 So, I'm going to go ahead and start with it because this meeting is held remotely. We need to cover a few things. So good evening. This open meeting of the Arlington School Committee is being conducted remotely consistent with Governor Baker's executive order of March 12, 2020 due to the current state of emergency and the Commonwealth due to the outbreak of the COVID-19 virus. In order to mitigate the transmission of the virus, we have been advised and directed by the Commonwealth to suspend public gatherings and, as such, the governor's order suspends the requirement of the open meeting law to have all meetings in a publicly accessible physical location. Further, all members of public bodies are allowed and encouraged to participate remotely. The order, which you can find posted with agenda materials for this meeting allows public bodies to meet entirely remotely so long as reasonable public access is afforded so that the public can follow along with the deliberations of the meeting. During public access does not ensure public participation, unless such participation is required by law. This meeting will feature public comment. For this meeting, the Arlington School Committee is convening by Zoom as posted on the town's website identifying how the public may join. Please note that this meeting is being recorded and the attendees are participating by video conference. Accordingly, please be aware that others may be able to see you and that take care not to screen share your computer. Anything that you broadcast may be captured by the recording. All of the materials for this meeting, except any executive session materials are available in the Novus Agenda dashboard and we recommend the members and the public follow the agenda as posted on Novus unless I note otherwise. We will now turn shortly after we take attendance to the first item on the agenda. Before we do so, permit me to cover some ground rules for effective and clear conduct of our business and to ensure accurate meeting minutes. I will introduce each speaker on the agenda after they call further. Please remember to mute your phone or computer when you are not speaking. Please remember to speak clearly and in a way that helps generate accurate minutes. For any response, please wait until the chair yields the floor to you and state your name before speaking. If members wish to engage in colloquially with other members, please do so through the chair taking care to identify yourself. Each vote taken in this meeting will be conducted by roll call vote. As a secondary matter, I would like to confirm that all members and persons anticipated on the agenda are present and can hear me. When I call your name, please respond in the affirmative. Ms. Exton? Yes. Mr. Cardin? Yes. Dr. Allison Ampe? Yes. Mr. Thielman? Yes. Mr. Schlickman? In the affirmative. Mr. Heiner? Yes. And I can hear myself. Dr. Bode? Present. Dr. McNeil? Present. Ms. Elmer? Present. Mr. Spiegel? Don't see him yet. He's coming later around seven. Great. Thank you. And. And then on the, and then Ms. Keys? Hi. Hi. I'm looking across my screen. Mr. Mason? Here, yes. Up there in the upper right corner. Let's see who else do we have. And then we have some, many of our principles. Dr. Janger. Can you hear us? Okay. Okay. Mr. Merringer? Here you're fine. Thank you. Great. Ms. Pierre Maxwell? Present. And we have Mr. Ardito? Mr. And Ms. Ford? Hi. Thank you. And. I think that's it. Yes. Okay. So the first item on the agenda is public comment. There were two people who requested to make public comment. And then I'll. So I guess as a matter of introduction, we give you an introduction. We did receive some written comments and questions for the public. Throughout the day today. And I was able to follow up with each of them. Some of them requested that their comments be. Shared publicly as a form of public comment, which I will do. Next. And while we do not respond to questions or comments posed during public comment, as a matter of policy, I expect some of the comments to be shared. As part of our administrative team presentation. And others could be included in future FAQs for families. And there were two people who had signed up because they wanted to do public comment. So let's see if they're here. Mr. Sweeter. Is that right? Yeah. Oh, hi. So. You can, you can go ahead. You get, you get three minutes. Thank you very much. Hi. My name is Noah. Sweeter. And I'm a rising senior in Arlington high school. I know there's a search and hiring committee for the new superintendent. And I am here on behalf of Arlington high schools, anti-racism working group. And the black student union requesting one seat each on that committee. It's critically important to have student voices in this decision that greatly affects us. In addition, our focus on anti-racism is very important in this search and hiring process. Thank you very much. Thank you. And. Ms. Connick. Is she here? Not yet. Can we, are you going to, are you able to handle this? No, I'm trying to find her. Right. There's a lot of names. So why don't, while you do that, I'm going to read some of the comments that, that people have requested to have read. And then we can do that one at the end. Does that sound good? Yeah. Okay. All right. So, um, So the first comment is from. Ms. Catherine and Mr. David Einstein. Um, she is an Arlington public schools mother. Her daughter is a rising first grader, a gallon. Her son will be in kindergarten. Her questions were what kind of curriculum and instruction preparation is happening right now. If any, to make sure that we're ready to support children who have been out of the classroom for six months. Will there be frequent testing of children and teacher staff? She works at Boston university where they have built the capacity to rapid test all onsite faculty, staff, and students twice a week. While that scale may not be possible in our public schools. Are there discussions of public health monitoring? Um, for example, waste testing, frequent testing that would help keep everyone safe. And also have there been any consideration for a phase reopening by age group data from South Korea and elsewhere suggest a very, very, low rate of transmission among children less than 10, whereas older children seem to have highly slightly higher risk of transmission. This would also benefit younger children who are the least able to do remote learning and would benefit from an 100% in person approach. Eddie Herbert is wondering, will remote groups be made up of multiple elementary schools or will students being groups with teachers and students from their current school? Um, Karen or Karen Mollering is wondering, did the principals ever consider half days AMPM instead of day on day off for elementary school? If so, why did they decide against it? Ms. Kelly Harrington is a teacher in Lexington and shared that she is hopeful that the circumstances with, while she, she is hopeful the circumstances with COVID will improve. If she initially chooses to keep her son home for full remote learning, would she be able to change her mind in the late winter, early spring and send him to school once she deemed it safe for him and her family? Maxie Schmidt asked whether we can be given a sense of the guidance the afterschool programs will receive. They rely on school and afterschool as they are in full time jobs. An anonymous question was whether we would clarify the plan being offered to families who choose to have their kids fully remote, either because they cannot or do not want to take the risk of in-person learning in the current pandemic situation. It appears that these children will be pulled out of their local elementary class and their plan cohort of nine to 12 learners and placed in a townwide class of up to 30 children to learn remotely. Has the emotional wellbeing or academic learning of these children been considered? And how is it equitable to those who have high risk conditions or others? What happens when everyone must go remote because the next pandemic hits or the current one gets worse? Do these children transition back to their school class cohorts? Or do they remain in a class of up to 30 children from across town? Is there any option being considered to allow children to remain in their school class and to participate remotely with friends and known classmates alongside those in a hybrid model? Ms. Jessica Scholes wants to start by saying that she appreciates the swiftness with which Arlington Public Schools acted last year to protect the public by closing schools and switching to remote learning. The questions are those that were top of mind and do not suggest that they do not appreciate the difficult task the school system is facing or the tremendous effort that has been put into teaching children during the pandemic. It does not look like the reopening. So these are all comments under that. It does not look like the reopening plans involved in person schooling take ventilation into account with the studies coming out of Asia that suggest that open windows significantly decrease virus transmission. We would love for the plans to provide for increased ventilation so that children are not breathing stale air all day. We are curious to know how the school will decide which topics are taught in person and which are taught remotely. Is there an effort to identify which topics students are best able to learn on their own versus which require in-person instruction? Is this an area where parent input would be helpful? The plans mention use of fogging. What does this mean when this fogging occur? Is there any risk to students from whatever will be fogged into the building? Will the district be putting together any social distancing guidelines for families to observe outside of school to reduce the risk of students contracting COVID outside of school and infecting classmates? It seems our children are only as safe as the least vigilant family so we would love to see some messaging around what is expected so that we understand there may be no real way to enforce expectations. This is an anonymous question. This is an anonymous question. This person is a single solo parent, single income, absence of another parent. And wants to know about the timing for remote learning, whether or not the town or the schools provide a space like the library or a campus where remote learning can happen with supervision and guidance. And then one of the children receives ESL classes wondering about support at school because remote learning ESL doesn't work. Wondering about after school. Wondering whether or not the town or the state will help with financial hardships that will happen due to remote learning days and the need for childcare. Whether or not there would be any government or community-based financial aid. And provisions for essential workers. And what that would look like. And upon possible or definite exposure to COVID, will schools be able to collect samples for the students to be tested? Do all family members have to be tested? Who will cover the costs for multiple tests for multiple times? Issues around insurance deductibles. And then precautions taken by teachers and families. And wanting to reassure them that this is going to be a good time for their kids to be healthy. And in the event full remote work to resume and parents have to work, how will the city help with respect to providing a community space for kids to continue learning when parents have to work from outside their home? Will there be something similar to emergency daycare? And the last one is from Ms. Wendell. She is wondering about considerations given to cohorting and familiarity of faces in the remote-only framework. What consideration has been given to social emotional development and was that social and emotional learning director integral in conceiving of this plan? And then how will public schools avoid establishing a caste system which prioritizes learning in manageable pods while remote learners learn in random online classrooms? Third, with what degree of confidence do we embark on having teachers tested regularly and results returning in a timely manner? Fourth, how will Arlington Public Schools endeavor to create a pandemic resilient learning framework? Have increased resources been allocated to training teachers for remote learning paradigms? How will Arlington Public Schools be held? How will students access the curriculum fully? How will teachers be empowered to ensure the students do indeed have full access? How will Metco students be supported? How will Arlington Public Schools manage the inevitability of asymptomatic or unwell children showing up to school buildings because their parents need to be at work? How will all children be kept safe and well? How will students be able to access the curriculum and learn alongside their peers and not be further marginalized and the mobilization plan when the next outbreak occurs? So all of those comments as well as a number of others that were not that people requested not to be shared have been sent to the members of the school committee and members of the administrative team. Ms. Hitzgerald, how are we doing? She should be available to speak. She should? She's just not on my screen because I probably have multiple. So go ahead. Christina. Oh, she raised her hand over here. Okay, I got her. Can you hear me now? Yeah, thank you. Okay. Thank you all the folks, teachers, staff, administrators who have been working I'm sure tirelessly so far this summer on creating some viable plans for our students. As a strata parent, I have a rising sixth grader, a rising third grader and a rising first grader as well as a preschooler at home. And obviously there are many, many questions but one question that I had was what is the threshold going to be to determine which plan we start the school year with as well as the threshold for determining when a plan needs to be switched all remote or can be switched to everyone back in the school. So I did get a chance to review the documents and appreciate having been able to see them and but didn't see that. Thank you. Thank you. So just before we get started with our first item, which is a visual arts presentation, I just wanted to share, we have a lot of participants tonight, which is great. I assume for many of you, this is your first school committee meeting, which is, is great. And we're really glad that you're here with us to partner in doing this really important and the way that we run our meetings is that we, you know, we, we move through our agenda, our school committee members speak. We don't, you know, we don't engage with members of the public. So I can see like there are a couple of hands raised, which is great, but we don't, we, we have a process for, for public comment where you would register, you would sign up in advance if you would, you know, want to make a written comment, many of which I read tonight. And if you wanted to speak and we did get, we did get responses from almost every, I think everybody who contacted us before four o'clock today. So we're going to go ahead and move forward to the first item, which is the Odyssey middle school visual arts presentation from Mr. Ardido and Ms. Ford. Hi everybody. Very nice to be here. I, we do have a little glitch in that the student Dan Gorbachev, Gorbanov, who helped so much with this video is not in the call for some reason. I don't know if he said he was. Did you expect him? Yes, we did. I see him. I can hear it. Hold on. Oh, good. We certainly want to hear. Excellent. Is he, is he a Ms. Morgan? Is he elevated as a panelist who he has opportunity to speak as well? I just unmuted him. Okay. So I think we're good. Can you check in Dan? Can you hear me? Hmm. I thought I heard his voice. Yeah. Yeah. I'm in here. Oh, great. Great. Excellent. Welcome. Welcome. Well, thanks everybody. I know we have a lot of other business to do. But this is a great opportunity to share a really special project with you that we've been working on since March. But so thank you, Dr. Bode, Dr. McNeil and school committee for giving us this, giving us this time. So what we're doing is we're presenting just a part of a video called Students Reflect. It contains hundreds of student works, some student voices, some staff voices, and a quick explanation of how it came about. Back in April, about six weeks into school closures, all 15 visual art teachers K through 12 agreed to give all art students in their Google art classrooms a common prompt. They would tell them the same thing. It was called also a call for art. The prompt was simply this, we invite every student to submit a visual artwork in any medium that reflects on the past six weeks of your life. And that was it. Of course, that extended to eight weeks, then 10 weeks. And you know the rest of the story. And then our extraordinary art teacher at Audison stepped in and took charge of the whole project. And that's Polly Ford. Polly. Thank you. Thanks for having us here tonight. Just as we are artists ourselves as art teachers, we know that making art is one of the best ways to process feelings and experiences. So we wanted our students to have the opportunity to process the emotional impact of the school closing and let them share that experience and process those challenges with the community and stay connected to that community that they were missing so much. And that wouldn't have happened without the help of our friend Dan Gorkinoff and students. Hi, so I'm Dan. I'm a rising junior at HHS and Ms. Ford and Mr. Agito contacted me back in June. And ever since then, we've been kind of working together to produce this video of over 800 student artworks made during the pandemic. And it's about 13 minutes long, but we kind of boiled it down for this meeting. And it also features music by a local Arlington band called Jim class. So I'm going to present it and I hope you enjoy working on it. Gotta do some technical while Dan is getting it up on the screen. Let me tell you how thankful we are to him. He has been working night and day on this. Since, like he said, since June. And he has been there every step of the way. He's been so responsive and so professional. He works with ACMI and he's going to be a great. Filmmaker someday. Can you also talk about the connection you had with Miss Bird, our director of social emotional learning and her contribution to this. Absolutely. We have reached out to Sarah bird who is our social emotional director. And she has been very supportive of this project because she has been supportive of art as a resource for our students to support them emotionally. And as an outlet. She really understood that the idea behind this project and the importance of it for kids to. Express and share. What their experience has been. And that is not an easy, but art is definitely something that we can be in our classes every day. As a. Memes for kids to. To communicate emotions. They really can't find words for us. So, and would you like me to share it? I can, I can share it. I have it. So I will go ahead and share my screen. Great. Thank you so much. Right. Just make sure you share the shortened version. So can everybody see my screen? Okay, here it is. And the sound as well. I have it turned all the way up. We are so happy to give you a glimpse into the hearts and minds of our volunteer student arts. We will continue to ask them through their art to tell us what they are thinking and feeling about their lives and about the world around them. Our goal for this project was to give students a way to reflect on the school closure. We asked them to share their experience of life away from school and friends and all their normal activities. We wanted students to understand that making art can help us to process things that can't always be put into work. One thing that I think is really amazing about all of this social distancing artwork is that we now have this wonderful record of what life is like at this time from many different perspectives. I like painting. It's because it just really brings out your personality and you can take anything you want. And I love art because you