty consistent with the districts that we've checked in with and how they're handling and how they're problem solving this and this is just one really simple measure but one of the things i looked at with our team in the enrollment office is just looking at you know how how productive are students on these days and that's a hard thing to measure but what we did is we looked at schoology as an example and we looked at their schoology interactions and we looked at you know what does that look like when students are in schoology and they are they are creating content that they're creating work so what i'm going to show you is just a quick graphic of what that looks like across the week and please give me an audible okay that you're able to see that because i can't see you now okay okay thank you so what we did is we looked at data from september all the way through january and we looked at schoology interactions so this is about when kids are creating content in schoology and when they're creating that content and there's really four different time zones of when they would be creating content so work being done before school is 5 a.m to 8 a.m work being done during school is 8 a.m to 4 p.m work being done after school in the upper right is 4 to 10 p.m and then work being done late night is to 5 a.m yes we do have students that are working anywhere from 11 00 pm to 5 a.m which gets to some of our social emotional elements so if we look at work being done before school the question is how do the different days of the week compare and when kids are creating content in schoology and this dark blue is monday but when we look at the rest of the days they're pretty evenly distributed in terms of students working before school and certainly our wednesday looks like the other days and before school work if we look at during school again monday is the heavy hitter this one is tuesday and wednesday and thursday and so we see that there is a comparable pattern during school days whether it is tuesday or wednesday or thursday across those days for the amount of content students are producing and generating in schoology when we look at work being done after school again wednesdays look very similar to these other days this light light yellow is saturday so of course we hope that you know things dip down on saturday and then we look at work being done late night and we see again these these days look very similar so one small metric but one way of looking at this from uh from a productivity standpoint is to look at these systems and look at what kids are doing and look at where their interactions and how that compares and how those days look now certainly if that interaction was very very small and very very low on wednesday that would be more concerning we would dig deeper into that but what we're seeing is that wednesdays look very similar to the other days again that's only one metric one piece of data not something in the report something that we just pulled together today but i thought it was worthwhile to share with you this evening as part of the conversation in terms of some future data to share we do want to get into the academic progress conversation in march with the board we'll be also talking about summer plans also some feedback and data from our stakeholders about plans for eva in particular elementary moving forward and then as jeff mentioned the board getting an opportunity to look at that sel data from the panorama survey so at this point i'm going to turn it over to our principles to maybe introduce our teachers and the students and could you speak a little bit to the structure of the the experience of the week what that looks like for you and what that feels like for you as you're preparing for in-person learning as well and how you've leveraged or used wednesdays and other days in terms of collaboration etc so maybe we can first turn it over to southview and tim anderson and then we'll go to valley view and then to the high school so tim well thanks dr schmazel uh chair ellenberg board members superintendent schultz community members and special guests i want to open with a special thanks to our teacher leaders and student leaders who are investing in our own capacity building tonight as we consider what might be best and what are the best ways to proceed by sharing their voice so i'd like to welcome southview students maisie and as elizabeth to unmute and join us and i'd ask that they'd introduce themselves and share their grade level and then share a little bit about what uh their week is like and how they've been using their time as learners in a pandemic hi i'm maisie and i'm in eighth grade um a little bit about my week i'm a hybrid student so i am in the building on thursdays and fridays um i know a big topic is what to do with wednesdays and how we're going to use those moving forward looking at the schoology charts and also from my own personal experience i find them really beneficial to help me get missing work done because during this time it's a lot harder to be productive especially when i'm at home and i find that that extra day is extremely helpful and um yeah crazy thanks and um as you think about the return to potentially four days a week how do you um kind of envision how what will change for you what will stay the same for you as a learner um i'm really looking forward to going back to four days a week um i think it'll help me stay focused more during the school day and um i think most changes will be positive for me personally um however i can't really speak um to this personally but i know a lot of eva students um like elizabeth have concerns about um feeling included in the classroom um and i know a lot of teachers are stressed about balancing those two groups when they're in school but yeah okay thanks thank you very much uh elizabeth could you share a little bit about what your your experience as a as an eva and uh potentially in-person learner uh have been and what you see as potential in them in the uh decisions the board has to make up yeah um yeah so hi my name is elizabeth teske i am a seventh grader at svms and uh i have been eva since september of this year so i have not gone to school since march um and i personally i think wednesdays are a really beneficial change to our year when i was in sixth grade i sort of laughed a bit when we heard we had fridays off because i did not understand why uh but now on wednesdays i completely understand it on b days tuesdays and fridays i have enriched science i have enriched social studies and enriched la so i have a whole bunch of homework every night but i also do all my activities and when i'm in school i have a lot more focus because i'm in person and i have all this time to do things but at home wednesdays give me that time that i miss um but something that aren't so great is we have changed this schedule a lot at the beginning of the year eva kids just went to uh advisory in the morning and then that was it two weeks in we had google meets uh that were about 10 minutes to an hour long and from a student perspective we got almost nothing done um then the schedule changed again we went to two flexes every uh sorry two flexes every day which was very very helpful for me i got to see multiple teachers and i got just the opportunity to get the help that i needed and then we changed again and now eva kids don't even have flex anymore and i am a kid that tries to be organized and i had to delete my schedule multiple times due to these changes um on the topic of changing to full time i think that it's great that we're taking these steps but i think that the hardest challenge of this year from my perspective has been the hybrid versus eva struggle so apart from being on a computer too many hours a day i have some classes especially at the beginning of the year where we were this computer in a corner we weren't really talked to by the teacher we were just sort of there and it makes sense why wouldn't you want to talk to the people in person in the room but i think that with all the hybrid kids being giddy to go to school again the eva kids are still stuck in the corner we're forced to choose between being social with people and being safe which is not a fun choice to make when you're an eva kid so just to wrap things up um first of all the wednesday structure is super helpful it's great but we don't need it when we go back in person because we have the time and the flexes in school to get things done um secondly kids need consistency in their life all the change is really really hard for me and i know that as a kid i can't change the kovid 19 protocol but we have people on this google meet who can just give a little bit of consistency to students and then finally when considering full-time schooling in late march the eva kids need to be in the factory sorry need to be a factor in the decision just as much as the hybrid kids please don't leave their voices unheard uh thank you very much school bird for your service and also for the opportunity to share my voice thanks so much uh maisie and elizabeth and i'd like to invite your leaders from south view mart oberli and sarah mazirco to introduce themselves and share a little bit about their week and how they uh envision tackling the the tasks before us so welcome thank you dr anderson yes um my name is mara oberle and i'm here with my colleague sarah and we are both seventh grade math teachers and we appreciate the opportunity to share this evening while this year has been a lot edina teachers still care about all learners and are working very hard right now to serve them wednesdays afford me the time i need to be the type of teacher i want to be and the type of teacher all learners deserve this time is critical for three main reasons teacher collaboration student support and the success of for eva learners first teachers are using this time to collaborate and design we are working to balance two cohorts of learners design or alter curriculum for both cohorts and handle all the logistics that come with that such as transferring traditional hands-on manipulatives into a digital model for our at-home learners 93 percent of south view teachers say they use this time to collaborate as a plc and grade level team responding to student needs and designing interventions and extensions 92 percent teachers say that they would not be able to sustain their current workload without wednesday time and either they would need to put in even more time outside of the school day or some of their work would would need to be not completed keeping wednesdays asynchronous ensures quality instruction and learning here are some quotes from southview teachers my lessons would diminish in quality so i would have to spend more in class time reviewing if we took away wednesdays wednesdays give me more time to help students as well which keeps them caught up and gives them a chance to review the quality and pace of synchronous lessons will decline if the current wednesday schedule does not remain not all lessons or parts of lessons need to be synchronous careful planning for wednesdays does not mean a reduction of learning time having more content or synchronous time will not equate to higher quality learning as long as teachers are teaching to multiple modes of learners i've also worked this year on our advisory task force and planning for school-wide implementation of advisory time that gives students voice value and connection this work was highlighted during our recent meeting or your recent meeting i know others have areas of focus as well lt work new district-wide science standards and implementation among others that they are working on during this time work that makes our school great and i'm sarah majorco at southview uh oh sarah you got muted i wanted to pop in with the student support what i wanted to share was wednesdays also offer time to support students while maintaining a learning day for all learners i'm able to target particular needs students seek support enrichment or connection through wednesday flex times a time that's absolutely essential because more students than ever are needing support in these learning models learners complete assessments and reassessments they seek and respond to feedback this is one of our pathways one thing that we're proud of at southview and a way that students are able to choose a pathway that works for them each advisor has been able to check in with each learner weekly during extended academic check-ins to help students plan and organize their classes and work and students are able to respect family time outside of the school day since the extra time is built into wednesday just to learn practice participate in sports and have family time and really keeping that protected as well as any appointments that they might need to go to right i know a number of students with braces this also creates an experience for all learners not just eva learners so struggling learners and families do not miss synchronous instruction and get even farther behind as student support services counselors and social workers are setting up meetings at times when students and teachers aren't missing class excellent thank you dr smazel and finally i believe wednesday is create a structure to ensure the support necessary to give eva students an equitable education wednesdays will be even more crucial than they already are because with managing a full in-person classroom eva students will have less opportunity for one-on-one support during class i envision using wednesdays to connect with