can take everyday trash items and make them into something amazing. Art has helped me because it helped me keep busy. Art has helped me find inspiration and creativity all around me and it's helped me do something that I really love to do and it's just fun. Art has helped me do this time. It helped me think about what happens in what's happening right now. You can use art to make other people happy because that's what it's really all about just making other people happy. Dan, you just did an awesome job. Yeah, so that's been the culmination kind of what we've been working on for the last two months. We hope you enjoy it and it's going to be sent out in a newsletter in these coming weeks. We will also post the entire unabridged version of this video on our website so all of our parents from our community can enjoy it. And I'd also like to thank Mr. Ardido for his leadership and the visual arts department and inspiring teachers and our students to share their vision and share their feelings and their experiences from this last spring, an outstanding job. Thank you very much to Daniel, Polly, David and all of our visual arts teachers throughout the district. Thanks again for this chance to share. Thank you very much. Thank you guys for coming. And on behalf of the committee, we really appreciate you moving us forward while centering the experiences of our students because I think that's a good way to start thinking about the pieces that we have to come, which is really important. So I'm just going to look around. Did any committee members have any comments? I see Mr. Schlifman. I'm hoping one, two, three because we're on multiple screens now. So Mr. Schlifman, go ahead. Thank you very much, Madam Chair. I hope that seeing that we've already let the cat out of the bag, so to speak and showing this video that we get the link to the YouTube up immediately because I know that folks who are watching this right now, myself included, would like to watch it again and again. There's just so much that went by so quickly. I want to look at the this beautiful art in a little slower approach. My usual question, because we're in a presentation mode of something or other, and while we have Mr. Ardito and his colleagues with us, what do you need from us? Wow. I wish I had a warning there. I would have compiled a massive list. We just need your, right now, we need your moral support. We need to know that you know, we're working very hard to make all of this work. I can speak for all the administrators that I'm getting to know so much better with the Google Meets that we're having on a daily basis that people are busting it to make, to get kids back safely to get this right. And I just need you to know that. Whether we can get kids back safely or not, I just want you to know that we had a focus group with recent alumni from AHS and one of the prevailing themes. They're talking about how wonderful the fine-forming arts were in Arlington and how much of a difference that made in their lives. This is a very important part of our curriculum, and I want to make sure we're supporting it even through the COVID crisis. I can't tell you how much that means to me. Ms. Ford, did you want to say something? Yeah, I'm just sad that, you know, knowing all that kids are dealing with, you know, in the past months and the months to come, that we can't stress enough how important it is that they have access to the arts, that we prioritize that in our scheduling and in our, I guess, in our budget, but most importantly, that they, you know, that it's available to all of them because it is what gets a lot of our kids to school, and it may be the thing that gets them to log on to school if that's where we are. But thank you for supporting it. And just to let everyone know, based upon Mr. Schlittman's question, the art, the visual art department and the teachers within it have very carefully and strategically put together an order where students throughout the district will have art kits. So we will be able to pivot between whatever type of plan that we decide that's going to be put in place. And that's the type of thinking and the preparation that has been going on within the visual arts department and all of our content areas, to be honest with you, thinking about how we can pivot through the different models should we need to. Thank you, Dr. McNeil. And thank you, Ms. Ford. And Mr. I'm going to Mr. Ardido and then Mr. Gorbinov Gorbinov. So thank you guys for being here tonight. We really appreciate it. The next item is the approval of the AFL CIO State Council 93 local 680 traffic supervisors contract. So I will, I guess, entertain a motion to open that for discussion. If there is any. Move to approve the contract as presented to us. Second. And to authorize the chair to sign it. Yes, thank you. Second the motion. Okay. Any discussion? I can't, there's so many people on the screen that I'm just going to do this really fast. So yell out if you have something you want to say, because there's, you're on two screens. Ms. What. I can't hear better. Okay, I don't have any comment either. So we're going to do a roll call vote, uh, Ms. Kardon. Yes. Yes. Uh, Mr. So the fall opening reopening update and draft plans. Dr. Bodie. Thank you and welcome to everyone who's attending maybe for the first time this evening. And I also want to thank Mr. Ardido and this Ford and all of the students, Mr. Mr. Gromenoff to for this wonderful, wonderful presentation. I saw I saw it recently and I was quite overwhelmed by it. So I understand Mr. Slickman's desire to want to see it a couple times. It's great. I also want to recognize that all of our principles are here pretty much everyone I can see in the in the grid. Who, along with all of our curriculum leaders as Mr. Ardido said have been working very hard over the last few weeks as we really delve into the complexity of what's before us and I remind people that as we We work on these plans and I do say that these that this is a is a lot of work and will continue to be a lot of work that we recognize that in the that we would all like to be back in school and normally next year. I've heard, you know, numerous teachers talk about how much they would like to return how much they would how much they Really miss students this last spring and would like very much to be able if it was all possible to resume teaching in the fall. So there's been a lot of work, a lot of discussions and I expect that that will continue as we move over the next few weeks. So this evening. I'm just going to give a first of an overview of the draft plans. I know there's a lot, a lot of questions that were brought up in the public participation this evening. I will address some of them, but I what I will do is also these will be questions that will help us develop the FAQ that we're going to to have for for parents and guardians and caretakers starting very soon. But there are a hierarchy of decisions that we need to engage in right now and some of the questions are a little bit further down the line in terms of the things that we need to address. Right now, the task before us is to sort of is to develop three draft plans is directed by the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education. The first of those plans is that we would have as many students as possible return in the fall, which is essentially can we have all of our students return in the fall in a safe way. The second is if is could we have students return in a modified schedule which we call hybrid schedule and that can have different forms to it. One of the original suggestions by the Department of Education was that we would have alternating weeks. So there are there are many versions of how that could operate. And the idea behind that is that we would not have all of our students in presently in school at the same time. The third option is that we would have an all remote which I know and many people been listening to over the last week or so and what's going on other parts of the country. So the one thing that I will say about these presentations tonight is that first of all there was a lot of thought that went into them, but we know that they there's still a lot of work to be done. These are drafts and we're looking for and have been seeking input ideas around this as we develop them over the next two weeks. The, the desi plan for districts right now is that we develop these three drafts and we submit the three drafts by July 31. Following that we will continue to work on the plans and and decide as a community. What is the operative plan for Arlington for opening of school. That is a decision final decision will rest with the school committee and we'll talk about that planning as we go forward. When we began this process of developing these draft plans. What we first needed to do was to analyze our schools just to see if what the capability of our facilities were for the guidelines that have been given to us by the department, which were based on recommendations. They had had from the medical community, both in Massachusetts as well as the CDC, they have recommended that at the very minimum we should have desks that are three feet apart. And we've looked at that at issue that possibility in all of our schools, but in addition to that they have also clarified that in order for students to have mass breaks take the mass off. Have lunch or have a snack. They must be, they must be positioned six feet apart. So let me go back to the three feet and give you our analysis that we have, we have found in our schools and starting with the elementary schools. Yes. We, we could have all students back in our classrooms if they were seated three feet apart. Where the problem comes in is when you now have the six foot requirement for lunch snacks and mass breaks. Many of our cafeterias might only be able to seat anywhere from 17 to the low 20s. And so we would also have to expand into gyms as well and have, and even with that have multiple lunches. Probably lunches would start very, you know, sort of mid morning. So there are a lot of constraints in our elementary schools. Doesn't mean it's not possible. It's just that there are a lot of constraints that we would be dealing with if we would have all of our students at the elementary level return to school. At Gibbs, what we have found is that that is not as easy. There are variability in the classroom sizes and in order for all students this year there would be 505 students returning to Gibbs. We would need to use every available room in the school in order to do that and also hire more teachers. We also then have a similar issue with respect to lunches that we would have to use the cafeteria and the gym and have multiple lunches in order for everyone to be in the building. Keep in mind, I'm just talking about the technical parts of this right now. I'm not talking about anything other than physical space. At the Addison Middle School, yes, we would be able to have the classroom space for desks being three feet apart. Could we have what would happen with lunches while we have sort of a similar problem in terms of lunches and in terms of multiple lunches and spacing. At the high school, it's not as clear cut because one of the other important issues with all of the classrooms that we would use is the ventilation in the rooms. And while we, in my letter to to parents, guardians and staff just recently, I talked about the efforts of the facilities department to make sure that the ventilation would meet the standards we would require. But we're doing we're doing a third party study right now at the high school. The high school presently you uses about 90 in any given block of the day uses anywhere from 99% of their classrooms. If any of our classrooms have to go offline, just in terms of usage of the classrooms for three foot apart, that may not be possible in terms of the schedule and the number of rooms that are needed. That still is data that we are, we are waiting for in this analysis. So we have looked at the technical parts of this, that that's really the first thing that we were asked to do and will be submitting information along those lines. But then we had to take a look at, you know, what are our guiding principles anything that we would give us a plan for the for the fall really needs to have it as core. What are the guiding principles and one I've just already mentioned and that is, you know, the health and safety of our students and staff. Another one is that we need to look at equity. Are we going to be able to have the learning supports for all the students that we have. We need to look at how we're going to support our students and for the social emotional well being. We've had some discussion a little bit of previewing of that and with our this our project. And, you know, because whatever, whatever we do their experience in school in the fall is going to be very different than it would be if we would normally return because there are some essential things that are going to have to be part of their experience in school. We also need to be taking a look at be flexible as we and fluid and nimble as we develop these plans because I think anybody who is part of this meeting and certainly been watching the news. It is hard to know where we're going to be four weeks, six weeks from now in with respect to the to the virus. So there's a lot of possibilities that still remain and whatever planning that we do our plans need to be able to be very adaptable and flexible, because we may not have a lot of notice in terms of what we might need to do. And the there, I can go into more detail about some of the is a multi page document from the Department of Education that outlines all the different kinds of protocols and in situations that might arise if a student or faculty member contracted covid so that's a discussion for a later time but we also have to make sure that whatever we put in place has sustainability some coherence and consistency as we look at these plans across the district as well as you know within different levels. And the other very important one is we recognize that we have to be able to provide the professional development that is going to be necessary to in order to have any of these plans is going to be it's a shifting a shift in the way teachers have taught if we have classrooms where there are students that have to face forward three feet apart wearing masks. That makes it very difficult to have the kind of group work or stations that we have that are that are very much intrinsic to how teachers teach today for teachers that may be whatever we're moving into a remote. How do we continue. How do we engage students in remote classrooms. How do we structure a remote lesson so there are a myriad of issues that we need to address and how do we incorporate social emotional learning into our curriculum and to what how we organize the day. So there are significant issues in that regard that we need to address. So though one of the things that we you know going back to what would the experience in the classroom need to be given some of the guidelines that we have around around safety for our students and one is that wearing masks is going to be a very important part of any plan. And I think that that's going to even be true. We have six foot distances because we want to be very cautious. Now whether we would in a six foot apart in the classroom environment. These are these are issues that will be explored more in the weeks ahead. But we know that right now there's a lot of concern both in part of parents and part of staff around safety issues. So this is something that we are going to be very careful about in maintaining certain protocols in our schools. We also know that we're going to try to do as much just saying cohort. So while we may have had students you know remixing for different subjects during the course of the day to the extent that we can limit that that is going to be absolutely essential. There is as we move from elementary to middle to high school that becomes a little bit more difficult just based on the way those levels are we also need to know that we're going to be using all of our core spaces as much as possible. And I was talking about lunches. I mean those are going to be areas that the gym are going to be areas that are probably going to be used for lunch for a large portion of the day. And so we're going to have to work with how we're going to have physical education and music and art which are all very essential in our education. We also know that kids are going to have to wash their hands more and use hand sanitizers and making sure that that is part of our protocols every day. So there are going to be different significant differences in the experience in school and we have students that are coming back after six months of really when we're in September, six months from being in school. And that in of itself is going to require a lot of re educating to what being in school means. And that is something that we will also need to address. I want to acknowledge that there is a lot of concern on the part again a part of parents and when we had the survey in June, we know that there's a lot of parents who might be interested in having their having a remote option. And I know there's a lot of questions of what that's going to look like. I was going to be structured how the there are a lot of questions with that that still remain to be worked out, but we will periodically being able to give more information as we do that work. As I said, there's a hierarchy of decision making that needs to go on at this time. And right now we need to figure out what is going to be our first operative plan for opening in the fall. That decision will be made in early August. And then, well, I shouldn't even say then it's not a linear process, believe me, we'll be working on a lot of these issues as we go along, but the, the level of sort of dig in is going to be easier to do right now we're trying to do three different things actually sort of four different things as we're as we're looking at all of the different things that we need to consider in the next two weeks. So we've been looking for input. We're looking for school committees input this evening. We've been talking with teachers listening sessions school council members have been asked we were certainly going to let people aware of these and get comments next week we will have a survey for parents. An opportunity for comment but we're interested in really getting up a much firmer idea of how many parents might want to choose a remote option. And I know there was a question earlier in the the evening about what will that what will be the timeframe for that and there will be there will be a time frame in which what that is that is a choice that will be binding for a period of time. We have not decided yet what that period of time is going to be but it will be we we cannot have a lot of movement in and out because of the the potential disruption of that. So that decision for parents will not be asked to be made until a little bit later in August but right now is really helpful to us to know what that level of interest is. We also know that a lot of our teachers are very concerned. I I we we've heard this in our listening sessions and so we're very aware of that and want to make sure that again going back to our central guiding principles here that that that that safety is very important to all of us. All of us are going to be in schools. We want them to be safe and we want students and staff to feel that way too. But I also have to acknowledge that you know we can't guarantee it. There's going to be some level of risk but we are going to do our very best to to minimize it for everyone. So I thought that I can come back later after this part of it and talk a little bit about transportation after school and so forth some of some of the items that were were asked about but we have our elementary principal and we have our elementary principals here middle school and high school and Mr. McEnany is going to talk for a few minutes about the elementary plan and then we'll move by level up. All right thank you Mr. McEnany. Actually can we I just we didn't introduce our elementary principals and I think they're all here. They might be on two screens but I just wanted to make sure that we did that before we started. We had Madame Pierre Maxwell earlier who is new to us and new to the Gibbs which is very exciting and I saw Mr. Amadi although I think he slipped to my next screen but I think he's here. So he is our new new to Arlington principal at Pierce School and then on this screen I see Miss Parrots and Mr. McEnany and Mr. Hanna and who's on my other one. I see and I'm going to get Stephanie's last name wrong. I see Miss Z who is here and phenomenal and Miss Donato and if I missed you you have to wave because there's a lot of boxes on here. I think that's it. So thank you guys so much for being here. Mr. McEnany. Thank you Chair Morgan. Good evening again. I'm Mark McEnany. I'm the principal at the Bishop elementary school. I want to thank you for the invitation to be here tonight to outline the elementary learning plan options for the fall. I want to thank Dr. Bode for her comprehensive introduction and preview of the district's plan and where we're going with all this. But before I get into the key points of each plan that we've worked on so far I feel there's a need to going to mention how we got to this point. So as Dr. Bode stated we've we've been tasked with or by the Department of elementary and secondary education with the creation of these three plans with the understanding that Dr. Bode will ultimately provide a recommendation to this committee who will then make the final decision on which plan we will follow in the fall. There was a huge amount of collaboration with the administrative team with the guiding principles in mind that Dr. Bode had just mentioned. And again I want to emphasize that the health and safety of everyone involved in in this effort is paramount and first and foremost. So moving forward our intention is to meet with with representative stakeholders within each of the schools. We also plan to continue to create opportunities for the wider community to engage in dialogue around these three learning programs. Before anybody is asked to commit to one form of one plan or another a more detailed information will need to be shared. That would include health and safety protocols transportation and facilities preparation and sounds like Dr. Bode has a little bit of information that should be able to share later after this presentation. And finally these plans have been shared with all of our teachers and our staff and a few of our stakeholders to include school advisory councils diversity inclusion groups and leadership teams. Their feedback and contributions have been and are critical to our success and to our to our teaching staff and our faculty. I speak for my colleagues when I thank them for their commitment and dedication during this time. So what we've done here is we've created this macro view of which only includes the most important and a broad framework of each plan. So we are now past this point and we are going to start working on more of the micro details that each one of these plans present. So as I outline each of these three plans these factors are consistent throughout the maintaining three to six feet of social distancing across the school day. Wearing face masks and or protective face coverings during the school day with scheduled mass breaks built into our schedule. Students and staff will also remain as Dr. Bode mentioned in small classroom cohorts with limited interaction between the different cohorts or classrooms. And then there'll be the utilizations of the classrooms for all core instructions instructions excuse me to potentially include specials like art physical education music library and and lunch. And then last regularly washing hands across the school day and frequently disinfecting all used surfaces more than once during the day. So the first of the three plans would be would be a full return. So that's all students all staff return into the building. So this will allow for 18 to 24 students per classroom at a three foot minimum distancing for the day. And then during lunch and mass breaks that would be a six foot minimum distance requirement, which does pose some logistical and space issues. Although this provides the most provides the most for in person teaching opportunities. It's still the most challenging environment to maintain the health and safety measures. The second high is the hybrid program where students would be coming half time in person and half time remote where that would allow nine to 12 students in a classroom at six feet minimum distancing throughout the day. So it does give us a little more flexibility as far as movement throughout the school. It does offer an improved ability to maintain health and safety measures. And we feel that it's a compromise between the in person and the remote learning. And then when remote when learning remotely on those half days or those I mean sorry half time days students will receive live instruction. They'll receive recorded or digital content and be assigned independent work. And then the last option that we have planned for is a fully remote program where all students in the elementary schools early public schools would be taught remotely by in person staff. While acknowledging that this is the least advantageous for learning and social emotional report support. And we only want to use this only if the public health concerns preclude in person learning. So we are at this point. Again it's a it's a macro view. And for every question there's 100 of them to follow and we're you know we're prepared to bring our groups together on a frequent basis we have a schedule a series of meetings with all of our stakeholders plan for this next month to meet at least weekly to really start ironing out the details of any given plan. So again, thank you for giving this group the opportunity to outline these three potential plans for the fall. Do you do can we just go through all of them and then have questions. Yes. Okay. Miss Pierre Maxwell I that's there you are. Good evening everyone. It is my pleasure to join the school committee and my colleagues to give you an update to where we are with the plans for gives as principle my mini discuss. This is where we are with coven and it's those three plans going to depend on how we move forward when we get to the final say from Dr body and I believe from the commissioners of education. So, our plans really take into consideration the social emotional learning, our core values for give school, the academic rigor progress based on learning resourcefulness for students thinking about their mindset and their social emotional learning, the need of our community, including our students, our parents, our teachers, and making sure that everyone can return safely to school when we do return. We do have three plans. The first plan is the chance to have all of our 505 students returning into the building. In particular, we have some very challenges that are specific to our school because of the structure of the building how the building is organized to get all the students and we would need to use our cafeteria our gymnasium for lunch. And so that would automatically take away that space where our students will be able to have physical education. We also with keeping the children three feet apart, we would need to hire an extra learning community made of four core classroom teachers, science, math, social studies, ELA and seven point two teachers adding a six learning community, we would need an extra point to art point to tech point to computer science point to facts point to music and point to P. And that's because unlike perhaps artisan or the high school, none of our class or most of our classroom cannot have equal number of students so we have classroom with the three minimum of three feet apart would take as little as 11 students where we have some classroom where we could sit up to 21 students. We would not equally exchange those students from one classroom to another classroom. So the children would have to stay steady where they are because one room does not equivalent to another room in sizes, which the reason why we would need to add another learning community and other teachers to service the children in order to that and of course that would come with some extra expenses in other area, such as we would need 100 chairs and desk to sit students in the cafeteria and the gymnasium for lunch. We would need, we will be able to use our locker so we'll need pockets for the back of the seats so children can be able to have their personal resources because they cannot share because of coven we wouldn't encourage students to share materials. So quite a few expenses we would have to incur in thinking about bringing all of our families and five students in. In addition to thinking about the small details we looked at our bathrooms for example we have a boys bathroom on each floor. We would need to add portable part of party because we could not let more than one or two students into the restroom so the concern would be children would have to wait so long they could have accidents so it would take a lot of expenses to be able to get all of our students into the building if we were to be able to have all the kids in. Can we fit them all physically in yes, but does that create the environment we want for inclusivity to have a diversity and how we place our students as all the kids in we would be forced to really have them all by their languages or by their certain classroom which remove the whole inclusiveness of mixing our kids where they get to interact with each other. So these are some of the challenges with bringing all 500 the hybrid model which is the second part of the plan look a little better because we would have about 253 students in a hybrid model that would automatically allow us to have a little more space to sweat the kids out in most places at six feet apart and then we would need not to have six lunches rotation we could still do three lunch rotation because now we would have the space and in the hybrid models the students would be able to see two days in one day in the middle on Wednesday we're hoping to have that day where would be all remote and then two days for the other groups so they would alternate it's very similar to what I think the elementary school is considering using the the small details still still to be taught out once we talk with our staff our department heads to make sure that we're taking every single aspect of the plan into consideration and certainly the last plan if in fact we are forced to go all remote will be the hybrid in the remote part of it being conducted the way we did in the spring what we're looking at doing differently and better in the spring is that we would have more of a rigorous curriculum for the kids to receive their learning and to make sure that they do have more of a synchronous teaching and learning happening and that we see that all the arts and technology the foreign the world language everything is offered to the children so the plan again it's a very very early stage of its first draft we have not had the chance yet to meet all the department heads for the district so they can really help us tweak the plan and we hope that sometime next week to meet with our teachers so they can see the plan and give us feedback and speak to their concern or some things we may not have looked into and finally we hope to meet with our parents so they too can have a chance to view the plans post questions and for us to be able to we find it and taking everything into consideration. Thank you for the opportunity to present the first draft. Mr. Merringer. Thanks everyone. My name is Brian Merringer I'm the principal at the Odyssey Middle School. And like the principles before me I think we're really concerned about student and staff safety. And so we're going to try to do as many things no matter what the three plans that we engage in. We're going to make sure that that's forefront in our in our minds and important so we will be setting up you know stations for washing hands hand sanitizing will be having hallways that will be going one way. There's a lot of just kind of safety precautions will take with any of the three plans. Before I talk a little bit about three plans I just want for many of you who are listening remotely you might not be familiar with the Odyssey and so I do want to say that we have a seven period schedule. We have about 940 students projected to come through the door hopefully at some point next year and we divide those kids up into what we call learning communities it's about 110 120 students so hopefully when I don't get too far into the details today but a seven period day about 110 students per learning community. The first model that we're looking at would be an in person model if students would come in they would be on a learning community team. They would have their four core classes English math science and social studies with their learning community when they went off team into art PE chorus technology subjects like that. Instead of previous years in which they would mix with other kids from the grades on other learning communities they would stay in the same cohort because we're trying to limit the exposure they would have to other students. The biggest issue that we probably have we can fit everyone in the building at three feet apart. However, chorus band and orchestra would be very challenging we'd have to figure that out. We would probably have to do that remotely. I know the music department is looking at various ways to make sure that those programs continue. We have an incredible amount of people in our chorus band and orchestra which I think really speaks highly to our music program but we're obviously you know we have 120 kids I think signed up in sixth grade chorus. We don't have spaces for that. So we have to figure that around. We could get all of the students in the second model that we're looking is a hybrid model and there's various plans that we could do with a hybrid model. Like the elementary school and the Gibbs we would split kids into kind of roots and there's various models I will give you just an example of a couple. One would be student a if you were in that cohort you would come to class on Monday you would go to your seven periods and then the next day on Tuesday you would be home working on independent work. You might have a band or a chorus session but pretty much you're on your own on Tuesday there might be some videos that you can access Wednesday everyone would be remote again on Thursday. You would go back to school for seven periods so in the hybrid you're in school twice a week and you're working remotely at least one day and two days probably independently. Now what you could do a little different model of a hybrid is you could say in we're going to go in class for English math science and social studies. I'll pick those four subjects you go in as a student and you have those four classes they would be longer they might be 70 minutes or so. Then on your second day on Tuesday you would have synchronous meetings with your other teachers with your gym teacher with your technology teacher so you would have more of a structured day on that Tuesday. You would have remote learning on Wednesday and then Thursday you would go back in with English math science and social studies there's pros and cons to that. There is also models where you would have students that would go in on Monday and Tuesday work remotely on their third excuse me on Wednesday Thursday and Friday or you'd work remotely Monday Tuesday Wednesday and then you would go into class Thursday and Friday. So there's definitely many models. The core is that you have half the kids going into school you can keep six feet distance and that you still have contact with your teachers. But there's various models to look at depending on kind of what we would think would be the community needs and the needs of our teachers. The last model that we looked at is a remote model what I think we heard from many families is they were looking for more synchronous learning. And so we would have to set that up where teachers would really be contacting students at a specific time and having lessons. What I would think would probably be the best option here is that you would have four classes on one day and three classes on the other classes would be 70 minutes. But I don't think it would be an engagement for 70 minutes. So what I could say is you have a science class. And so you go to that science class. A teacher runs you maybe through a lesson for 15 20 minutes and then says look could the class now go and work on an assignment or I want you to get in groups and all of a sudden I want you to come back 20 minutes later and we're going to read convene the class. So there's various ways that you could split up that 70 minute walk. So overall we want kids back. I wish we could repeal obviously the coronavirus and get kids in. I think all three models have its positive and negatives but I do want to assure people that we are working to the best of our ability to make sure whatever model we pick we give your kids the best possible education. Thank you. And Dr. Janker you are also here. Thank you. So thank you all very much for your time and thank you for all the questions. I've appreciated the questions that have been coming to us through surveys conversations. We've had meetings with multiple multiple rounds of meetings with teachers conversations students were planning some small group conversations with parents as well as a conversation with students in the next couple of weeks. As well as surveys to get more feedback. So Dr. Bodie warned me to be fast because I usually have a lot to say and you can tell that I have a lot to say because this is a nine page memo and it's all bullet points and every one of those bullet points could be fleshed out and probably a page of description. So what I'm going to give is a 30,000 foot overview of a 30,000 foot memo and I'm going to try to be out in five minutes so that she'll know that I can actually do it. So we've had a lot of participation and input from a lot of different folks and our focus from the beginning has been to try to balance four key things as represented in the guiding principles you've already heard. First and foremost it has to be the safety of staff and students as well as the safety of the community because we have an impact on the epidemiology of all of Arlington. Second, social emotional well-being. If the students don't feel safe, if teachers don't feel safe and if they don't feel emotionally safe or cared for, nobody's going to engage under any one of these forms. So it's most important that we have that. Next, equity. We really need to make sure that we are serving the needs of all of our students in terms of providing support for most vulnerable students as well as providing challenge and opportunity to all of our students. And last but not least, we have our educational goals and we really want to make sure we meet those. So our plan we've been trying to build is a flexible plan that allows us to provide a rich educational program while maintaining safety, social emotional health and equity. So what we did rather than having three plans to some extent was to come up with one overarching plan because we have every expectation that at some point we may end up being all remote. At some point we might have to be hybrid and eventually one will hope we'll be able to move back to school more over a period of time. So what we wanted was an overarching form. In addition, the overarching form gives the teachers a vessel to plan into. It makes a big difference if a teacher's meeting four times for 55 minutes or four times for 80 minutes or running over a full year or running over a semester. Those are the chunks that they're going to build their content into. And so we've had a lot of conversations. We looked at a six