eva students and support them to increase their mastery level with content we want to close by sharing this message from one of our colleagues wednesdays have been extremely beneficial to making a better academic and social experience for my students i was initially very hesitant at the idea of losing a day of instruction what i have found through though is that i have been able to make larger gains in social emotional connections and because of wednesdays by having more time to get to know all of my learners i have been better at i've been better at meeting them where they are at and pushing them more to grow as learners thank you for hearing our perspective thank you team south view so appreciate your participation tonight how about we turn over to sean dudley and the team at valley view you're muted sean there how about that uh chair allen berg school board members superintendent schultz dr schmazel valley view staff students all staff and students and community members thank you for the opportunity to share this evening we have um five people from valley view here to share this evening and we will start with our students who have been super patient and hanging in there we checked in a little bit ago and so i'd like to introduce nola and heli they are from mr molex advisory and this advisory is a student leadership team advisory our equity team advisory and so i would invite them to share their experiences and um i will just say anola why don't you start thank you okay hi everybody um i'm noah i am a hybrid student a through k and i'm in eighth grade i'm really happy to be sharing my opinion and review on this because it means a lot to be speaking for a lot of value so thank you for the opportunity um so my daily sort of um when i'm in school i do feel that i am more connected to um the teachers and uh friends it is kind of hard though still to socialize with them because we are six feet away and so sometimes it feels a little awkward you know kind of talking six feet apart from each other so sometimes most of the time actually we um there's it's very quiet because people are too nervous to talk so if that's maybe the lack of why we're not seeing a lot of um socializing it's probably because of that distance also um when i am not in school and i am online uh i one of the benefits is um the schedule that i have in being able to once i am done with that meet i can get my work done um i really have to give credit to um miss anderson science teacher she has done a really great job managing um like the labs and everything that she has done for the class and i just she's one of my favorite teachers and she's handled hybrid and 88 really well i'm not going to keep talking for too long because i know helly really wants to talk but for wednesdays i do feel that they are necessary i've talked to teachers and they've actually told me that that's how they reach out to eva students um i like them because when i am in hybrid or i'm in eva i feel calmer knowing that i have wednesday to get all that work done and i know that kids that do sports especially um dance kids i have got friends that do dance and they have extremely long practices so for them to be in school and then right after that go to a sport it can be a lot so wednesdays are really beneficial thanks willa hi helly do you have something to add i know you do hi um i'm a heli i am in seventh grade and i am currently doing the learning model hybrid um so on a days and b days um i sorry i go to school um in person on monday and tuesday and i obviously the asynchronous wednesday and then thursday friday i am hype online um so on a days and b days um i mostly on obviously monday and tuesday i get work done in school um but i don't really have time after school to do my homework for that day because i'm really tired after walking around the school and just doing a bunch of work um it's really sometimes it gets stressful because there's a lot of work to do um and as a kid i have other things to do too i have activities i have clubs i have family friends and i want to get to those two and when i get home from school having to do homework right away is really overwhelming because i feel like it's just another thing to do um so when we get to wednesdays it's really nice to just take an like a good solid break and have the whole day to do homework um and just take a mental break um most of my tests are on thursdays and fridays so that wednesday is really nice to study for the tests because um if if the wednesday was an actual like a school day which where we had would have to uh join meets and stuff we wouldn't really have or i wouldn't feel that i have a good solid time to study and understand what i'm going to be being tested on um and studying really does help me succeed in tests i mean kind of self-explanatory um but i really and i really appreciate the wednesdays because it's really nice mentally and just it's like a supporting day for me and i know a lot of other classmates who really enjoy the wednesdays because it's just nice to take a break and focus on um our home life obviously like i said homework studying and just ourselves for once um against something like in addition to what nola said um a lot of not me but i know a bunch of friends who have theater after school who have sports um dance a lot of other activities that take a long time which take away time for them to do homework and that affects them because then they won't obviously be able to do their homework which is not really good because sorry i mean that's just it they they want to be able to do their homework but they just can't because they don't have time and that wednesday really does give that them that solid day to actually finish up their homework and i know because i've had a lot of homework one day and that wednesday after i was done i felt so relieved i was so relieved like it felt so good so um in from my point of view and from a bunch of other students and teachers in my school um i really do appreciate the wednesdays and i think we should continue with the wednesdays thank you so much for letting me talk thanks to heli that was great um and thanks nola that was great too um we have three teachers with us all three of these teachers are content leads in a building we have um i'll ask them just a wave and then when i'm done introducing they can just dive in so we have tim ron hobdy tim is our science content lead we have margaret smith and margaret is our language arts content lead language arts and reading and we have jennifer hurt who is our math content lead and um so tim is also a valley view parent of an eva student so i'm just going to give them that little plug there so we'll let them talk about their their experience their week and um what wednesdays are like for them as well thanks hey thanks sean um and hey students way to go i can't imagine doing what you just did in front of a screen full of adults like that at your age my gosh i would have been running for the for the hills so it's tough following you but nice work um i'm tim ronabi i teach sixth grade science and i have we we have a fifth grade daughter at creek valley who does hybrid and we have a seventh grade son at valley view who does eva so i have um we're involved with everything if you want to email me any questions about perspective i'm totally happy to share uh and i just the thing for me this year i taught for 24 years and uh just a single like a lesson so how i design and plan and execute a lesson it um i'm a perfectionist i i want all the details as they need to be and so setting up these lessons it's like i plan a lesson for me i'm experienced i also plan the lesson as though a substitute teacher who's never subbed before or ever taught is going to teach my lesson so that anyone from any place can access it find what they need and learn some content and have fun all of that that's that's how i approach a lesson and i love it i'm not complaining at all it's great that it's this has brought a whole new skill set out of me um this experience and and that's awesome and it takes it takes hours and that is the truth it takes me so long to plan uh a lesson and to make it good the way i want it done to have kids say hey thank you i was i found everything it was organized i liked it i learned something um and so for me the bit that that's uh the the extra time on wednesdays is is huge it is my catch-up time it is my connect with kids time i connect with parents on wednesdays i have phone calls with parents i have google meets with parents i harass kids for missing work um i congratulate kids for awesome work and it's it's awesome like they'll like that stuff randy was showing us i can just see the kids on their schoology account looking at their science notebook and even it's a great chance for me to say hey this is awesome way to go and i i don't do that in person like i should i found that easier to do in a kid's notebook virtually and to have a kid say thanks with five exclamation points and that's awesome um or to say like uh you know somebody who's not getting all their work in if if i can't connect with them by a schoology or a meat or something i call their parents and their parents have been amazing um and i ca i do that on wednesdays and it's uh it's so i find creative ways to use that time and we we're on i'm on an equity committee we meet on wednesdays i'm on a grading committee we meet on wednesdays um i text so you know while this is going on i text my uh my partner teacher our phones are blowing up with text about what's going on with lessons and what we're gonna do and um and so that's kind of it's it's a it's my day to talk to parents kids and my peers and well an amplified people were piloting for science so i'm in touch with their rep all this stuff is happening um and if i can get one lesson planned and do all that it's a it's a huge huge win for everybody so um i'll i'll pause there i could i got too much i could say thanks tim margaret or jen all right hi i'm margaret smith i teach 8th grade language arts at valley view and when um shawn asked me if i could speak tonight i started by thinking about what wednesdays mean for my students and so my students value the time they have on wednesdays and when they started hearing about the schedule changes they were concerned and they started asking if they would be losing this day because it helps them manage the responsibilities of being a successful student in a rigorous district students use the time on wednesday to complete coursework connect with teachers for additional help and extend their learning in addition to the previous items wednesdays also provide additional time for eva students to connect with teachers and that is really important because we're in middle school teachers are tasked with multimodal teaching and before the pandemic began i know the high rate of stress secondary students were feeling they were staying up too late doing homework stressing about assignments and didn't have a lot of down time to take care of themselves this is not because they didn't want to take care of themselves it's because the system around them forced them to choose between sleep and assignment completion when the anxiety of covid19 has been added into this middle school teachers are seeing students unable to cope with the constant unknowns of the pandemic wednesdays are one way to protect students mental health in addition teachers and my colleagues also value wednesdays the combination of eva and hybrid students in one classroom has caused most teachers to rewrite every lesson assignment test and project to make things work for a multimodal classroom teachers are constantly prepping new lessons figuring out new technology and looking for ways to make this year better for students some of this work occurs during our prep time a lot of it happens on nights and weekends wednesdays allow teachers additional planning time for the challenges of multimodal teaching it also allows us time to work with smaller groups of students design creative lessons collaborate with other staff members make screencasts attend ieps and iep and 504 meetings and all of the other things that we need to accomplish during the week and so i just hope that you hear from all of these others the students and other teachers who spoke that we value wednesdays for a variety of reasons and see them as an essential part of this school year thank you for your time thanks margaret hi jen hello well i just heard so many great things from all of our colleagues here so i am jennifer hurt i teach math that's valley view and sixth grade math and uh i just celebrated my 25th year in edina public schools i'm on in year number 26 and never in my 25 years of teaching here would i have ever guessed i would be teaching in a pandemic so adds an extra layer of excitement we currently have those three different learning models and you know when i think back to 25 years ago we have the same interest in mind we want what's best for our students and so thinking in that perspective in that mindset um whatever it takes for us to deliver deliver um whether that is online for our students or it's in person or it's asynchronously we are using as much time as we possibly can we're using before school we're using evenings and we are using our weekends to plan and we are kind of exhausting ourselves so from a math teacher point of view what i thought i would do is kind of run through two different scenarios we have our regular school days or monday tuesday thursday friday and then also our wednesdays um