period year long program. We looked at a four period with modules that some could go longer. But in the end, what we came down to is what's called a four by four semester block. This is something that actually many schools in the region use already. Cambridge uses it. The school actually came from uses it. It has many advantages and it has some disadvantages. And so the overarching model is that students will have four 80 minute blocks, four days a week for half a year. And that there's four blocks in which they can take classes for half a year. So English would run for half a year twice as long. And then there's four blocks for the second half of the year. The advantage of that is many fold, right? One, it has to do with this cohort issue. At the elementary school they're talking about cohorts where a group of students stays together all day. In the high school with a number of multigrade classes, electives, folks taking different kinds of classes, that's really very difficult to do. So what we focused on instead is what we're calling classroom contacts. It's the number of kids in the course of a day that I as a teacher or I as a student am going to interact with. Because it's that first level of contact that we're most worried about in terms of contact tracing and in terms of minimizing spread. So going through the four models in an all remote model, there is no contact, but the advantage there is that you have four blocks. Students are taking in split into cohorts, teachers may flex across the cohorts because the kids are remote. But the general idea would be that a student would take two classes each day alternating so that they would have an 80 minute block, then a break, an 80 minute block, and then a break of synchronous class. And then the next day they'd have an 80 minute block and then a break, an 80 minute block and then a break. And so that gives us the ability to have some focused time, synchronous education during the remote education. It allows the teacher to divide their class of 20 students, let's say, into two groups of 10 or 11 students in order to be able to run those synchronous meetings effectively. As you can see from this, it's really hard to run a meeting with 30 people on the screen. If we move from there to a hybrid model, now we have classroom contacts. So the idea there would be that half the school would be coming on Monday and Thursday or possibly Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Friday. That says yet to be determined. But that half the school would be coming Monday, Thursday, and half the school would be coming Tuesday, Friday. So you'd have half your class at a time in front of you for 80 minutes in the class. That allows us to have six feet of separation in the classroom. It gives us a little more flexibility around moving around and interacting within the class. Those students, of course, would be masked and hand-watching and all the other precautions. And then the other half of the class is independent. They're at home or potentially in school getting support if necessary. And those students are working remotely on the work. So teachers are providing them with lectures for additional content and individual independent work. And then under the last option, which is everybody in, then the classes can meet four days a week for 80 minutes in person. Now they're three feet apart and they're facing forward and they're wearing masks. So those are basically the three levels. And the challenge we run into in the high school is if you haven't noticed, we have a building project going on because we have an old building. And the reality is there's a lot of issues around sort of space and ventilation, a lot of substandard classrooms. So we are limited by this situation in any of the in-school options using only classes with really effective external ventilation. As Dr. Bode talked about, we've got an outside contractor coming in to review the ventilation and airflow in every single space. But the expectation is that we will lose the use of some of our interior spaces and some of our large interior spaces. Most definitely the pit will not be available to us and possibly even old hall will not be available to us because there's no exterior ventilation. They're questions about the theater. And so there will be some limitations in terms of space. And as we've said before, we were already around 90% capacity using 90% of our classes every day. And our enrollment is looking like it's going up. We have 1,520 students currently signed up to come to Arlington in the fall. So that's going to put a real challenge on things if we have to fit everybody into the building. Let me see what I forgot. I think that's it. Thank you very much. Did I come in under five minutes, Dr. Bode? I didn't put my stopwatch on. You did well. Thank you. I'm just going to touch on a couple of things and there may be questions that come up. We just got last night, late last night, updated information on transportation and operations of buildings. Just not really had any time to data digest this. But what I can say about transportation is that the model that is being given to us would be a little bit different than what we had heard a couple of weeks ago. But it still would be the B1 student in a seat and then in the diagonal seat, the B1. So it's more of a crisscross than you would only have one, every other seat. There's more information on that. But certainly that has some effects on what we're doing both in special education transportation and some of our own, our medical transportation as well as in districts. The after school programs that the elementary and it gives, we are still trying to plan for those as well and taking into consideration all these considerations with a plan for the after school. Clearly that, you know, the students that would be in the after school program, we were, for example, in the hybrid would be not everyone. We would have half of a school in the program that day if they were, if they were actually part of the after school program. So that is an area that is still under some planning some discussion and I can give you more information later. As a question came about ampm you've heard alternating days or or paired days we early on did not because we talked about the ampm at the elementary or for any school. The issue is the cleaning between the the the morning in the afternoon and that might pose a that poses significant obstacle. Um, I think that maybe this is a good time to move forward with some questions and I think some of the other questions that may have come up will surface and turn this back over to you miss Morgan. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you team for that. That's a lot, a lot to think about. Um, so I think we'll so we may end up doing to go through is here I do want to make sure that all of our members have an opportunity to ask their questions and I suspect that there will be, you know, a lot in the responses so if we need to come back around I don't want people to feel that this is their only, only opportunity so let's start with miss exton. Thank you. Um, so I wanted to start by thanking all of you for being here and sharing all of these plans. It's been a lot of work. It's very clear. Um, I guess my first question is, um, I know later in the agenda there's a report about the special ed, um, special ed regulations or recommendations from from desi is there something are we going to hear something separate at that point, or because I guess I'm not seeing a lot about what the program is going to look like for students on IEP students and special programming SLCs. And I know that that was part of what desi was looking for. Ms. Elmar, can you tell us a little bit more about what you what you have for us in your piece or if we should take those kind of questions now. Um, so the piece that I presented was the update on the desi guidance so it's not specific to Arlington. My understanding was the request was to kind of distill what the desi has said to answer miss exton. Um, that, you know, once we decide on the plan, we will have iterations for each of those plans. But, you know, once we decide on the plan, then we can talk about what special ed delivery delivery will look like. Um, students in foster care students, you know, in our macro program but we needed to get these bigger plans in place first so we are not tonight speaking specifically to special ed but in the presentation I have will share what the expectations are from the desi. Um, I would just add one thing which is really additive to what Miss Elmar said and that is we are we are considering the possibility that some of our students may you know, if we were in a hybrid situation that they may be in more than other students that those are considerations that we are thinking about. Um, and that would include some of our ELL students as well, but we it's not as though we're not talking about this but we really have to adjust that those discussions to what plan we're going to have. Okay, I would, I get maybe I misunderstood what was expected to go to death the next Friday but I thought that there was sort of specific a specific ask for how the needs of how special education and high needs students needs were going to be met in each of these three plans based on um, you know, can they wear masks and they're they need you know remote learning is not working for them and so I think you know that needs to be something that needs to be added to this before we can send this to desi. It will be that was not the charge that we received tonight though in order of these initial presentations so before they go to the desi there is a subset that is for your special education plan your ELL plans. As teams finalize these we will add to them. I will add that I'll talk a little bit about what the expectations are when I present later on. Thank you. And another thing I've just been thinking about is the synchronous piece. You know some of the plans had it a little more fleshed out than than others and I would encourage for example an elementary to think a little bit more about the details. You know it says in talks about like five hours of synchronous learning I'm assuming that you don't mean they're going to be there you know continuously for five hours but again I think fleshing out some of what that might look like for students. You know again you know other plans have had like certain subjects and what's going to be remote and what's going to be in person and I'd have liked to have seen a little bit more of that in this this first draft. Thank you for your patience there's a lot of a lot of questions and I don't want to take them away. So my last question I guess is do we have to do sort of a consistent model for K to 12 like does it have to be this two days Wednesday off two days for every for all grades you know I know from the surveys the younger grades definitely struggled more with the remote learning. I don't know if it was ever a discussion to do something where some students or some grades were coming more frequently high schoolers who may also just in terms of safety and the virus being together less frequently. I don't know if that was ever something that was discussed. It has been discussed and the short answer is that it doesn't have to be exactly cookie cutter to the scent that we can have consistency and coherency throughout the district. We want to do that. The high school is very different than K8 and yet there's still difference between elementary and the middle schools as well. So it's very possible that we could have a very different a different program and there's there is no requirement that they have to be exactly the same as far as the issue of whether we would you know maybe spread out among schools or only have certain grades come. Those were all discussed in the early the early stages of this as we were planning the last couple weeks, but the after after discussion we've come back to having school stay together in in their buildings and rather than people say well why can't the high school just go all remote and we move classes over to the high school. Those were different ideas that were floated out so we have looked at various options and what you're seeing is the first draft that you still has layers of more detail that need to be had, but there are other things that we also had not gone forward with as an option. Okay, I just would be interested in having that sort of stay on the table or something to sort of think about because, you know, as a kindergarten teacher and again looking at the surveys, the, you know, pre K to two. The remote learning is really, really challenging. I'm thinking I'm all set for now miss Morgan. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Cardin. Thank you and thanks to the team for all the efforts so far. I guess my first question is about the hybrid model and the supervision or lack thereof of the students who are who are not in schools and not on the Wednesday but on their off days. You've got the classroom teacher at the elementary level who is has half her class in school. You have at the middle school and high school level teachers that have other students, you know, presumably for most of the day in school. So there wasn't a whole lot of detail or sounds like it's mostly going to be independent work but there's some opportunities for some supervision but it's not clear who would be doing that supervision. At any of the levels, are we going to be able to get more detail? Is that something that more staffing can help with? Can we redirect, you know, reading teachers or other teachers to help with that? What is or are these days really going to be independent study days? I will let the principals also respond to that question too. Yes, we have thought about what could be what could happen on a remote day. Would there be more potential small groups that could happen? I think it's going to be challenging at the elementary level and just speaking there and I really would love to have people join in on this. I think it's going to be challenging if we're going to keep a cohort together how we manage to do that completely. Because different students have academic support, different students have other kinds of reading support and that's a possibility of what might be possible. We also have the looking at the instrumental music. We didn't even really talk about that today in terms of how that might operate next year. It's been fairly successful and a remote option. That's also something that might be a possibility. The one thing about hybrid and certainly it's true about remote all is that the need for partnership with parents is going to continue. That is just the reality of any of these plans that there's going to be some level of supervision that would have to occur. And as was mentioned for the early grades that is much more challenging involves much more support. It's not been easy for parents and it's not been easy for teachers often to be able to have a large group together at those ages. So we recognize that. And as I said, I think it's a good point that you bring up and it's something that we are certainly have talked about and we'll definitely continue to talk about. Would anybody. Kate. So my name is Kate Parrots. I'm the principal at Hardy. So I think, you know, go connecting that with the previous questions and comments to is that we certainly do know that there are pieces of that remote learning that didn't work, especially for our youngest students. And I think as we've had our conversations, you know, we think about our neediest and our most vulnerable. And those conversations have also involved those children who are our youngest learners. So I think that the time and attention that we pay to them and their needs is really very, very important. So please know that that's something that we're talking about, but these are these are complicated. And so finding the fine details of that is difficult to put forth at this particular time, but some of the things we're thinking about are the fact that we do have many, many very talented educators in the Arlington Public Schools and they're not all classroom teachers. So this is going to be the kind of thing that turns into already is a real team effort. Of course, the challenge there is not exposing anyone, adults or students to too many other people. So we really got to start to think outside the box about what that looks like, because you're right, a classroom teacher can't be teaching live in a classroom and then also be monitoring all day. The children that are at home in a hybrid model, which means that there needs to be some ability to team our teachers in a way that is safe in order to meet that need because we know the youngest children especially need that time and attention and guidance in order to try to be more independent. One of the nicer things about the hybrid model in the scenario of kind of half on and half off during the week is that the classroom teacher also has the ability to in person set the kids up for success for their learning in the following days. And if they're able to have some kind of check in with the kids in the morning, then maybe they can be a little bit more independent. We've also learned a whole lot about what are the kinds of things that children can do independently. So I think there'll be a mix of, you know, that live instruction. There'll still be some recorded elements to the day. There'll be independent practice. But also that the live piece might not necessarily solely be the classroom teacher or it could be a classroom teacher, but it could be a different classroom teacher in a recorded way. I got some great feedback from a parent this morning telling me that during the time of closure this past spring that at the grade level. The different teachers had taken turns, you know, recording and so one of the teachers was the writing teacher one of the teachers was the math teacher, you know, social studies, and that this particular student really connected and identified with that teacher as the writing teacher and felt very confident and comfortable in doing writing with that person, even though they'd actually never met in person. So I think there's a lot that we can do to meet the needs of the students based on, you know, what we've learned from the past, but we're not at the place yet where we can say to you confidently, this is exactly how it's going to happen, because there are still so many, so many unanswered questions. I hope that helps. So I'll go next kind of with the the divvying up. You know, I think this as Kate would say is evolving like I think every day I feel like we're getting closer to an answer but it's frustrating because every time you get closer to an answer we have more questions. You know, I could see at the middle school level if you went in for one day, the next day could be certain courses that we couldn't teach in person, whether that's a course course or a orchestra or something like computer science so we have computer science which is an elective. I could see doing that on a student's off day. It's very easy to do online a computer science course. We could also split the courses and have some that are only remote and some that are in person. So I guess when we're looking at a hybrid situation, the question is how many courses are you coming in at the middle school level to be in person, how long are those courses. And then the next day you independently working or are we giving you other courses that you could take online or remotely. And, you know, I think, as I said computer science seems like a natural fit to do, you know, just remote. You know, I think we're going to have to talk to parents about what they think is important to do in person and what they could do online so we're looking at a lot of different possibilities. I think as an administrator speaking for hopefully some of us, one of the big factors that we don't know is we're making these plans and looking forward is how many parents are going to send their kids to school. I would have said a couple of weeks ago a lot more parents were willing to send their kids to school. I think that is changing a little bit from parents that I'm hearing from increasingly through emails or phone calls, they're being more concerned with kind of the, you know, the upticks in Florida. I also, you know, worry about my staff and how comfortable they feel. So there's so many variables right now that, you know, I'm hoping we'll get more direction from the greater community next week. But as far as keeping kids invested on days that they're not in school, I would like to think that we would have some plans and we would have some course offerings for kids. I wanted to thank Miss Exton for the question I should share with you today as we were reviewing the Gibbs plan. When I was meeting with the special ed coordinator, Miss Stephanie Grineer and our assistant principal, we were quite aware that the plan has not defined yet. What are we doing with our ELL students? Where are our special education students, our intervention group and many of the things that we do. But the focus was really on the tier one to set up for the whole school looking at it from a tier one lens. What do we need to be able to get all the children in school physically looking at how do we organize that, how do we make that happen. But that conversation is definitely on the forefront. And we do have several meetings scheduled with the different stakeholders that's going to help us think outside the box to make sure that not only we're following the IEP plans and the services that we do to the children, but also keeping the whole essence of the experience of middle school alive. Give specifically is organized so that our sixth graders come in a transitional place where they can really learn how to appreciate being a sixth grader so we can developmentally focus on their needs. So in that tier one aspect of the plan, that's some of the stuff we focus on. And of course the next step now is to meet with our directors of different department, meet with the special ed department, meet with our teachers and meet with the parents. So we're not making these decisions in isolation. We can have all the thinking hats on for our people with all the different skills. So by the time we have been told this is the definite plan, we would have already taught out all these specificity so we can have a plan that is quite inclusive and address your concern that you just presented. It is not forgotten. It's just in the process of happening. Well, I can go quickly up the high school level. I mean first Miss X and thank you for your question. As I said before each bullet could be a memo and there, there are a few bullets that say IEP programs will be per IEP but the bottom line on that is part of the design of this program. It leaves the slots in there and programming in there to be able to provide special ed 504 and ELL services. Some of them might have to be changed in terms of schedule but we can provide those under all three of the models. Obviously the all remote is one of the most challenging and there may be ways to do that as well. So just a quick rundown. First the basic idea of having three in terms of how you keep kids engaged while they're remote. The model of having semester long classes where there's more focus on fewer number of classes is in part really is very much focused on that because it means teachers are only responsible for 40 to 60 kids so they can do a lot more follow up and engagement with those students to students are only responsible for three or four classes. So again they're really focused on those. We're really looking at doing you know we've learned a lot from the spring. We've learned a lot from the 40 MOOCs that we've offered this spring hundreds of students have done about how to engage students in remote learning. And so we work a lot with like things that are called flip content where you have videos with embedded questions. We have video content and then responses that the students do where you have assignments that require the students to get together in their own Google meets and do work together so there's a lot of ways of creating projects and other activities to keep the students engaged when you're not sitting there with them. The other thing that we're looking at is that, you know, with some of our programs that says in there that for like sub separate programs and other academic support, it may be that students in those programs who need more constant support would come in on the alternate days. Those are smaller programs, they can be more easily socially distanced if there's only 10 students in a program, they just need a bigger room, and they could potentially come in every day. And then last, we're looking a lot at different kinds of remote learning support. And one of the things that's under consideration is whether we can staff for students who don't have a good learning environment at home because it's one of the clear things that came to us from the students that didn't engage that they just weren't able to be in a place where they could get their work done. And maybe that we open the red gym and have a para pro in there and let students sitting at pretty large spaces so that they can come in for one of the one or two of the blocks each day and get their work done remotely and get support and engagement and potentially also teachers could come down and meet with them if they needed more support. Thank you. Great, thank you. So that was a long, that was a long question, a long answer. So I will withhold my other questions but just just to follow up on a couple of the points. So, first on the on Ms. Exton's question, and this will come up in the presentation later but the requirements are that our high need students have to be to the extent possible in school every day under all three plans. And so there should just be like the other districts have aligned that we are going to try to get our high needs students into school every day in this hybrid plan in this remote plan. So, you know, that just needs to be aligned added in. I'm not surprised by the oversight. And then as far as, you know, getting more sense of the community. These, these plans are still highly lacking in information for parents to make an educated decision. So I know you're not I hope you're not going to ask for commitments or just getting a sense of the community with with additional surveys. But there's still not a whole lot of meat here I mean when Fairfax County there were the first ones that went out with with a parent choice two days a week or all remote. They were very they had a very clear plan of what that of what those two days a week and three days off we're going to look like and what a fully remote school was going to look like, and our plans are not nearly there yet. So, I'm not sure why I mean I know there's a whole lot going on there's a lot of distraction by the three foot rule that came out. But, but I think we need to be working and over that over the next 10 days, getting a lot more detail into these plans, and then going to the community and saying, Well, what do you think, and then, and then we can further refine as it's going to be an iteration process over the next three weeks. Thank you. May speak to that very briefly. Thank you. So just as a point of clarification. I want to make sure that everyone understands and I think this was all of our intention so if it didn't come through. Clearly, I think it's important to just stop and clarify that a part of what we're doing right now is making sure that we make room for all of our stakeholders to be a part of this conversation and make sure that the teachers had, you know, a really good chance to weigh in that families have had a chance to weigh in. What we had heard from people before we started to put these plans to paper is that it was really difficult for them to give any kind of feedback without something to go from. So we didn't we really didn't want it to be too complete with all of our ideas, making it seem as if there wasn't room for that feedback. So we know very well that there's going to need to be more information that comes out before people are able to, you know, give that next step or that commitment to anyone plan. So thank you. Dr. Allison Ampe. I just want to echo what lens said that I understand what Ms. Perot said that you're trying to give some space and summit and understanding that not everything is decided but from a parent's point of view. There's just not enough information there to have an idea of what a day under model hybrid versus model fully remote will look like in terms of what's the student going to be sitting down to at school what's the student going to be sitting down to at home, how often are they going to have to sit down. It just goes on. And so, because of that for parents to weigh in on it. It's, it's like asking someone who's colorblind you know it is this writer is a green because there's just not enough information there to say so I'm providing that feedback for you as you go forward, getting these plans ready to talk to you get more information from parents about and then the next step actually finding out what people really want to do we need to have a lot more information as parents. So now I want to flip to at least one of my questions. Which is, when, and this is really more for the administration, I think. The last time that we got information from desi in terms of incorporating medical opinion about knowledge about the transmission of virus by children teens was in June was month ago. There has been a lot of virus that's gone under the bridge, since that point, and I'm wondering when they're going to give us an update because some of the information that they're basing their requirements on I would like to know how, you know, is it to be changed for example by some of the infection outbreaks that people are seeing in camps in Missouri and actually in Massachusetts and there's been a lot of problems in summer camps and from the information that one can get online, not in medical journals because it's not there isn't anything in medical journals yet. It looks like they were following pretty good protocols and yet they were having problems with virus outbreaks. I would prefer that our medical professionals are taking that information and integrating it into recommendations and I'm just wondering when are they going to do that. The most recent document which you have is what what what would be the flowchart essentially for it, you know, student has is diagnosed with COVID we don't have what I think you're asking for is what is the current recommendation the current recommendation with what's going on in our country right now what is the current recommendation on the effect of COVID in our planning. And I can't answer that question as to when that will happen, but the one thing that I think we all recognize is that things could very much change we are only right now. Toward the end of July and we still have about six weeks to go before we're going to be entering school and that a lot has changed in the last couple weeks. So, certainly when we have more information from Department of Education in that regard, I will let you know but right now we have what we have. And what I'm also asking is, as you have these conference calls with desi and other people can you please kick back that we need updated medical information from reliable medical sources. Instead of us having to try and interpret what interpret interpret everything that we're seeing in terms of healthiness make our decisions. So that was that's one question. My next question is, when will we be getting the plan for how our preschool is being handled. You know I realize we've heard from all of our major schools but actually the preschool is one of the highlighted groups that needs to come back first and is of highest priority yet we haven't heard a specific plan for how they would be handled under any of these circumstances. That's a very good question and one that I've had a number of discussions about recently. I will be able to give you an update on that but I can't do that tonight. What we have done is this week. One of our concerns honestly I mentioned that before is parameter what was going to be the status of its opening and what we would do if it wasn't opened on time. And we have developed sort of a plan for that if we that would were to happen in terms of the usage of the building. That actually was a big consideration for a while. We have discussed the class sizes in the school and how my things might get rearranged, but the intent of the preschool right now is that we were not really looking at a hybrid model at the moment, but it is something that the plans for this are in development as we were going along. And I think I probably will be able to find we have the next school committee meeting to give you much more detail about this. Thank you. And then my final question for this round is, there hasn't been any discussion yet about the possibility of doing a phased back approach where we don't bring everyone back at the same time, but rather bring them back. And I'm just wondering, is that being considered? Could it be considered? Should it be considered? It is being considered. It can be considered as we go forward. This is something that we need much more guidance with regard to the Department of Education because it does affect days in school. It affects time and learning. So the answer is yes. We have thought about whether that can be phased in. And I think in some ways it would be sort of ideal to do that. Because there's going to be a lot of training of students that's actually going to have to occur. First of all, they've been back. We haven't been in school and we're now asking them to do observe a number of protocols, which has not been what they've experienced before. So the answer is yes. But that wouldn't change the plans per se. It would just be an adaptation of whatever plan we go forward with. Thank you. Mr. Thielman. Thank you. You know, first I want to say, I want to thank everyone for their hard work on these plans. I realize the principal's department heads, the union leadership have all been conversations for a long time. And the superintendent and her staff have had away all sorts of different complicated options. This is unprecedented and it's not easy. You know, there's no plan is ideal. Not, I don't, not one of these plans is ideal, bringing all the students back in the current environment that we're in certainly isn't ideal. The hybrid model has its challenges and everyone remote has its challenges. So not one plan is ideal. The one guidance, one thought I have is that when, you know, last spring, we talked to Dr. Bodie and suggested that we do our very best to try to do some synchronous direct instruction. And we did that and we had an experience with it that we could learn from and we could share best practices. So my guidance, my suggestion respectfully would be that, you know, we should try to do whatever we can do to bring students back, maybe it's not going to be everyone at once. It's probably unlikely maybe it's a hybrid model because by bringing students back. We, we have a way to actually test the plans that we've been talking about or you've been talking about for months. You actually get the chance to have students in the building have teachers in front of those students. It won't be perfect. It won't be easy, but you actually get a chance to test out what you're what you've been talking about in a safe way with us probably smaller groups of kids. I would, I would urge us to do our very best to try to bring students back. I'm, I'm, I'm obviously I think the hybrid model is probably the model that's practical. So that's just an urgent that just a guidance that by doing that by actually trying it by actually bringing people on, you're actually going to feel better and you're going to learn a lot and teachers will share best practices and learn from what's happening in the classrooms and people can make actual adjustments based on actual experience rather than theory. So, my question is, and I guess this is generally to everybody. Under which model. Do you think we have the best chance of, or I guess, I guess in general kids lost time last, last fall, last spring rather they lost time in the classroom. They didn't learn certain concepts. There has to be a period of time in the beginning of the year in which we are helping students to recover some of the concepts they've lost so they can continue to build their skills and every single subject. So, I guess my general question I guess to anybody who wants to answer is, what's the, how does that factor into the strategy for teaching and learning this year. And is there any one particular model where you think you can do recovery best, you know, where you can you can kind of recover, we do some of it, you know, capture some of the concepts or teach some of the concepts kids missed in the spring. If I could, I'd like to just volunteer one strength of the hybrid model for that task, which is, of course, to recover students and lost learning. The hybrid model does create smaller cohorts of students. So, when they are with us, they will be in class sizes that, you know, I haven't worked in recent memory. So, I think that that that is an upside is that that when they are on site the quality of instruction, especially around recovery will be there and and it's something that his parents mentioned as well that we'll be able to set students up for their remote time when they are live, but then it can come the other way around as well where we will be able to respond to struggles that we know that the children had while remote. So, you know, each one of them is equally, you know, all have flaws for that really important work, but I think the remote at the very least gives us smaller cohort of students to do that recovery work. Thank you. All right, thank you, Michael. The, the other question I have is, is, do you expect any, any change modification in course requirements or grade requirements or grade goals for the year in other words, under this, under this model, under all the models. Do you, do you think that, you know, you're going to have to say, well, look, we can only cover 65%, or, you know, 60, you know, a second percent of 65% of the learning that that is required in a given course or subject over the course of the year. Have you, have you thought about, like, have you thought that there might be some limits on the amount of learning that students can do in anyone grade level or any subject, subject. I don't have a, you know, so I don't know, has anyone thought about that? And is anyone model better than the other? I can take that. No, I mean, that's definitely something that we're considering as we look at the first four to six weeks of school and how we're going to map that out. And, you know, want to make sure that we're focusing on SEL getting kids acclimated back to whatever structure we decide that's going to be in place. But we also want to make sure that we're assessing the students, not so much in a one time assessment environment, but giving them an opportunity to reengage and then use formative assessments to figure out just where they are in the curriculum. Something that we're targeting is making sure that and looking at some of the professional development that we've had on remote learning and just listening to researchers and other practitioners. The advice is not to try to go and cover everything that you missed in the spring because that's just not going to be possible. And it's going to cause a lot of stress and anxiety within our students. So the things that we were going to focus on are those, you know, key understandings those essential standards that we need to focus on in order to move to the next level and learning. And we want to integrate that with a lot of SEL and, you know, making sure that we're making those connections with students and that's going to be very, very, very important. As we look at how we're going to enter into the new year and that has to be something that we