which are our asynchronous days at valley view and south view and i believe at the high school on regular days we are now providing um in class and in-person instruction as well as eva so we're teaching um online as well as in person and it has definitely been a challenge not just for teachers but for students as well so providing support to both students in person as well as online we're using some synchronous time to try to connect both of those learners we are using a lot of coaching sessions really trying to coach kids up well we have them sitting in front of us during our blocked time we're offering still some personalized learning choices we like to give those kids voice and choice but that takes a lot of planning we offer lots of in-class activities um both synchronously and asynchronously and um we at valley view have for math taken on a thing called a learning log so the kids are tracking all of their learning and all of their work and i currently have 132 learning logs that i give feedback on um every other day so over the course of two days i look at 132 different learning logs and work and i give feedback on those i know many teachers have much more than that even in addition to our regular school days we extend our office hours we are sending office hours before school and some teachers are offering office hours after school we're conferencing with parents both on the phone and google meets and we are trying to be as available as possible for students outside of our school hours so i know that many teachers are checking their email well into the wee hours at night i checked my email i told my students i'm getting kind of old so eight o'clock is kind of my bedtime uh and i shut down a little bit more and i try to relax a little but um i know that teachers are well above and beyond eight o'clock at night still checking emails at night on weekends because we know that that's when students are not only doing homework but that's when they get stuck and they need us so we want to be there for students because ultimately we want to help kids whenever we can on wednesdays my wednesdays sometimes are busier than my regular days there are times when we are using all of our time to extend out office hours for our hybrid and our eba students it's a time to connect with them not only do we have a small time of advisory time to connect with them it also allows us some targeted intervention time for students who are struggling or students that perhaps don't receive those additional services like our math plus or maybe they have iep services we offer retakes and we have our makeup tests of which that time used to come out of school time kids don't have to use that school time anymore they're using that wednesday to do those retakes without those makeup tests i'm updating schoology for students we're conferencing with students and parents we're meeting with our plc and our job-alikes to plan and create things like screencasts and practice activities giving kids more voice and choice and of course our pearson which is our new adopted curriculum typically teachers are working a 10 to 12 hour day or even more in addition to weekends um if we lose our wednesday time i think it's safe to say that it's not a guarantee that we can continue with the same level of online and instruction or in-person instruction for our students we really want to this is what we're here for we're here for our students and we know that our common goal is what's best for our students students unanimously love these asynchronous wednesdays they're productive they catch up they work ahead they attend enrichment sessions that we offer and they're able to meet teachers for extra help so uh there it is thank you so much for listening we truly appreciate all of your eyes and ears on us today thanks jen tim and margaret for this that's awesome thanks everyone thanks sahelly and nola dr smazel thank you valley view team so awesome to have your voices in the space and with that we'll turn it over to the high school and andy b evening everyone uh cherry allenberg superintendent schultz members of the board community thanks for being here and listening um i just one thing as i listen here tonight to clarify uh when you think about wednesdays i just want to put out there it is it is not a completely asynchronous day um so it is synchronous for many of our students and asynchronous for some and it depends on the day so i think it's helpful to clarify how often um our teachers are interfacing with kids on wednesday all day you know combination of of time meeting with students and time meeting with their colleagues but with that um i want to do some introductions i have some student leaders here and some teacher leaders that are here i have connor hilalea he is a junior hybrid student and i have malika srinivas she's a senior and she is an eva student you want to give away molecules to you and then i have carrie disher she is an english teacher and the area lead of the english department and i have kim caster who is a french teacher and the area leader of world language so i guess let's just start and hear from students again kind of in the same format about how things are going your thoughts about the the ramp up of more students back to school and other topics like flex wednesday and so on um let's start with connor he's a hybrid student so let's go hi everybody uh my name is connor as mr beaton said i'm a junior at edina high school and i think all of the students and teachers before me have really nailed home the point and i i would rather not bore you so instead i'll just provide some anecdotal evidence of what this wednesday will serve for me this week um looking ahead to my homework tonight i well tomorrow i have an ap u.s history test an enriched biology test a meeting with mr beaton in student senate and an interview um so i essentially have five hours to prep for all of those if i'm gonna get roughly eight hours of sleep which if i'm honest it is optimistic um so if we look at what wednesday really provides for me it's an opportunity to catch up on all those things i mean obviously i can't be catching up on my studying an hour before i take the test but it gives me the opportunity and flexibility to rearrange this my schedule the way it fits for me because the way it's structured isn't isn't always perfect and i understand it's utilitarian it's been meant to benefit the most people and it usually does um but this wednesday really offers me the opportunity to make my schedule how i want it to be and gives me really the opportunity to make the best out of it um so i would i would stick with what almost everybody else has said that wednesdays are vital and taking them out would would be a mistake for both students and teachers um addressing coming back to school all together i'm a little bit uneasy about that as a hybrid student i'm i'm in the school two days a week which has been nice i'll be honest it's been nice to have that interaction and i have noticed that has helped with my mood and mental health overall which has been a big topic of this meeting but my biggest concern here is safety uh when when i think of some of my larger classes i have the yearbook in the morning and that's roughly 27 students just in hybrid a um and we have managed space with the cafeteria um but i can't really imagine feeling safe in a classroom with 20 plus students and three feet of distance and i really think the whole the whole distance is so feels so arbitrary that we can suddenly say that six feet is no longer necessary even though that's what we've been preaching this entire time um so beyond that i just i just feel for the safety of my teachers and i know mrs caster and mrs disher can probably address this more than i can as a student um but overall i'm kind of uneasy about bringing everyone back i'd like to just thank everybody for bringing us in the more you value student and teacher voices i think the better off we are as a community so thank you all thanks connor i really appreciate it moleka your thoughts hello everybody i'm monica schrunovas and i'm a senior um so last semester first semester i was a hybrid student um but then i switched to eva this semester um so regarding the wednesdays especially just in high school a lot of students who pick eva are generally more motivated and self-motivated to do their own work so having those wednesdays is really nice because although you know you might not have to turn something in as an attendance based assignment those students have the time to check in with teachers as well as get their work done on their own time which is a freedom that you know people in high school get once they get there you know you have work but then you also know what you need to get done so that wednesday really helps just echoing what everyone said about wednesday it's a really really good thing to keep um and then something that i'm actually feel really really strongly about is the addition to more students into the building um kind of going off connor's sentiments i'm a little more than uneasy i am very against it um considering we had mr nicholas kelly here earlier um who was clearly very very well read up on these things he mentioned how teachers are going to be completely vaccinated um by mid-april um and right now teachers are kind of going through lotteries based on like oh like who's going to get the vaccine and i think on the state of terms where that's the way teachers are getting vaccinated i don't know if we should be opening up school and especially as a senior i've gone through middle school and pretty much all of high school with the same academic rigor as like a normal pre-pandemic life and then senior year was kind of supposed to be the more ceremonial term you know we'd have pep fest we'd have prom we'd have graduation and those things are incredibly important to me and i think in addition to safety i think that's something we should prioritize and like the epidemiologist said we should take it slow and steady rather than push it and i think it's either you know short-term relief and mental health benefits or more of a long-term solution in the end if we just take it more steadily and we can have you know possibility of a graduation and then next year being a time where we don't have to worry about coming back to online we can just have it be a more constant way of life so in terms of coming back to school i really think we should listen to the signs um and you know take it slow um and then yeah just that's it thank you so much for listening to the voice i'm really glad that students could be here to provide their input appreciate it monica thank you uh kim do you want to share a few thoughts from your world as a world language teacher hi everybody um yes i'm happy to do that i'm excited to be here i am a french teacher i teach both french immersion students and students that picked up french in sixth grade and um there's been a lot of conversation in the world language department so a couple of things i would want you to know is that we as an elective are often on multiple teams so i'll give you kind of some student perspective and some um obviously teacher perspective but the collaborative teaming experience is happening for many of us in two or three different classes because of that's how that's how we teach the other thing is that the chinese teacher the latin teacher the asl teacher have each four or five different preps that they have to have ready on schoology and that the the tedium of all of the clicking of schoology really slows down the process the second thing that i think is universal for both students and teachers is that we because we're so driven by the minnesota bilingual seal and we need to have proficient students in speaking and listening reading and writing we've done average three to four google meets a week during distance learning and also during hybrid so in some ways a wednesday is a break for kids from having to be in our class from period a from 11 o'clock to 11 45 and they can kind of catch up and do what they would like to either making a recording or doing a reading or something and i think that's really important also from a teacher perspective because um actually a science colleague commented to me today that because we're doing so many meets and that's important because we want to keep the eva kids and the hybrid kids at the same spot it doesn't allow us a sneak and what i mean by that is i teach a french cinema class and in the good old days the kids in the room would be watching the movie and i could be grading something in paper or at my computer while they're watching and still be able to stop the movie and have discussion in between and because we're so focused on what's happening during the day we can't answer emails from kids that do come in because they're doing asynchronous work we can't get to other things and so wednesday is also an opportunity for us to catch up on some of those things including giving feedback in a in a more timely manner the other thing i think that i would like to reiterate is the intervention plan that the high school put together is one of is is probably better than what we've had for collaborative what other days we have a dedicated hour minus from 12 30 to 1 30 where all world language kids could be invited during that hour and so they're mine i don't have to fight with an english teacher no offense carrie or the math teacher i don't have to get the first invitation to them and so we've been able to connect with our eva students our