consider for whatever model we're going to put in place. Okay. I hope that answered your question. Yeah, thank you. Yeah, I mean, so I'm going to say something that might be terrible to say, but we don't make the most efficient use of time in school right now. Running kids through five, six periods a day of school, where, you know, many of them are getting review and a few of them are getting doesn't necessarily target teacher contact time to most efficiently work with kids. And that's why even when we've been in school, people have experimented with things like flip models, where students are getting content delivered outside of school, and the time in school is focused on student interaction and teacher contact. And so I think one of the mistakes we make when we think about this is the state asked us to come up with this plan, this plan or this plan, with the idea that you just launch right into one or the other. But I think we want to really think given the situation about being thoughtful about our planning and efficiently using our contact time with teachers. Because as Michael Hannah said, right, if I've got 10 kids in my class, I may get a lot more done with those 10 kids than I would with my 25 kids all sitting there in my class, at the same time and if I designed my remote learning well, the students are going to do more than the last piece and this is the biggest is teaching is not feeling well right teaching is igniting a fire and if the kids are engaged and the kids are doing the work. They're going to learn more than they have in the past, and if they're disengaged they're not and so if we make this all about getting you in a seat facing forward, because we're worried about you know physically getting you in the school, and then you're unable to engage because you're stressed your teacher stress you're sitting there with a mask on the whole time so you can't communicate very well, the teachers are afraid to move around the classroom give feedback. Then I don't think the kids are going to get the educational experience so I think we have to start as Mr. Dr meal said, let's start with the social emotional piece of it making the connection getting the kids to be saved. And then the teachers, trust me the teachers have been spent started right away, listing all the things that they didn't cover all the things they needed to cover, figuring out what the key prior learnings are that they're going to have to do in the fall. My last question is, I guess, maybe to Michael Mason or Kathy, you know, is there, has there, have you done any modeling on the, on the cost of the three models is there any comparison that talks about, you know, the costs of each of the models to the district. Like is one less expensive than the other. Go ahead. We haven't really modeled the way you're talking about but we certainly realize what the additive costs are going to be that we're going to encounter. I think when you have every student back is is we've heard from the from a number of our principals that you create a need for both middle school in particular going to need more teachers in order to be able to have the classes that we need to have in order to be three foot apart. So yes, there's also going to be. And this is going to be true if you're in person or maybe not as much as remote is that one of the things that is in the medical guidelines that we can talk more about it and another meeting are looking people with people have to serve self certified coming into school. And if they are ill they're going to need to be out. We can't use subs the same way that we've had in the past through we go on ASAP and people sign up, you really have to have people that are trained in the protocols of your school. And so one of the things that we we know we're going to need to do in fact I made me post it this point, we need to hire more building subs for each school. We know that people were going to be building sub art are not going to want to be a district one they go to different schools because of the level of exposure. But we, we clearly need to have more people that are going to be available to go into a class when somebody gets sick, or they're not because that is going to happen and we don't teachers will come into school taking you know, take to Tylenol and come into school they're not feeling well that there's that level of dedication. But this, this year is going to be different. We really don't want people to come to work. We don't want students to come to school if they are not well and that's something we're going to have to be very asked parents to make sure that's the case. But yes, we are going to need more, more staff. I think primarily it's going to be more in the way of support staff that is going to be teachers except that maybe the middle school. Let's hope we get more money from. We're going to get about 1.3 a little more than $1.3 million, which can be used for salaries. The money we had from pairs at really worth things, not for salaries. So, yes, I think that in general that these plans are going to cost more money than we had budgeted for this year but we fortunately have made some provisions for that to and we also are going to get additional money and maybe even more from the federal government it's hard to say how that's going to trickle down to us. Let's hope so. Thank you, Ms. Morgan. Thank you, Mr. Schluckman. Good evening. First, I want to welcome our two new principals. I'm so glad to see you here with us tonight. I'm really very anxious about this whole thing right now. Without a rigorous rigorous testing program, we could go two weeks before we know there's a problem in the school. And a lot can happen in two weeks. Keisha Lance Bottoms is the mayor of Atlanta got sick because her kid got sick. The kid was asymptomatic and they didn't know the kid had the virus until the parents got it. Young children are the highest probability of being asymptomatic yet contagious. I am not comfortable with the medical information is before us. And the directors that are coming from above seem to be from folks who are more intent on opening the schools for the economic purpose then to serving the best needs of the health and welfare of the community. Fairfax County was mentioned there two weeks ahead of us. They open on August 25, just as a point in time. We're still seven and a half weeks away from our opening and a lot can happen and a lot will happen between now and then. So within that context, I guess my first question is for Dr. Janger, who I think is really had a thoughtful program. I'm really so impressed with what I'm hearing from Dr. Janger about whether they're thinking about the high school and talking about going to a four by four. What happens under a best case scenario that sometime around December January a vaccine comes out that is widely available that we can start with our staff and then with our children. If we go to all remote or hybrid model. How do we look at making the transition back to full time instruction, especially when you're doing a modified semester schedule such as high schools proposing. Well, I mean the nice thing is we play trumpets. We have a party and then we go back to school four days a week four by four blocks are an adjustment for our teachers but at that point they will have designed curriculum that fits into that rhythm and a half year schedule. They'll have good flipped material that they can continue to use within the class and they'll be able to bring students back for in class instruction four days a week. You know, and I will be honest, I've been in a school in that environment and many of the things we there are disadvantages which made in Arlington not something that I would have recommended off the top of my head. But there were advantages in terms of everybody's stress because the reality is students are taking two, three, four classes and teachers are teaching two, three classes. They have the prep time to reorganize and to put it in place and to transition over so we would take a little bit of time and we bring everybody back to school. I mean if there's no reason to keep them out. My other question goes generally to the district. As I'm hearing it there's been some concern from parents that they have kids on different schedules, Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Friday, seeing that we've got scheduling software that successfully schedules the high school. Can we get a commitment to ensuring that siblings are in the K eight area are aligned in terms of the days they're on and off. Should that be the desire of the parent. Well we'd like to give a commitment that can happen I think within each school. That's probably more likely here's the issue. If you do this alphabetically which is the most likely way to do this, you know and the main becoming in every day that we can at an elementary school definitely figure that out in terms of how that would work. And we could move that into k eight the problem is it's sort of like in the middle of the alphabet, in terms of how that would happen. I think it. I think that we would have to actually sort of have it by by almost hand done I'm not sure that we can do it because the courses that you would take in the middle school. It just, it's just different than what you would have at the elementary but would we absolutely talked about this and yes we understand the issue. To that extent, you know when we we've had some models that are a b a b, or a a a a b b. I think that that in the k eight we're going to have to get some consistency as we go forward to the hybrid. It's, I don't know if our scheduling software would really be able to do what you're asking, but if there is some way that some software out there that exists. We certainly be open to it. I don't think that that would be, I think be much more hand done, actually. I just don't see as an alphabetical scheme is being particularly useful, especially for the people who are in the middle of the alphabet, you know the A's and the Z's are happy. So there might be an advantage to being in the usual alphabetical ghetto but we should be able to go and programmatically place kids. Because we're going to be scheduling high needs kids a little differently to run a scheduling routine somehow that gets them into alignment on siblings that that just doesn't seem to be that difficult. We have a scheduling consultant and I will certainly speak with with him about this possibility and how we can look at it. And I'll leave the floor for my my next colleague, just saying that I do not see any way we can open full. And I'm very, very anxious about the hybrid right now and I'm hoping that scientific based information rather than politically based information comes forward that's going to help us to align on the best decision for our kids. Thank you. Thank you all for the work you've done. I really appreciate it. All I can think of is when I was a teacher I used to look forward to the summer. I don't think teachers is doing that right now and have to add an extra course to teach a prep to deal with diseases. First off, I'd like to ask Dr. Body have we surveyed families members students and members of the family that are high risk. Has that been done. As a separate group know they they in the survey that we had back in June and we'll do the same thing. I realize that one. I guess where I'm coming from is, although as Dr. Ampe stated we don't have a lot of information for people to make decisions whether they're coming back full time or not. These people might have already made the decision if they have actual children or family members that are high risk. That's probably try to keep the whole family isolated. So that may be something you want might want to consider. The other question I think Mr. Thielman got a bit of an answer. The money that we're getting is that federal or state or combination money to support us in this effort. Mr. Mason, do you want to answer that. Can you repeat the question please. The money that we're going to get in supporting us for the extra costs for COVID is it state and federal money. The money that is federal money ultimately. It's a grant that's managed by the state. Thank you. On the desi plan that you have to submit. Does that require content I understand the management parts and that's what you're presented tonight. Are they also looking for content at this time. No, actually it's your limited to number of words in certain sections to like 300 words. Okay. Going forward that other than the completely complete the remote program, will we be still offering a breakfast program in the schools that we've done it in the past. The answer would be yes, if the students are in school. Now, that is an issue that actually is something that is near and dear to my heart about this is, we have been all summer long, providing food for families that have some food scarcity issues, and it's been a very successful program. We're going to talk more about that. In fact, we have a joint press release out with Arlington eats is going out. So that is something that we are going to have to address because for a lot of families this is an important source of food both the breakfast and the lunch that we provide. But I can tell you more about that but I will also tell you it's something that we are thinking about. Another aspect of October 1 in the past has been a sacred day for funding and stuff. If we go half the students in half the students out. Is anybody thought of that as far as attendance and accountability. There is going to be some leeway with attendance I don't know exactly what it's going to be yet. In fact, we don't have particular guidance on that we also know that there's going to be some level of testing that's going to go on, maybe a month or so into school, but whoever is registered I don't think that that part is going to change is like who is registered on our roster and if they're if if your homeschooling you are not part of our numbers in October 1 but if you are in our remote option program remote learning program which is something that we will ask people to make a decision about later in the summer this is not now this is just that's later when the more developed plans are out there. They would definitely still be part of our powers, our numbers. At this time, do we have anybody that has stated to the school department that they're not going to participate in any of the programs. In other words, they're going to self school or whatever. We've had a couple I think it's something that Dr. Neil might say I know I've seen a couple of inquiries about it, but it hasn't been over it hasn't been a lot. I'm not looking for specific numbers I'm just curious if that's happened and I think you just responded. Yes. Yes, so if you're if you're speaking of the homeschooling applications. I mean we have our typical families that participate in the homeschooling application process. You know, annually, and then we have people who have reached out to inquire about the possibility of it. And then we've had people who have committed who have not been in the homeschooling program before. So it's been a mixed of, you know, between inquiry and people who have definitely made that decision. And I'm sure they've made in some in a couple of people have said that, you know, super back in school I'd like to shift back from the homeschool plan back to being in school full time. Thank you. I would just suggest that you some way try to find out if there is a population of students that might be either themselves or their family at risk definitely would not be coming back that might have an impact on your numbers of coming back into school. Thank you everybody for all your work phenomenal thank you again. I just have a couple of comments. I'm going to start. Mr. Slickman talked about the issues across with that with siblings and I see the note in the elementary draft about it being logistically challenging to have siblings with aligned schedules at different grade levels and in different schools and I really appreciate Dr. I think the response on that it sounds like perhaps the thinking has evolved as miss parents alluded to that this was a living breathing situation and things would be moving forward. I couldn't support a plan that didn't didn't help families by having their kids in school on the same day I feel like that is just too much of an ask. Families who have we have teachers who have kids who go to our schools. We have teachers who we have families who have teachers who teach in different districts whose kids go to our schools. We have so I really you know in a major rationale in the spring for not having synchronous learnings work and synchronous meetings were concerns about siblings providing childcare and so we don't we don't get to not have done that for partly not have done that in the spring and then not provide, you know, sibling placements that will actually work for families in in, you know, in the fall. I also need to hear a lot more I've been calling it magic Wednesday, because I don't actually know what's going to happen really Wednesday it seems like a lot of things could happen on Wednesdays. So I definitely want to learn more about that. It sounds, you know, I'm open to it. I'm not like a post I just I, I can't quite picture it. And I also, you know, I'm concerned that they're that right now or I really I want to make sure that we are developing a plan for special education under each plan. I heard Ms. Elmer say, Oh, well, we need to know what the real plan is going to be and then we'll come up with a plan which I mean I get that right like I want to know what my real plan is too but I think there's a very high likelihood that we are going to iterate through a large variety of plans over the next, you know, I don't want to speculate as to how long but I think we could go back and hybrid, we could shift to a remote, we could shift back into a hybrid, we could shift then into a full return model that doesn't look like I hope we get to Dr. Jangers trumpets I truly do. I think that would be great, but I think we could end up being in a full return model at some point that that looks something like the full return model in these, these plans that we've had to look at for some period of time as well so I definitely want to understand what, you know, what things would look like for our highest needs learners under each, each plan. And then, and then finally because I think my colleagues have covered a lot of this I think the, the concern around the plans, you know, certainly before we go out to parents and ask them what their, you know, preferences are or choices are or whatever word we end up using are for their children we need a lot more information about what their day is going to look like and how that's going to be and I would also echo that we really need that information for our teachers as well, because they are going, we are going to be asking them to make a really, you know, for some, maybe one of the hardest asks or choices of their careers that they may say that for various reasons that they, you know, would like to be considered for the remote program or for various reasons they want to, to do, you know, be a part of the hybrid model or whatever happens in our buildings. And I think that that, you know, to the extent that we can provide our staff and our teachers with as much detail about what their day and life would look like what their experiences would be with kids and how things would, would look. I think, you know, we are, you know, it's going to be really hard to get to a place where everybody feels comfortable with everything. But I think, you know, it's really important to give them as much as they possibly can, before they start to think about that kind of really significant professional decision. So I'm glad that it sounds like a lot of outreach is being done, which is great. And I'm, I'm, I'm really, I'm glad to hear that. And so, you know, I, I'm looking forward to learning more. And I appreciate, I think it's really hard to go out and start, right. And so I think, you know, that's that, that there's