struggling learners our kids that want reinforcement because everybody's aware there's one dedicated hour on wednesday that we can have that conversation whether it's five minutes or 45 minutes and so the wednesday is really pivotal for us in world language just because it allows us to stay ahead of the game and to connect with all learners and and i think that the learners also need that break as conor said that allow them to do homework later than 8 30 in the morning because that's when i've declared the senior class to be in the google meet thank you thanks kim i appreciate it scary you want to add anything on from your perspective i do hi everyone i'm keri disher i am an english teacher at edina high school i am also the parent of an eighth grader at valley view middle school who will be a hybrid student as soon as his hockey team gets out of quarantine in a couple of days so we are getting there and um it has been an interesting year to say the very very least um i would say this has probably been one of the more challenging years of my career on the days that we are instructing students both in person and online it's kind of like threading a needle to find the balance of giving the attention of the students who are immediately in front of you and also giving attention to eva students who are on your computer and i feel like no matter what i do i should be giving more attention to the other group and so i can only imagine what that is going to be like when a higher percentage of students is sitting in front of me and i am still constantly reminding myself to come back to those eva students and make sure that they feel included and make sure that they feel loved and make sure that they feel as though they are supported in my class um english teachers of course have a ton of discussion-based classes and we have writing-based classes and so we do a ton of writing conferences um our flex time on wednesday is you know about an hour in length i looked through what our teachers are offering to students this week and we are ranging from meeting with three kids for a very targeted intervention or enrichment opportunity all the way up to one teacher meeting with over 50 kids during her flex time this week to make sure that students are caught up and making sure and so that's the type of flex opportunity that we offer to students every single week in addition we have teachers many teachers who are trying to find ways to meet with students even outside of that limited time block um we are you know meeting with t with students during lunches because when we have been in distance learning lunch has been kind of a squidgier time period where you can kind of grab it when you need to if you can meet with kids that's awesome and i think you know as we meet with our collaborative teams on wednesdays one of the things that continuously comes up and you can see this comment in the report that randy published that has the kind of all of the comments from our departments at the high school is that really everything we try to do is to benefit the student experience right when i am meeting with my colleagues it's to make sure that i am offering better curriculum and better activities and better things for my students when students have a chance to meet with me to talk about their mental health or to catch up it is in the service of making them making them feel supported and making sure that their mental health is up to speed and we know that that is a struggle this year i have talked to more students this year who are feeling anxious or who are feeling depressed or who are feeling isolated than i ever have before um i just really think that the time that we have been allotted on wednesdays is beneficial and we are using honestly i think every single minute to do something to make this that make our students feel as though this is an okay school year because in so many ways it has not been an okay school year it has been a school year that has been full and riddled with challenges and hurdles and obstacles and we just are trying to make it so that they are still getting the learning and the content that they need but at the same time that they have and feel that safety net of support beneath them from teachers who care so much about them i think that's all i have to say thank you very much thanks carrie i really appreciate it back to you dr schmazel thank you thank you then high school team so appreciate again your voices coming into the space and it's so important for us to hear from our teachers and hear from our students in anecdotal ways in addition to some of the other data we normally pull together with that i'll turn it back to our board chair uh ellenberg to um navigate any questions that the board has great thank you assistant superintendent smozel and thank you to principals dudley anderson beaton the teachers that were here tonight and especially the students who have more bravery than i do because i could not go on a board meeting and present and i promise my kids are doing their homework if any of their teachers are on the board meeting tonight so um before i turn it over to other board members for questions and comments um and i'm gonna save all my questions to the end i just wanted to comment that i am um supportive of the administration's recommendation for the following reasons i like the pacing of the model rollout because i believe it balances the need to get students in for more person in-person time for their academic and social and emotional needs but also balances our efforts to try to ensure teachers are getting vaccinated along with affording us the opportunity to ensure our additional mitigation efforts are in place and working i don't think we can underestimate the importance of these layered mitigation efforts to ensure our in-person learning model is sustainable and safe second i also support the asynchronous wednesday time frame i believe it supports our teachers and the fact that they're doing multimodal teaching i believe that it supports our eba students and the fact that they need additional time with their teachers and we have upwards over 20 percent of our population doing eba and i believe that it affords targeted intervention for um our students as well so i just wanted to give my opinion what i'm going to do is do a round robin with our board members i'm going to ask them to ask their top couple of questions and then when they do ask their questions if they could please comment on their support of the plan in general and then specifically the timing of the plan rollout as well as if they support the asynchronous wednesday or not um the first person i'm going to ask to comment is matt because i believe he has a time conflict and will be leaving the meeting shortly um so matt i'm going to turn it over to you and hopefully he's still on the meeting but well lenny then i guess you get to go it look does look like matt's still there um i've got a couple of questions but i'll also note i'm going to be briefer than erica because i share the same perspectives that she has in terms of i do support the plan based on what i've heard so far and i do support the wednesday the question that i have is are we able to cover enough material in four in that sort of 4-1 mode so some of the students talk about the wednesday being a catch-up day and my experience with my kids is that every day was a a learning day and now that in sort of saturday or sunday became the catch-up day so any teacher want to jump in here the question is on a 4-1 model do you have enough time to cover the material consistent with prior years carrie or kim do you guys want to answer that because i i think the the question is about just being able to get through the standards and the content right i mean i'm happy to answer that um we have been able so far to make sure that we are covering the standards in english english is a little bit different than other content areas because we are not following for example a menu of content we are more skills based and so we are able to ser kind of circulate and go through and make sure in a variety and multiple times during the year that we have covered standards um in the english language arts classes i have no concerns about us meeting those standards and covering the content necessary that we would in a normal school year with the 4-1 model and the i don't know if anybody else wants to jump in they can but my second question is is the purpose all these schedules seem like a ton of work a lot more work than the normal we're just gonna have five days in person is the proposed schedule more manageable than what we're currently doing time wise so four days four one versus uh two one two i think that's a great question um there has been conversation at least in my classes about what happens when you have so one of my classes has 34 kids and i think i have seven eva students so we would have 27 kids in the room um but i think that we can still move forward on meeting the standards with everybody there i would say one of the interesting things even since coming back to hybrid last week is a conversation where again at least in language kids are actively participating on their in-person day and then because as i said we're bringing them in on the group on a google meet on their opposite day we're getting a little bit less engagement from them when they're home and so for us i think that it would get better engagement with four kids in the room than to one and two and will it increase your workload um not i don't think in the way that we're running language classes right now because it's just more kids in person and fewer kids on the meat than the in the way that we're lesson planning great thank you so apparently matt was talking but was having sound issues so matt do you want to try to try again okay apologize apparently there's some technical issues um with mr fox so um ellen do you want to go ahead sure um first i i want to say this is one of the more difficult conversations i'm listening to all of the teachers and understanding exactly how hard this must be for you and um especially um given all of the changes we're making and on on top of the pandemic on top of um just stress caused by the pandemic so i i understand that um and i so i'm trying to figure out how to approach my comments um so i'm listening to the teachers i'm also listening to parents and and listening especially to the students i think no one's having a good time this year and i i'm i'm just recognizing this um so here's where i'll start by speaking to wednesdays it seems like that is the hot topic um i'm getting a whole lot of emails this is the first time i'll ever say that i actually went into a meeting and i was getting emails as this was starting so i haven't read everybody's feedback i'm really sorry um but i want to acknowledge that i'm trying to figure out what's right for most of the students and i've i've heard months of stories of how difficult it has been for students to not be getting face-to-face instruction and how hard being out of the building has been for social emotional development and how students are falling behind academically from not being in the classroom i'm inclined to place the highest emphasis on maximizing in-person instructional time particularly in the foundational subjects i believe that the best way to do this is to get our students back in school five days a week as soon as possible as neighboring districts are doing especially in the middle schools and i will i'll i i think that the district should consider approaching wednesday looking at the needs and the middle school model versus um high school and there are some some differences um and and here i will before i i continue i just want to ask a little bit about what is actually being proposed so if we're going to be going to a four day a week model is that going to um what is this daily schedule going to look like for middle school and for high school and so maybe um if if somebody could answer that question i certainly can answer that question for the high school we'll stay right now we don't have any plans to shift from our seven period day schedule so four day a week students would do seven periods on monday tuesday thursday friday and would have a seven period day on wednesday as well but it's just built around subject areas for each of those seven periods so as kim was alluding to she would have a chunk of time during world language to bring in world language students and kerry as an english teacher would have time to bring in english students during her subject area period so that would be the model that we would continue forward with this okay um ellen we would have the same schedule as we have right now um wait andy's excuse me andy's still talking um andy but i can't hear you yeah no i think i i had to explain do you have another question so it's the same schedule that we're currently in right now all we're doing is adding more students so it's the exact same schedule that we're in right now but essentially the proposal is to slowly eliminate the alpha model so that you go with instead of having kids come two days a week they would come four days a week but the same seven period day schedule okay and and and just so there must be some delay in in audio from you i'm really sorry um i hope i'm not talking over you right now even but um my question is in the in a typical year we had shifted from um we had three seven period days and then an even day in an odd day which allowed teachers um time for that flex time um and i'm