something on the table that people can start talking about and thinking about and mulling over I think is really, really important. And I think there are a lot of districts that are not even at this place yet. And so I feel, you know, I, I feel anxious, for sure, about looking at it and thinking about what school looks like in person and remote for our kids and our teachers. I also am, am, you know, I'm grateful that we're, we're in process at this point, because that's, that's where we need to be. So, um, I, what I was hoping so I did we were there. I just wanted to give my general comments. You know, there's no good situation. We're all in a terrible situation. But from my perspective, I'm just going to look visually for, did people want to come back after we've been at this for a while and a lot of other things have come up. So if there are other comments or questions, I see Dr. Allison Ampey and Mr. You know, there's no good situation. We're all in a terrible situation. But from my perspective, the massacre, the Massachusetts chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics is not a political organization. I respect their judgment. They endorse these standards. And I understand that some people have concern about them and certainly I'm open to starting with hybrid, but I think particularly for our elementary students for our K through two grades, as Miss Exton indicated, we, we really need to, to, to consider a plan that phases those kids in full time. So I am looking for as we develop, you know, we still have a week to go on this state requirement, but then we only have 10 days to go to the final plan really to a decision on our honor about August 10 about what our school is going to schools are going to look like, because we then we have to start building that we have to start building the schedules we have to start figuring out who's teaching my classes. So we've got a lot of work to do in a very short period of time. But when when when a plan comes before us for approval. I'm going to be looking for something that gets the most students possible in the classroom consistent with the desi guidance. Thank you. Dr. Allison. I just wanted to bring up facilities and not to discussion at this point it's just I know that this was an issue that was on a number of parents minds. And just to say that desi came out I think yesterday with guidelines, more specific about facilities and that we had reviewed what this district has been doing in the past. Over the past months at our facilities meeting last week, and my quick take on, you know, skimming through the new desi guidelines was that we were, you know, we could go through and we were checking everything off. I wonder if it would be good to have a short presentation for this for our next meeting. That's all great. Anybody else. Okay, so I'd like to, and I'm going to make a request at least some of our I know it's late for our, our principal team, I wanted to have a quick conversation just so that we're all speaking the same language with the community about the process that we're in over the next two or three weeks in terms of, you know, what's going to be how things are going to be submitted, what the role is of the school committee. And so that we all sort of understand how this is going to play out so that we're all sharing the same information with parents and, you know, so I, I, I guess I wanted to. So I'm moving on in the agenda for one thing. So we're closing out the file reopening update, but I think this will be a quick conversation so I was hoping that at least some of you could stay on just for this piece around how we're going to sort of, work through this decision and these, these submissions. So I wanted to, I'm going to put Mr. Schuchman on the spot about this because I know that he had some sense of what the recommendations were from MASC and I just wanted to have a quick conversation about as a committee for those watching at home we communicate only in public meetings. So we end up giving some of our business in front of everybody will do all of our business in front of everybody but we sometimes are in a situation where we don't actually know how things are going to pan out or what people think because you know we're trying to figure it out as we go so Mr. Schuchman can you give us just a brief overview like super brief about your sense of we have two pieces right this these plans need to be submitted. And that that may or may not but certainly could require school committee that could could we could decide that we want to approve them as submitted and then there will ultimately be another decision on or around August 10 about which plan. We continue to move forward with into August and and we're pretty certain that that requires our approval. Well the basics for MASC are this is that any of these three plans these are both involved policy and budget which are the domain of the school committee so MASC's position is firmly that we should be approving any plans submitted to Jesse. That we cannot advocate our responsibility to vote the submission of the plan. There was a more formal discussion of this taking places a zoom meeting among school committee members unfortunately is happening tonight so we're here and not there but more guidance will be coming forward but I think it's essential that because this is a budget policy decision. And because this involves bringing community input into the decision making program process. We have a responsibility to to either approve or not approve what is submitted on our behalf. So discussion from the committee on this or Dr. Vody do you want to weigh in. I don't want to. I guess let's let's hear from the committee and then I obviously interested in what you have to say to Mr. Heiner. Through the chair to Mr. Schluckman an order for us to vote on this since this is a preliminary plan tonight. I would I have no problem supporting this idea and I agree with it that it's our responsibility on the both budget policy. But this plan has to be in correct me if I'm wrong. Dr. Buddy by the end of the month. We don't have a meeting scheduled for them. Would we just have an emergency meeting with just this topic for the time presented to us finally what's going to go before desi and for us to just look at it ahead of time and made it briefly and vote on it that night. With the chair's permission opinion is yes we would have should have a special meeting for the purpose of approving the plan. Thank you. I don't have it in front of me but I read the MSE bulletin at least as just saying that the final reopening plan the one that the district is going to proceed with is the one that's going to affect the budget and therefore, and going to, you know, change our policies and therefore is the only one that's required I think Mr. Schluckman is correct that we can certainly decide that we want to have approval of whatever gets submitted to desi. The district submits lots of reports to desi that we don't see before they were submitted so I'm not as inclined to require that but I'm certainly willing to listen to my colleagues. Just to follow on what Mr. Carton said, if, as he suggested, we are over the next year going between different plan, you know, we're having to ping back and forth because of the situations of the virus at that point in time. To me it does make a certain amount of sense that we approve all of the plans because we may end up going through all of them or or at least hoping to go through some of them into until the trumpets get here. Ms. Keys. Hi, I just wanted to remind everybody that these plans are being presented in draft form and we've been working with administration on them so we've you know been in contact and discussion. But a lot of them require some pretty dramatic changes to contract language that would have to be negotiated. So even if a final plan is approved it's still going to have to then go through negotiations with the unions all and it's going to be all three of our bargaining units. Thank you. Mr. Thielman, you're on mute sir. I am I am now my life. The timeline that Mr. Schlickman is talking about is that we would approve something next week before it is submitted. We would need to add a meeting next Thursday and come back. And there's still pending union negotiations about this. I think we're going to have to submit to desi before we do that. I would I want to give Ms. Keys the opportunity to know that's right. In the process of choosing the final plan from these three that we're going to go forward with in early August. That's probably going to require some discussions and negotiations and we're going to have we're talking a massive MOA. So, I, you know, look, I think I think it's I think the thing to do is to consult council and see what council tells us to do either Doug Hyam or our council is and all their guidance. That's rather than because we're all talking about it. I may have seen document we read online and we haven't looked at references. So I guess what I would like to do just in the end effort to keep us moving is to go ahead. My understanding is is that we can vote to add a meeting next Thursday night that we can hold and that I have the authority to cancel that should we make a decision later on tonight or after that that we don't that we don't need to have that meeting. That is there. So, so I'd like to hear from Dr. Bodie to because we haven't heard from her. And then if, if others would like to entertain the positive somebody would like to entertain the possibility of making that motion so that we have that on the calendar because I believe we would need to do that in this meeting, so that we held it, and then we could cancel it if we didn't need it. Dr. Bodie. In terms of what you need to do. You do not need to approve the draft plans to go in their drafts. Yes, you would have to vote on the, the final and yes, whatever the final is that actually could have many iterations to it as we continue to move forward. Let's say for example, but the hybrid model. There are there are different stages, even in that and and keys is actually correct that we're going to have to enter into negotiations about some some aspects because they're going to be changes in working conditions. That is, that's definitely the case. So at this stage is really what we're submitting is is pretty much at the level that you've seen tonight. In fact, even probably much more truncated because we have a very limited amount of space in these templates. They, I, I, my interpretation of what's been going on in terms of having these timelines it's it's it's the Department of Education and I think rightly so is sort of creating a framework for having decision points and thinking and sort of some time in which these, these plans can be developed. So it gives it's up to the committee, you can certainly choose to vote on them. But it's, it's pretty much what you've heard tonight, except there might be some tweaking I'm not even sure a lot of the detail on a lot of it is going to be actually included, but they want to know what you've been thinking about. And of addressing as we've also pointed out early what are we going to do with some of our high need students so you've heard the discussion and you can, you know, we can share with you the templates and, you know, I actually haven't tried to see if I can print it out but we certainly can share that information. The most important thing I think is the feedback over the next couple of weeks as we try to decide as a community, a district, you know what, what do we, what are we going to choose to do. And honestly one of the reasons why the date that Department of Education made it early August is that they recognize that this is a very, what we're living in right now is unprecedented and very fluid and changing and it gives districts a little bit more time to see where things are but even early August is still a lack of change and we have to be able to be to adjust to those changes. I so this entirely up to you if you want to it's not required that you prove them, but it's certainly required that you approve the and we'll have a lot more discussion. As we go forward with this, and there might even be perhaps even a subcommittee meeting that might want to have to meet in this timeframe. Thank you, Mr. Schlickman. Okay, I'm going to make a motion and then we're going to, you know, want to make a couple of comments. I moved the Arlington School Committee hold special meeting on Thursday, July 30th at 7pm. I'm asking for seven instead of 630 because we have the focus group with the FinCom and the capital planning folks at 530. Okay. Okay, look, the mention is is that we have to decide as a community the people who need to decide as a community or the people of the community elected make the decision that's a seven school committee members. The, I don't want to see us in a position where the trend is so far down the tracks we can't make a course correction and the submission to desi feels like an important junction that we're encountering, we had over 300 participants in this meeting tonight. And this is the first time the participants in this meeting have seen the plans and heard from it. We have an obligation to stop and listen to the folks who've been listening to this, receive the feedback and provide guidance and make a vote next week based on both what we heard tonight and what we were going to hear over the next week from the people who attended this meeting to walk away from this and not make it a vote and not make a decision. On the submission, I think abrogates our responsibilities as a committee and the representatives of the voters in this in the school district. Any other comments. All right, so we have a motion by Mr. Schluckman seconded by Mr. Heiner to add a meeting at 7pm Thursday. I don't know what the day is a week from today. Today is the 23rd so the 30th of July. So we have a roll call vote, Ms. Exton. Yes. Mr. Cardin. Yes. Dr. Allison Ampe. Yes. Mr. Thielman. Yes. Mr. Schluckman. Yes. Mr. Heiner. Yes. I'm also yes. All right. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for all of our principals. I don't know that I've ever actually seen all of you in like these boxes. So many of you all at once. So we really appreciate your time. And I'm sure that this came at the end of a really long day. So thank you for being here with us and answering so many of our questions. And thank you for being here. And I'll turn it over to Dr. McNeil. I'm going to have a special education. Guidance. Ms. Elmer. Dr. McNeil's kind of share the slideshow. I believe you had the DSE memo that was released about a week ago. In your novice agenda. So just wait for Dr. McNeil. Gotta clean up that desktop. Let me try it again. All right. Do you want me to share my screen? I think I have it on my, as well. All right, thank you. So if you want to start at the beginning in July 10th, the DESE issued, you can advance it, issued updated guidance for fall reopening, which supplemented the guidance they issued for schools in general. And as you can see, this was to help develop the portions for reopening plans, which you've noted that specifically relate to special ed. So to answer your question, Jess, there will be sections of the plan that specifically speak to special ed for each of the models, a remote, a fully remote, a hybrid and an in-person model. Earlier when I was saying, we need to know what the plans were. We needed to know what hybrid would look like, I think in-person, fully in-person would look like what fully in-person mostly looks like, with perhaps changes due to, you know, how we poll students or assign students to classes to minimize, you know, cohorts and whatnot. But the, if you advance the slide, please. The piece that Mr. Cardin was speaking specifically to, the DESE has been very clear that, A, we need to provide a FAPE, which means that we need to provide the entire IEP. In the spring, you know, there was a period of adjustment and there was questions about what did that mean to implement a FAPE during this closure. Given the amount of time and learning opportunities we've had, knowing in September, we will need to implement the full IEP. So if you get, you know, three sessions of, you know, reading services three times a week, then you get three sessions of reading services. There may be some adjustments that, you know, at the high school plan where they switched to 80 minute blocks. So instead of three 50 minute blocks, you get two 80 minute blocks, you're still getting your services. Those are the kind of things that have to be worked out as the different levels establish their plans. But the highlight, as Mr. Cardin has noted, is the emphasis on getting students with disabilities, particularly preschool age and students with significant and complex needs in person as much as possible. You could advance that, please. So to that end, regardless of it's an in-person or a hybrid model, the, while students may be going on an A-B or an A-A-B-B schedule, as you've heard, there may be some special ed students who are going every day, you know, and which students those are, you know, that is still to be determined in future slides. I'll talk about how we start to make that determination. But in those plans, you know, you will see that some students are coming in more often than the whole group. You can advance them. Again, if they're in-person, can't be delivered because of reasons outside of health and safety. So again, these plans, these guidance is for the entire state. There are some school systems or specific buildings across the state that maybe can't meet circulation and error requirements or things like that. You know, if you're open, not due to health and safety, like we haven't closed down because of COVID numbers, there is an emphasis on considering providing in-person services in the community or in the home if you cannot provide it in the school setting. And also previously, you can just go back for a second. In the spring, I mentioned before, we had two models of service delivery, which was resources and supports, which were, you know, we spent a lot of time developing that enrichment page and there were, you know, packets and tools that could go home and there was instruction and services and those combination of things made up service delivery. For the fall, for reopening, service delivery is going to be instruction and services, meaning structured lessons, tele-therapy or, you know, synchronous lessons, asynchronous recorded lessons, but that it's direct instruction. It's not work packets. You can rely on those as supplements for practice and rehearsal, but, you know, they will have to have teacher-directed instruction to meet the requirements of the IEP. You can advance it. And I mentioned that about the in-home, so you can advance that. As I've said, they must receive the services documented in the IEP with the strong emphasis on in-person, particularly for preschool and students with significant complex needs. You can advance it. And so here is the definition of what that means, because I'm sure many people feel that, you know, their child's issues are significant, they're complex, their child is high needs. Specifically when looking at the IEP, there's a page of the IEP called the PL3 or the placement page, which indicates the level of need based on the amount of services that a student receives. So if you have an IEP at home or if you wanna look it up online, a high-need student is a student that receives 75% or more of their services outside of general education. Moderate need is 25 to 75%. And so we're able to, and we have already started to look at our low, moderate and high-need students to think about, you know, which students we need to bring in most frequently. In addition to that designation on the IEP, which is a pretty objective measure, there's also some more subjective measures such as students who cannot engage in remote learning due to their disability-related needs. Students who are using AAC, Aided or Outcommentative Communication. Students who, this is outside of special ed, students who are