just what i'm hearing is that in this model that you're proposing it's a seven period day just no even day no odd day we've had many discussions and i'm i'm hoping you can hear me now i can but your mouth isn't moving okay well i'm hoping that you can hear me i'm sorry if my my any computer setup is happening so uh we had long discussions um as we started about seven period day or block and when we started and we knew we were going to be in the hybrid and seeing kids just two days a week we emphasized doing seven period day so the teachers would be able to see kids on both monday and tuesday see two days in a row as opposed to doing odds and evens and they wanted more actual daily face time for students so that's why as we shifted to the model that we were in first hybrid and then distance we stayed with the seven period day schedule and especially since we essentially added flex to wednesdays instead of utilizing that typically how we would on a thursday once a week when we were face to face fully face to face like free pandemic okay so so and in a typical year teacher teaming and plc work and intervention work would happen on the just explain that to me i'm just trying to figure out if we shifted to a back to a typical year schedule for example what would that how would how would how would you normally take care of um those very important needs well our collaboration time that our teachers did was typically before school started so it was in the duty day teacher has an eight-hour duty day but the bell schedule is a little bit less than that so they would have about a 45 minute meeting once a week for their teams to come together but that's also when they had a modality that they were used to teaching in they were teaching all face to face many teachers like kim and kerry have taught in the subject for a number of years they were continuing to adjust curriculum but they're not completely rewriting a new curriculum daily i mean ask carrie and kim they feel like new teachers this year and they're not new teachers because they are literally daily i'm creating new curriculum to be in this online format so the amount of time needed for collaboration i think is certainly much more this year but i'm a fan of giving our teachers as much time as we can afford them to be able to work together because very much research shows that when our teachers have an opportunity to collaborate and work on student needs think about their curriculum think about assessments they put together a better product for our students so super important but in a typical year it would be a before school meeting once a week all right um and then uh one of the things that i've always hoped for was that when um and when and if we would be able to go back to full time that we would also be able to consider separating eva students from the hybrid students so that teachers would not have to or so many teachers would not have to have the responsibility of meeting the needs of both hybrid students and eva students this always seemed to be almost in like a very challenging um task if you know as everyone is saying every single teacher seems to be building their own um curriculum and their and and meeting the needs of all of these students and and it just seems so inefficient to me um especially in some of our larger departments when we have multiple teachers teaching the same subject so my hope was and i'm just wondering if the district has ever considered for finishing up this year and as the board has just said we are going to be looking at eva but not in this format there must be some teachers that are considering teaching this next year has a district looked at trying to separate those tasks for the remainder of this year i can answer that that question again we have we we looked at creating evo only sections before the school year started in august carrie and kim were part of those conversations as we were trying to design what our hybrid model would be we looked at it again at the semester to say what are the possibilities of doing that first from a scheduling standpoint i feel like we've addressed this question of previous board meetings this is students losing classes that they wanted teachers teaching new preps that they hadn't taught before so kerry disher would teach us lit and english 9 and english 10 as opposed to maybe just teaching the one or two preps that she had before world language classes um having all the levels in one section so kim would teach french one through five in one hour because we put all the eva kids into that room with her and these are the things that were coming up and in the end even in those instances if we fought and fought and tried and tried to create a couple of eva sections here and there throughout the school as soon as one student has to quarantine then the teacher has to work with students both online and face to face they have to create online curriculum because that would be my expectation is that they would continue to work with those students at home so in the end we made the decision to base our model this year while we were in a pandemic based on an online model to create online curriculum that hybrid students would be able to participate in and get support and and make progress when face-to-face so that's where we started to try to make this as tangible and possible for our teachers now next year and we're doing registration right now and we have hundreds of kids that are choosing online classes for next year so next year kids will know what they are choosing they are choosing an online class and we will assign a teacher to teach an online class and they will be only online students in that online class and there will only be face-to-face students in the face-to-face class so um but the difficulty of doing that on the fly when students had already made their choices was difficult and we have been trying to manage that all year so i don't know if anything else carrier kim that you want to add add to that um i don't have anything to add but i can just verify that we spent a ton of time as a lead staff or a lead team talking about the possibility of having separate eva and hybrid sections and believe me that when i say that that was what all of us wanted but we had some of the i think smartest people looking at the numbers and we just could not make it work with keeping letting kids keep the classes that we wanted to and also making sure that teachers had schedules that were manageable and we're not having four or five different preps in a single day okay sorry go ahead kimberly well i i guess the part that at this late date i i'm not necessarily talking about the future but i think in some ways some of these classes have gelled considering we've done two months of online learning and all kids were in the google me and so um i would come back to my french cinema class which and this is this is my voice my personal opinion as one teacher but that's a group of kids that has been doing french for 12 years together and it and i can't imagine finishing the year without them all in the same space because some of them are eva and some of them aren't i want them to i want to give them as much of an experience to finish their senior year as a team as they got when they were kindergartners and i think that's probably the same for a lot of these classes at this point in the year okay so ellen if you can if you could comment on the pacing of the rollout and then i'm going to move on to another board member because we can come back to other questions but i want to make sure other board members get a chance to um get their initial comments in okay um as far as pacing i think that um both at the middle school at both at the middle school level and at the high school level we have built in substantial flex time we've added additional one additional class during the school day and we have every day flex time in the middle school schedule it seems like this flex time should provide the time for the type of interventions that wednesdays would be used for under the four day per week plan and because of that flex time we've we've historically offered fewer hours of face-to-face instructional time in the middle schools that i'm very concerned that that instructional time is not going to be able to be recouped between now and the end of the school year um for example if we return even if we re we increase our our time back and have every single wednesday it's it's basically two to three weeks of school and um in fact if you look at the just the way that the middle school model works that is a lot of instructional time and um and i'm i'm concerned because if we don't get that instructional time this year how are we going to make it up is this going to be a summer school or is this going to be um i don't know i i don't additional interventions next year so um i'm just saying i would um i am concerned about the slow rollout um i don't think that um uh that the logistic what i've heard about the logistical reasons um are not convincing for me to say that our students shouldn't be back in school five days a week as soon as possible um julie erica um so i have just a couple questions um but first before i even start i just want to say thank you so much to the students who spoke today and um i mean a lot of bravery um and all the students that have emailed the board also um thank you for your emails and sharing your opinion i think that student voice is just essential to um to all the work that we do um and one thing too i'm i think today is a really exciting day for our district i think uh this is we have really gone through a year together and i'm thrilled at the idea of bringing our students back for more in-person learning so i just want to say that i was at the high school dropping something off today and the energy and the excitement and students volunteering at a masking table to say hey welcome do you need any an extra mask i'm sure one of my kids probably forgot theirs and they probably got it there um but i just i i want to just reset this because i really think this um this year has if anything has taught us anything is that we there aren't two sides to this decision to bring students back and if we have a synchronous day in synchronous slash asynchronous day on wednesdays with learning going on i think there are thousands of sides as we heard from the students everyone comes at this a little bit differently and there's a lot of nuances so i just wanted to say that out loud because i i think it needs a shout out um so my quick questions are how many teachers at both the high school and the both the middle schools have students both in eba and in the classroom thank you yeah go ahead yeah no i'm sorry i jumped the gun i was so excited to let you know that it's a great reminder that all 99 of middle school teachers have to teach both cohorts and so um they're caring for those learners for any number of reasons who aren't able to be physically present it's a heavy lift as you heard from from the uh staff members here tonight and um so we don't have the luxury with our model to create uh those uh eva only and in person only sections lots of reasons for that and then all those other reasons the principal beating cited a large challenge so for all practical purposes 100 of middle school teachers have to do both things and it's incredibly difficult yeah okay and same andy at the high school correct yeah yeah i think that we had created a couple sections here and there in special education and and ml we were able to do with the session sections but actually some of those have even started to cross over a little bit uh second semester versus first but there's a couple but i'd say uh 99 point something percent of sections in our building teachers are working with both um eva and hybrid students okay thank you that's helpful just for perspective um and then one question that's come up a couple different times it's kind of a nuance in the in the plan but you know students that um opted into eva at the second semester and not and and not hybrid and now that we are moving to a hybrid model that has more in-person learning four days do we anticipate that we could potentially make a path for those students to come back in if they want to and i don't know what the number of those students are i don't know if we know the number of those students or we do but like is that in the plan i mean maybe not tomorrow but as we roll out these next couple weeks can any of you guys talk to that sure i can address that question um as we said and we've said before in our current model right now our teachers are able to do six feet of distancing in their classroom based on the section sizes what we do at lunch and so if tim anderson we determined that he test positive and he is in a classroom with carrie disher and they are six feet of distance there is not a close contact and i think we emphasize that nick did that when you add more students the classroom you will create more close contacts that's just a given the guidelines that have come from the governor have said do six feet when feasible but asking it says three feet must be maintained okay so we are now working on our sections as we slowly eliminate the alpha model to see what the section sizes are so kim gave an example of one of her classes that has 27 hybrid students and five eva students okay something like that okay i can't remember what the exact number was but let's say 27 face-to-face we'll have to look at her classroom and the teachers are doing that now to see can kim effectively do three feet of distancing in a classroom with 27 and she because we want teachers also we want teachers to do six feet of distancing so can she effectively do that and so we're looking at it by section by section to see what's the what's her room like where she works and can we do that three feet of distancing in her classroom so that's the expectation so we have over 900 students that are currently eva so over 30 of our students are currently eva if we invited them all back right now with the current guidelines um we likely would not be able to do three feet of distancing in those classrooms now if that is not something that we are concerned about in this district then you can make that decision but we're just from a practicality we currently right now we would need those eva students to continue however is another caveat case numbers and case rates continue to decline which is awesome and if they get to that point where they are 10 and below the guidelines say we don't have to be concerned about that social distancing piece so if those case numbers are getting to that point then absolutely we might have that conversation say are you an eva student that is interested in coming back to school because we don't have to do those same kind of guidelines and they could smoothly because our sections are intact does that make sense so kim's eva students could potentially come back to her class if we are getting those case rates to the point where we're not concerned about the social distancing guidelines it's kind of a long answer um yeah no it's helpful i mean 900 students and and you know i i don't know what the number is how many would even want to come back you know but like if we had i know we have students that move they're you know it's it's a very easy transition easier i shouldn't say nothing's been easy an easier transition from hybrid into eva right and that switch back so if that if there's movement there and then it opens up space i just wanted to say are you guys looking at it a case-by-case basis as students call and and the different needs um so okay yeah and i would say we're always going to be prioritizing what the student needs it's the same thing we're talking about with these tier one students we've got about 85 students in the building already four days a week march 8th we're proposing i have a list of 107 tier 2 students that we're going to invite in four days a week and some of those are eva and some of them are hybrid so it'll be that combination so you know we're gradually increasing the number of students that are going to be in those classrooms and we are expected at this point now based on the current guidelines to maintain three feet of distancing in those classrooms okay great thank you um and then i just just kind of where my thoughts are right now um is for pacing and the rollout um i think it's i think it's a smart pacing i think it allows for a lot of sustainability for the mitigation layers that we're adding in the operations um i think that really if you go back it really ties back to our priorities and the approach and strategy that we as a board approved in july erica mentioned at the beginning of this meeting and it really falls in line with that that that to make sure we're moving so that we can sustain this model i don't think um there's a lot of work going on and a lot of student needs in getting back in the school and i want to i i'm full in support of making sure that we're pacing it so that we're successful um and that has proven to be the case this whole year so um i'm in support of that and then second in terms of our wednesdays um you know it's what i think isn't is hard to um and for the community and also board members like you know we set precedent that in the elementary level we went back five days right but the difference is that the implementation is very different at the secondary level right the elementary teachers are not teaching both two different completely different cohorts at the same time so i think that's i've heard that used a couple different times that there's precedent there but really it's two different it's two different things going on so i think that utilizing those wednesdays um and just being continuing to be really intentional and if there's you know places that we can improve of course i know you guys are always looking for ways to improve but i think it is effective i think it's efficient and i think it really supports student needs um and i think that is that's all i got so thank you good job thank you julie oh and before i turn it over to you uh matt's computer microphone isn't working so he emailed me um his thoughts so i was just going to share them he said please share my thoughts apologies my microphone isn't working i very much appreciate that we are moving forward with methodical plans we have brought back k2 then 35 then hybrid and now i'm moving back toward full in quotes i recognize that students express needing and desiring some semblance of consistency during this very challenging year so i do not believe it is wise to push the administration to change on the fly in opposition to their guidance along with all three principles via asking them to deviate from this plan today meaning i support steps to bring kids back four days a week in the next several weeks but to be very clear i support plan for today i would like to see kids back in the classroom five days a week as soon as the system can tolerate it i recognize that teaching ebay and live are hard that people are exhausted in the schools at home and across the community but while normal won't be normal for a while still every day we can help get kids back with their peers the better so i would like a plan to shift back to five days after spring break and again deeply appreciate all the efforts of our staff families and students to push forward while the world consistently changes around them thank you so that was matt's feedback um ellen do you want to go ahead yes thank you eric i guess one of the advantages of being at the end here is i get to benefit from the accumulated wisdom of my peers um i've got a question first off did i hear that we are is this a plan the four to one plan a plan to end the school year with we is that the idea or are we just taking it one month at a time did i miss that did we address that i would randy can you address that or john i would i would say that um we continue with this plan and as we've been doing the whole year um look at it again um in april um just so that we give some time to it and then uh see what decisions we we need to make relative to the plan um give peop to get beyond the the pivot instead of um doing it or changing it right away or examining it right away give people some time to be in it for a while so i would recommend we do that sometime uh third or fourth week in april okay so we're the the idea is to play it by ear uh for a bit here okay um i want a second a couple things that julie said that by far and away the most is that i think that this i don't know if this is these are the words you use julie but on one level this is a day of celebration we have been wanting to get our kids back into school for a long long long time and uh people are very very happy about the fact that that's coming up and thank you administration for coming up with a coherent plan to do that absolutely thrilled um the uh second comment that julie had was the question of eva to face to face and andy basically you answered that with the capacity uh rationale that the capacity is difficult to the face-to-face capacity is difficult to absorb in the school right now because of that um i don't even need a response to this but um i think i would lobby if that becomes an issue first of all i would say i would suggest i would like to be able to get as many eva students who want to come back face to face as possible and to accommodate that given annie that you said there's a capacity issue think creatively putting some classrooms in in flex places it's possible to put some classrooms in hallways or gyms um so and i don't need a response to that just something uh to put in in your wheelhouse um so my large remarks are again i just want to underscore the fact i'm thrilled that we're getting back face to face we've been looking at this for a long time and i'm thrilled for our students i'm thrilled for our parents and i'm thrilled for the teachers because i think it's going to be easier than a hybrid model uh for teaching so um the the the issues right at hand uh whether when to start and then wednesday that to me is a tough call i was thrilled to actually hear elizabeth teskey she was one of the presenters from valley view i've known or south view i've known elizabeth for years through scouts and she is organized beyond her years and she's a leader beyond her years too so a very good choice of a representative and a voice and so there there's a real solid argument for taking uh to having wednesday be an asynchronous day uh we heard a series of very coherent um rationales presented to us and uh i was a stand-up computer instructor at the science museum for 18 years and i've told a number of teachers that i've worked with how challenging i think i would have found it to be teaching my computer class with my live students right there and at the same time having to monitor classes out there in cyber land and let alone these students being adolescents not adults so i think it presents a significant balancing act that's so there are some trade-offs and um there is tremendous pent-up demand in the community for full five-day face-to-face and we've just been receiving an on an ongoing uh set of emails from parents in the community saying we would really really like full five-day face-to-face and so i just want to uh clearly express that that there we're hearing you i'm hearing you that they're we're all hearing it that there's a tremendous desire to not miss any more days of school to get our kids back uh to make up our lost days and then i can say that um part of that is coming out of the the fact that this year for some students has been absolutely disastrous and uh it's hit my house my home and it you don't like seeing things going south and so what's what's missing um with distance learning for many students is the in-person accountability and the in-person support the inhibitions for a lot of adolescents are lower when they can actually see the teacher right in front of them and talk uh drop their guard and so forth in front of a screen that's very difficult so for me when i look at this asynchronous day i'm hearing i'm hearing the rationale for having it by the same token i'm also very much aware of the strong desire to get our kids back in face to face and so erica you put a question to us where do we actually land and i think where i land is doing something a little bit more creative i suppose and that would be a late start on a wednesday on wednesdays give a little more time for the teachers clearly but then get some more face to face um and then a another question or desire on my part would be to have us move back uh to accelerate our kickoff of this two weeks and again because of the strong strong demand to get our kids back into school so um those are my those are my comments erica thank you owen i'm janie thanks erica um i'm gonna be completely honest and and tell all you guys and and anybody who's out there watching i'm not sure how many community members we have out there right now but this has been probably one of the hardest decisions kind of one of the hardest thought processes that i've had to go through um in all honesty my gut reaction right away was to say five days a week it's five days a week for a lot of the reasons that kind of some of the stuff that owen just mentioned um but in actually reading through the hundreds of emails that we've gotten from parents a lot from students it's been really amazing to hear from students and having some great conversations with our educational leaders one of the things i realize is it's our job to make sure that we are doing what's best for all students right like it's not just some students but we need to do what's best for all students and we have a system in place uh to have our secondary teachers teach two models that's the decision that we made um it's definitely too soon for us to be monday morning quarterbacking that decision um it's definitely not the time for us to be rearranging and shifting and giving students new teachers and new schedules and having teachers get used to new students you know there are other districts that made a different decision i actually took a walk with a friend today who's in a district that made a different decision and their secondary teachers either teach distance or they teach in person and they have their own set of issues right there there is no perfect solution their students don't have the same you know vast category of classes that they could choose from that our students get to they don't have access to as much of the enriched content as our students have it's different there's trade-offs and i think it's too soon for any of us to decide which is better it's the model that we have and our decisions have to be based on what's best for all students so with that said actually hearing and listening to what's been told to us i i am going to say that i'm supportive of having the four in one week with the support for students on wednesdays i've heard loud and clear that that's really important for our eva students and we have to respect that and we have to respect that they have their needs are just as important as as students who are face to face with that said the other thing that i've read between the lines and heard very loud and clear from people who have voiced it is that that wednesday day to me i feel as if the desire to have more structured opportunities for kids to use their their student agency that that we're trying to grow in them and to have more opportunities for them to get help when they need it is really important i know i've got a middle schooler i've got a high schooler you know my middle schoolers very engaged on wednesdays with synchronous activities and and some um some outreaches for flex and some enrichment and whatnot and i i understand that the middle school model looks a little bit different than the intervention model at the high school but i guess what i'm i guess i would like to challenge the secondary leaders to really say are we using every single opportunity for structured time for our students to connect with their teachers to the best of our ability knowing that we're going to keep this four in one schedule so that's that's where i land with that one of the things i want to make sure i point out though is that wednesdays are there's learning going on in my house on wednesdays it's not it's not a day off my kids are definitely engaged i think the intention of all teachers is that students are going to be engaged in learning on wednesdays so i don't want anybody to think that by supporting this this model that i or any other board member would say we are in support of students have wednesdays off and and because that's not the case um the engagement and the opportunity for help and for um enrichment it needs to be a part of it so i wanted to make sure that i let i let that be known um as far as the the pacing well actually i do want to go back and say i i like julie and owen really hope that we can create a path to allow for more eva students to come back into the building when it's safe so i want to make sure that i say that out loud because i do think um that's important to honor that ability for those students i think the pacing part i would love for us to accelerate this by a week but only if it's safe i would love for us to accelerate it by a week only if we can say for sure that by doing that that our students and our staff and all of those mitigation efforts and everything will be in place and be ready to roll in in the right way if that can't be done then i fully support the plan that you have put forth with that so i think those were all the points i was trying to keep track of them all in my head so i'll let you take over erica thank you jamie um so i just want to um before we move on to more questions i just want to wrap up this section um it sounds like the majority of the board supports the plan as is um that um like janie says there was some board interest in accelerating the plan but only if it can be done safely um and then um there's interest in and you mentioned this john looking at um the plan which we would do anyway um towards the end of april and then i'm looking at um the the wednesday or how the plan's working and i'm getting back to the board on on that aspect of the plan as well as other parts of the plan um is that that makes sense okay yep okay um and so i want to open it back up to board members for additional questions um but first i'm going to ask my questions since i haven't had a chance um i wanted to first support some comments other board members made one is i wanted to reiterate what um owen julie and janie said it's like a telephone game about trying to find a pathway for eva students and maybe it's not the first week or second week but as things settle in and we you do the class counts um if they're ways that we can find um a pathway for e-waste eba students to get in and then i also think we have we should ask there could be families that aren't actually comfortable with the reduction in social distancing and we need to make sure that we're giving families the opportunity if they want to actually prep eva at this point um because they aren't comfortable with the reduction in social distancing um and that being said um i don't know i actually don't think jeff jorgensen is on the call anymore but maybe um john or randy you can address this um i don't know if it would be part of the iep process or or some other process but if we have students that are um have medical issues where they're um they the six foot social distancing is um almost a necessity because um they have risk factors for covid are we able to accommodate that i would hate for students not to be able to come to in-person school um because we have made the decision to reduce social distancing because they actually have a medical condition and their only option now is um not is eva so i just wanted to have a better understanding if we are able to do anything for students sorry um i did talk to jeff about this and um that is being handled by case managers case managers are communicating with uh their families um and um accommodating uh you know the the you know the safe learning environment for for their kids so um jeff has had uh a couple meetings with case managers and uh leads at at the secondaries and have made that that point they would they would do that by a case-by-case basis based on the parents wishes okay all right and then um my last question for now is um one of the i guess one of the things that i'm most concerned about is actually unstructured time within the school day and that surrounds lunchtime and bus time and i was wondering if someone could provide me more information about what we're going to do during lunch time how far apart we think students are going to be spaced because the reality is they're going to be unmasked and um i just wanted more information about that and how close kids are going to be together and and then also for bus time if someone could explain to me the governor's new orders how that relates to social distancing on the bus um those two questions i'd appreciate it thanks i'll defer on the bus question but uh in terms of lunch uh the only way we can maintain safety for students at lunch is to open up the second lunch space so in the case of southview for example we need to find open space and that per buildings and grounds will give us the adequate ventilation that mr hamilton was talking about and so in our case we'll move lunch to half of lunch to another gymnasium i know the other two sites have similar strategies they'll follow the guidelines in terms of seating arrangements so that we can adequately contact trace and we'll be working to maintain that six feet um distance uh if at all possible and so we'll have to come up with some resources to get extra tables and some extra staff supervision but we think we can do that and we're going to do a walk through tomorrow to see if we can accommodate that and i think it's similar at the other sites um and we're we're experimenting with qr codes and stuff for contact tracing purposes okay i just wanted i wasn't sure if we were still trying to maintain six feet at lunch or if that was going to shrink so i just wanted to make sure of that okay and then john or can you speak to transportation are we still supposed to maintain uh i thought we're still still supposed to maintain a certain distance on buses but i'm not sure how to do that right and you talked about that in your opening remarks so yeah i'll just i'll just say it a little bit uh cherry ellenberg in terms of busing we still need to have six feet of distance between the drivers and the students and so what effectively happens is the first two rows on the buses get eliminated in terms of student seating and so that reduces the capacity of the buses to about 40 and then we have two students in a seat typically for the rest of the bus so what um david is working through is from a capacity standpoint we have some routes that are over our legal capacity now when we take those students out of those first two rows and so he's going to work with some families we'll have to see if we have some volunteer families that can volunteer to transport their child so that we can lighten those routes or see if we can adjust some routes to be able to balance out the numbers of kids on the bus and i know that that's something david's continuing to work on okay thank you owen oh uh thank you my um one of my concerns is the learning loss and we are not really talking about that here tonight but i would like to um deal with how we can measure that and what we can do to remediate it uh whether we're talking summer school whether we're talking holding lettings letting parents have their uh child stay back a grade um so at some point i'd be interested in having a discussion about that and it's not unique to dinah so um that's on our that's on our march 16th board meeting all right okay good thank you oops ellen yeah i um i just wanted to weigh in since i didn't comment on our students that are eva students and i am i'm very concerned that if a parent had certain circumstances where they were offered a choice between eva or hybrid and they chose eva and now we are saying you cannot come back to in-person learning because you chose eva i i'm concerned that that just doesn't seem right to me and i i know that you that many other board members talked about finding safe pathways but i feel a little stronger than this i just feel as if we know what's right for our students and our parents know what's right for their students and i'm going to i would hope that the district would make it work so that if a student wants to come back to in-person learning that they can do so and and that's that i i i feel very strongly about that things are changing in families by the minute it's a very fluid situation for many families some some some may have needed to protect family members in the winter but now they have vaccinations they've received their vaccinations so that's not an issue just don't i i want to work a little bit harder and not just say well look at i i i would suggest that we don't decline students from the from wishing to come back to our schools thank you erica could i jump in sure so that makes five of us i think that have strong opinions about eva having eva students having the chance to go back face to face so i wonder if we could revisit that right now and maybe gauge uh sentiment from the five of us we haven't heard lenny um speak about it so julie julie's raising your hand what do you think julian well i want to make it clear that i want a pathway for eva students to come back in but we're mandated by the state of minnesota to have a minimum of three feet between students and so i'm not exactly sure [Music] um and maybe you or ellen have a plan for how we can cram our students in and still maintain the three feet but we have an obligation to all the people that are in person right now to increase the time that they're in person and then what my suggestion is is that we try to find a way to get other students that want to come in in i the only other option we have is to re-pref our entire learning model and quite frankly that's a disaster for our district that would take andy or tim or sean how many weeks does it take to rebalance our classrooms i mean it takes what like three weeks and maybe i can just jump in i i think that just so you know from administrators we have every intent and we would love to have all of our students back and if you asked our teachers here they would be very comfortable teaching in one learning model face to face that would make them very happy and we're excited about that possibility as case numbers continue to go down i think that some of the other solutions i think we have to think about and and i think i i addressed this when julie asked that question um you know if those case numbers do continue to decline and that will depend on community efforts masking vaccines that will all have a positive impact on those case rates going down and then we will be inviting eva students if they want to come back we don't have to do those social distancing now but if i look at a class like one of kim's classes let's say overall in one of her sections she has 34 students okay so um 34 students i know where her classroom is will not be separated by three feet they will be closer than three feet so our options are if we had all those students back in the room is to reassign those students or ask him to um set up her class to be in three groups and two groups come in face to face and one of them goes online each day with the other eva students so i mean these are the things that we would have to do and then again where do those students go if i'm doing that school-wide that's a lot of students um out in the hallways and all over our school and that's not even accounting for when students when teachers are out and we have to do virtual sub so there's a i think you just have to give us some time to be able to um move through this addition of students and do it well before we move on to the next step and i and i like the idea when we're talking about a celebration it is a celebration that we are going from distance learning to hybrid to know a four day a week model um and we just need time to be able to put that in place effectively the other thing you should be aware of is that some of the conversation about bringing more students back has actually led some of our families to elect eva even now even in the last couple weeks you have to remember that our even numbers started in the fall in the 500s at semester time they were in the 700s and now they're over 900. so there are students and families that are choosing this for health and safety but some of them are also choosing it because they think the instructional model is it works for them while absolutely others want to come back and need to come back face to face and they will do better face to face so i'm just asking for the gift of time as we roll out this model and we're trying to balance that consideration for our staff as we slowly increase the the numbers of students in our building mr ron hobdy i saw you had a hand raised oh thanks i was thinking so surprised to hear my name um thank you uh just hearing i have i think a quick unique perspective to share um we have a seventh grade eba student um we also have the luxury of of having chose that not for health and reasons um and so i feel we feel fortunate for that like we chose it uh and he thought it was a good learning model for him and and then as a teacher knowing we were opening back up i had the same thoughts you're saying right now like wait a minute we we signed that google doc under um different uh different um guidelines if you will so my wife and i had this discussion and i was on this the side of hey he should get to come back and she was on the set of we you know we filled out a form and we committed and i'm and you know and we asked him and he's okay staying home so we i can say this from a place of like i said luxury we can but hearing what andy just said as a parent i totally agree with what i heard and i'm not just saying that because i'm a teacher this is a parent of an eva student who could come back saying that like i hear what you're saying that's totally reasonable it's totally reasonable so i think a lot of parents would buy that not buy that but you know believe that that's just what's best for the system thank you i'm julie yeah i mean i think andy you just i i just wanted to kind of echo what erica said um oh and i know you were talking about while we have you know um a quorum of board members that want this i i did not want this as a administration i never i didn't that's not my thinking behind this this is can we have a pathway to get students back and i heard from all of our principals that yes that is part of the plan i think one of the most important things and we have we've talked about this before but it's just a reminder that we are operating in the current time frame right now and we've had to do that and it takes a remarkable amount of patience for all of us right students teachers administrators families the community i mean this is going on in districts everywhere but we're in a right now our district is in a really good space right we're currently we're in a good space and i think if we continue that then there will be i trust that if there is a way to get more students back in that would like to come back in i i have no doubt that we will get there um if we are able to but i also don't think it's our place i i'm not comfortable mandating that so i just wanted to make that clarification because i think it's an important one so that's it alan and then lenny i think you have your hand up also yeah i think um part of the reason that i i i'm just hoping that we will be asking our parents and students um about what their preferences are relatively quickly because this is it's the it's the question of will we be able to make it will there be space for us this is the uncertainty of this and the stress that the pandemic is causing and it um and i'm i'm hoping and i'll ask when will we be asking our parents um what they would prefer so we did ask not too long ago for preference for semester two so um help me understand ellen do you want us to do it a second time yes this semester yes i want to know which given um given our current situation where the majority of the board wants um a shift is is following the recommendation of the the administration and the shift will be four day in person um i'm just wondering how many parents would choose that in-person model or eva i i'm i'm assuming you're going to ask that aren't you so asking between the four day and eva so have hasn't that preference already happened am i missing something randy maybe you can help i think what ellen's saying is that now that we're we're increasing the amount of time that hybrid students are having for person does that does that change the the nature of this such that we should go back and ask about that and i think if we're trying to identify the families that have that choice we'll have to ask them at some point we just need to figure out what the time of that is and then what would be the conditions that would allow us to be able to bring back additional students and we'll we will have a challenge of um you know if we have more that want to come back then we can safely do we're going to have to figure that out so we're going to have to meet i think as a secondary team and talk about that in terms of a process and what might make sense and what would be a timeline and i think also randy we should uh this is part of a incident command team just to think about the timing of it as we will watch the numbers you know if they continue to drop by provide more flexibility for that movement to happen or less flexibility for that matter okay and then janie you're uh since owen called me out for not having commented on this issue i thought i would would weigh in i mean i i do share everyone's else's concern about people who signed up for eva thinking that hybrid was two days a week and not four and so i'm not sitting here saying that we need to immediately open up the gates and allow all the men but i do think we have to figure out what are the numbers and so i do think it makes sense to go and ask people again because for example if we find out that there's only a 20 person shift then there's probably a way to accommodate it because again the number of people who picked eva are still going to pick it because they're still going to be concerned about the health issues so rather than guess about whether we can accommodate it let's figure it out in doing so i think we have to make clear to parents that there are no promises that right now the default is if you signed up for eva then you're in ebook until there's a change but we'd like to know in the event that we could accommodate so i think there has to be clarity in the message the other thing that janie mentioned earlier you know i actually had the same reaction she did when this first came up which is why can't we do five days and it is through listening to teachers students administrators and sort of trying to figure out what makes sense that got me to the point of landing and saying okay four because i looked at versions of this and said we need to go more aggressively but i don't really think that that makes sense based upon the information we've received tonight the information that i've read so again it's not an easy decision for people out there looking just because we come up with a definitive response doesn't mean we haven't waited doesn't mean that we haven't wrestled with it it does mean that our function is at some point to make a definitive conclusion and it has to be one or another so that's it jd and then back to owen so i want to make it clear what i mentioned that i do i am in favor as lenny said a finding out how many students we're talking about that want to come back in who are eva that want to come back in face to face but what i don't want it to do is to get ahead of or have it slow down our process of bringing back our students in as many days as possible so i would hope that if that's something that we do that it can be done consecutively with the planning of getting kids back in school and that if it means a little bit longer in some cases um to get those kids back in i don't want it to hamper the progress that we're talking about in the timeline that we've talked about for getting kids back in four days so i want to make sure that i was i was clear about that thanks jamie what genie just said yes i wouldn't want this to disrupt the rollout of our plan to get the kids back into school a lot more i want to underscore what ellen said is that uh i think the decision for um parents was that it was eva versus hybrid and now it's a different story and so um if we could get a census of as soon as possible what uh the eva parents would like now that we are going back face to face uh for twice the amount of time what that what that community interest would be so i would find that very helpful to know how many how many folks are in that camp julie i just wanted to make one other quick comment you know when when we communicated this out with the shift um we did talk about you know hybrid could shift to more days in person so i don't want it it's it's it's just this this conversation is making it sound like this is like a bait and switch from the district and that's not the case at all that's been going on so i i feel that that's just an important point to make that families signed up knowing that the hybrid model and that there's always the plan from that we've put out from last july is that if we were able to get the kids in for more in-person learning through the hybrid model that was always going to be the plan that is always what we've been working towards and we're here and we got here so i just want to make sure that our principals don't feel swallowed up by adding this layer on when they're telling us they need some time in the grace of time so i want to be really clear at least from my point i i want that grace of time so that we can do this right and look for pathways so just that's it i think it's a great conversation and i think it's i'm glad that we talked about it and made sure that for our parents that it was discussed tonight so um there's obviously interest on everyone's part to get as many kids in in school as possible that are interested in being in school i think the question is just like how you said um randy um when do how how quickly can we get the information and what exactly is the pathway and that's what we need to figure out so um but i appreciate everyone's feedback and everyone's comments um i i just want to check if board members have more questions about the plan itself um anything that was discussed tonight before we move on to um uh four chair updates sorry no well thank you um thank you principals for being on tonight and teachers for being on tonight and presenting your perspectives i appreciate it i appreciate all the work that's gone into this plan and um to owen and julie's point i think this is a it's a good thing there's complications it's stressful but this is a really good thing for students for parents for teachers um so i just appreciate the hard work that everyone has put into it our administrators i know you've been working really hard trying to get this pulled together so thank you and our teachers i know are working extra hard every day so thank you very much to all of you so um i have a couple of updates um for the community um our next board meeting is march 8th um and we're going to move it into the district office conference room to be in person our um board meeting room still under construction so we're going to send out some more information about that um to the community and then additionally i wanted to just remind the community you should have received an email about it but there is a survey out right now to get stakeholder feedback about our new superintendent search um so if you go to dot edinaschools.org backsplash and then it's s-u-p-t um search um there is an online survey there and you can fill it out anytime between now and march 4th um to do stakeholder feedback and we do have some focus groups going on but in case that um you aren't part of one of those we have lenny i'm going to put you on the spot for this but when is the open community forum focus group and if you don't know it that's totally fine it will there will be information about it but i just wanted to make sure people understood the different ways they could give stakeholder feedback um let me see if i can find it i do not know offhand okay sorry i should have let you know beforehand this is yes chair ellenberg it's nicole tischer um i'm ha it is on wednesday um early evening and if people are interested in signing up on that same page that you mentioned they can click the google form and sign up and then there'll be a randomized process where we select a number of those people who signed up for that community forum but it's uh it's i want to say seven o'clock from 6 15 to 7 o'clock on wednesday night but i might have those times off just a little bit that's not tomorrow night though no i'm sorry a week from what oh okay i thought so i just wanted to make sure no no thank you um um john do you have any superintendent updates i do not okay and then um i wanted to make sure the board saw the information item which was the superintendent compensation range for the um search firm advertisement and see if any um anyone had any comments or concerns about that information piece no okay great all right well thank you to all um all the board members for your feedback regarding this um i know all our board members have been working hard as well so and we don't necessarily all the same perspectives but i appreciate everyone's feedback and everyone is working hard for all on the students so thank you to everyone here and without further ado i will adjourn your meeting so thank you