homeless, students in foster care or Cumbric care, who those would be students who are living in group homes outside the 24-hour custody of their parents. And students who are duly identified as English learners. So those are the groups that the DESC wants us to prioritize getting in as frequently as possible. You can advance it. And so as I mentioned, we need to develop plans for each of the models in person, some of the considerations that we need to make. And this is a conversation I've had with both curriculum directors and our principals, administrative teams is that when we build those schedules, when we look at class assignment, we need to be centering the students that I just talked about. We need to be figuring out those class placements first for those students so that we can minimize, you know, have our groups be flexible so that typically you might have a third grade learning specialist is pulling a student, you know, two students from this class, another student from this class and a fourth student from this class. We're going to have to be really thoughtful so that we try and minimize that crossing of cohorts that you've heard about. We can't eliminate it if that's unlikely. However, we do have to put emphasis on minimizing that. So class placement, specialist schedule, learning specialist schedules really need to be at the forefront of the planning that can now take place once we have an idea of what the hybrid model was, what the in-person model was. And so looking at the additional spaces, some of our related service providers are in rooms that don't have windows, you know, they're smaller office spaces because they're seeing one to two students that don't allow for the required social distancing, they don't allow for the required air flow and ventilation. Those are things that have to go into the planning for how we're using spaces in the building and what alternative spaces we're using. That also impacts in-person learning and some of the discussions about what spaces were available throughout the day are impacted by needing to relocate people to other parts of the building. You can advance it. I just mentioned that shift from resources and supports and to services and instruction, they just highlighted that again. You can advance it. And again, I said this at the beginning, even if we're in a hybrid model, when we put equity at the center of the work that we've been talking about this entire closure, that mean equity doesn't mean everybody gets the same thing. So there are going to be students who get more in-person services than other students. Some of those are gonna be special ed students, some are gonna be the other groups of students that we mentioned and that's what it means to put equity into practice. For our preschool, you were asking about it, Dr. Allison Ampe, to the extent possible, we wanna have our preschool students in as much as we can. One of the complicating factors is we have an integrated preschool model. We're required to deliver those special ed services and we're required to have certain ratios in order to have an integrated classroom. The DESC is putting in for a waiver of those ratios but has not received it. So that is still a consideration in order to have an integrated classroom, you need to have 51% general ed, 49% special ed. Typically that means our class of 15 has eight general ed students or in our case, tuition paying students and seven special ed students. We're gonna have to look at when we allow for social distancing, how many of those general ed students we can actually have in daily and there's considerations then, what does that mean for tuition paying folks? And again, until those waivers come through the state, that's a question that we still have. You can advance it. Another question is around our IEP teams. It is likely due to social distancing that we will continue to have remote meetings. The ability to have 10 or 15 people in a single room in order to have a meeting, which is often the case, probably won't occur. I'm putting these qualifiers in here because we don't know the conditions yet but we need to continue to have our IEP meetings. What is important is that people should understand that we are writing an IEP as if we are full in person. That is the guidance from the state, that is the requirement, that when you hold the meeting, you should be writing it as if we were in person. We have what we've called the remote learning plans or what will be just simply known as parent notification for these other models, hybrid or remote, that will indicate how we will deliver that IEP in those two models. Those changes for service delivery that, we wrote an IEP, like I just said, for in person that meant you were gonna get reading five days a week in a hybrid or remote model, you still have to get those services, but like I said, you may receive that in two, larger sections or you may be receiving that, not every day of the week, but two sessions, two days a week. So those are the kind of things that will have to be adjusted when we go through and it's likely we will have a period of remote time. But it does not change the IEP placement and I think that's another something important to point out that those changes in delivery for the various models do not change the placement of the IEP. And I believe that is the last slide from the major highlights of this, to Mr. Cardin's point, Fairfax County is opening remotely. Our hope is to still open in person, even if we do not have all people, all students in person that we are getting a large number of our special ed, our preschool students and those other high needs students in person, looking at other district plans, they haven't released that with that specificity yet because the plans to the DESC on the 31st are still preliminary plans. You know, when I look at the Brookline plans, those are still preliminary plans that have not been released. So those are all out there. Those are all things that we're working on. And if they follow up questions and if any of the principals are still here because we have been working with they and the curriculum directors. So Ms. Eksten, do you have questions? Yes, thank you for this. And it helps to clarify a little bit of what I was asking about before. In terms of, I understand the safety piece of minimizing crossing cohorts. Does that affect caseloads for service providers? I think one of the things that we're going to have to figure out is if families opt for a remote only plan. So that is an option that families can choose. And so I think what you saw in the proposed remote plan might mean that if you're choosing to go solely remote that you won't necessarily be assigned to the person who was at your school. You know, as Ms. Keyes has pointed out and several of the teachers, the idea of running either simultaneously a remote session and an in-person session or trying to deliver in-person services and trying to deliver in a remote caseload would be a change in their conditions or would be a change to their caseload. Currently, until we have more specificity on the plan that we're going with, I think those questions are up in the air. If anything, when I talk about changing the schedule or assignments, it's about in those general like classrooms. So that when you're pulling from a third grade classroom for say reading services that, you know, instead of spreading those students out among three or four classrooms, can we place them so that they're coming as a cohort together to reading and returning as a cohort to the same group rather than breaking them apart and then putting them back into four different classrooms? Those are all the kind of things that still have to be worked out. No, thank you. I appreciate that. And I know in the spring, a lot of special educators felt very burdened by the piece of learning remote and the paperwork and all of that. And I just, I want to make sure that we're supporting them in the work that they're doing. So our special educators are EL teachers. A lot of those specialist related students support services people worked incredibly hard, not that anyone else didn't, but they had a charge from the beginning of April to be doing that. And so I agree. They've been working incredibly hard. And I think now that we have the ability to proactively plan, we have a responsibility as administrative team to make sure that we are planning with that in mind, whereas before we were reacting to a situation that already existed. Yeah, no, I use that word burdened in a, they were working incredibly hard and there was an added piece that general education teachers didn't have to. So in this case, I'm trying to support the special education teachers in their work. So thank you, come out that this morning. Mr. Cardin. Thank you, thank you for that presentation. Just a quick comment that, you know, we have a historic event and inclusive district. So a lot of our programming is included, is emphasized with push in and we flip the model, you know, several years ago, rightly so. But in looking at students that are, you know, that may need more in-person services, I do hope that will be more flexible than the very minimum that's required under this guidance, in part because we have pushed so much on in-class services that I think when you look at the number of high-need students, we're probably lower than other districts. So there may be more students that in a different model would fall under that category and will need more services. Oh, as I mentioned, we've already, we're able to pull those students who meet that on, again, that designation on their IEP page. And to your point, there are several students who are not in sub-separate programs who receive a substantial degree of services, whether those are students who have one-to-one services throughout the day. So it is the totality of their services. The other piece of it is as well that we have to still provide it in the least restrictive environment. So many of our students who are in our SLC or supported learning centers are substantially separate programs, spend a great deal of their day in inclusion settings, and we can't simply say, oh, we're gonna have you come in every day, but you're just gonna stay in your sub-separate classroom. So they still need to have the inclusive opportunities that are delineated in their IEPs as well. We will have an impact, again, on classroom, perhaps classroom assignments. People have mentioned that until we know which parents are sending their kids in, they're students in, if they're, again, to eliminate or to reduce or to, again, I don't think we're gonna eliminate crossing the cohorts, but in order to reduce that, is there a classroom that we designate for that inclusion classroom? So that, again, a cohort moves together. Those are all things that have to be played out. Great, thank you. My point is that, so there's another category, cannot engage in remote learning, and hopefully the classroom teachers are aware, which are their students fall into that category and maybe more support. Yeah, and I would just include that, as I mentioned briefly, and it may have been quick, because I am aware of the time, that we are, we pulled both that moderate group, that 25 and 75, that 25 to 75%, in addition to the high needs, which is greater than 75%, to look at those students individually. That's great, thanks. Dr. Allison Nippy. Thank you. Can you just say who the waiver is being applied to? The DESC has to apply for the waiver, and to be honest with you, I'm not exactly sure of their structure. So if there's a federal requirement, and they have to apply there, we had an update today. So our weekly meetings that we had with the senior associate commissioner, Russell Johnston, have changed to bi-monthly meetings. So today, they simply updated that they were going to provide us information on the status of that. They didn't tell us where it is. And this sounds like a big, it sounds like a hopefully solvable, but difficult puzzle to get both inclusion and service and cohorts anyway. And social distancing, yes. And we have the move that Dr. Bode mentioned. So we're still hoping that that stays on target, because they also started working on where we used to be, if I'm correct, Dr. Janker. So I don't think... Great, Mr. Kemen. I don't have any questions. I think we're moving in. We're pretty far along in the meeting. Thank you. Mr. Schliffen. Mr. Heiner. First question on the funding. Is the funding separate or is it folded in, the additional funding that we get? Is it folded in with the federal money that we're getting or is it a special fund for special education? I haven't seen, and Mr. Rainson can speak to this. I've not seen additional IDEA funds. However, the CARES Fund, what you should note is the CARES Act funds, all of those are applied same conditions of proportionate share. So we've met with St. Agnes, Arlington Catholic, Leslie Ellis, and New Covenant to talk about how some of the funding is also available to them. And we've had preliminary meetings on how they would like to use that additional funding. Great. My last question is, and I'm not expecting, you may not be able to answer it at this time. There are a lot of independent things in it, but when can parents expect the modifications that might be necessary for their IEPs? So it wouldn't be changing the IEP. What it would be would be notification of how the IEP is going to be implemented. And so again, that will really be largely contingent on what our ultimate plan is. So if the district says we're going remote, then we need to notify you how we're implementing that remotely. We go hybrid, how that would be, if that's a change from what it would be in person, how it would be implemented then. This next question may be dependent on an old man processing. You mentioned placement doesn't change delivery. Did I misunderstand that? Yeah, it does not. So changing the delivery of the services due to the COVID pandemic does not change your IEP placement. So in the terms of state put is a term that if you're in the field, which means placement pending appeal, it does not change what's written in the IEP. As I said, these things are notifications of how it's going to be implemented, but we don't have to reconvene and change an IEP to reflect Dr. Janger having, as you mentioned, two 80-minute blocks versus going from the five days schedule, right? We don't have to amend the IEP to do that. That notification is saying during this period in which we're in hybrid or during this period in which we're in remote, this is how we are implementing the IEP. Will that require an acknowledgement and acceptance by the parent or the guardian? It is a notification, so they do not have to accept it, but we do need to work collaboratively with them to explore, particularly for remote, how is it best implemented? But it is- My only concern with that is that the potential misinterpretation that it's going to be a change that they're going to be stuck with in the future forever and ever. So I'm just suggesting make that clear to them. Thank you very much. Mr. Slickman. That was just eating blueberries before. No, no further questions. Thank you. Okay. And I guess I'm still looking forward to hearing more about this. This was helpful in terms of, I'm still trying to put the pieces together of the earlier conversation and this and understand how it's going to work. And for the same reasons that we wanna make sure that our parents have as much information as possible before they need to make a decision and our teachers have as much information as possible before they need to make a very difficult decision. And we wanna make sure that our families with special education students also have as much information as possible so that they understand what the implications are for whatever decision they make. So that's sort of a theme from tonight. Probably doesn't come as a surprise for anybody. So yeah, okay. Thank you so much. You're welcome. Thank you. Superintendent's report, Dr. Bodie. You're still, yep. Yep. Just two things. One is the news that I had to send out to everyone both in a press release and a letter earlier today that the Black Lives Matter banners that were in front of the high school were defaced last night. This was very sad and very painful for the high school and all the students and the staff and the administration there. We are working with the police department. They are investigating. It was done at night, discovered this morning. And so we are moving forward with, I don't believe that they can be fixed. So I think that we're gonna have to go forward and replace them and we will do that. But I think it's important that that symbol, that message remain visible in the community. The second thing is just a general update on the high school. We've had a number of, I think maybe in the evening when we have a little more time we can fill in but we've just some more meetings about the landscaping and parking and coordination with DPW and their plans, look, comparing our timelines. You certainly can drive by the high school and see that the work that is being done. We continue to work on the issue of air quality in the facing classrooms to the construction and that's certainly part of the whole analysis that we're doing right now for the high school. But at the moment, the work on the area we're down, which is gonna be the area near that circle where the preschool has come in over the years, that is gonna be one of the new entrances. So there will be two entrances to the high school and plans are moving forward in that regard. So all is moving as, in fact, we're in pretty good shape with respect to the timelines for the construction relative to the opening of school and that's all. Thank you, Dr. Bodie. The consent agenda, all items listed with an asterisk are considered to be routine and will be enacted by one motion. There will be no separate discussion of these items unless a member of the committee so requests in which event the item will be considered in its normal sequence. Approval of warrant number 20319, total warrant amount $4,895,426.25 dated July 4th, 2020, effective date June 30th, 2020. Discussion, please, Madam Chair. Yep, so let's do it. It seems silly to. We have a motion for discussion. Do we have a second? Second. Great, go ahead. We just got a new warrant in. Folks were requesting us to sign tonight. There's like over $3 million worth of construction costs for the new high school project. That's an awful lot of money and we don't have the documentation or the knowledge of what's happening to document that. So we're essentially signing off on vendor warrants of a large amount of money for a large project. Is there any way for us to get some sort of documentation or feedback from someplace else before we sign the warrant and approve that? Hi, Mr. Mason, we did receive and it was prior to our meeting a warrant. It was somebody on sounds like it was on your behalf, but it was not a name that I recognize. Yeah, so this evening, what I'm doing is training my staff to get more familiar with other software and Steve Wolensky, he is the one who handles the accounts payable and all the invoices. So normally he would provide me the document, I review it and sign off on it. If I, and as I see any issues with it, I will push back. And when I sign off on it, I then presented to, well, we then submitted to the school committee for approval. Yeah, the question is, it's not Steve. I don't care if it's coming for you, Steve. That's $4.29 million we're asking to sign off on. Yeah, this was a big warrant because some of those construction projects, there was a lot of back payments that were due. And since the school department is handling the processing of the construction project, they are coming under our warrant cycle. We can provide, all these documents are public and are approved prior to this. We can provide you any additional documentation that you may request at any time. Yeah, most of the stuff that comes through the warrant is pretty routine and we can more or less figure it out. That's a lot of money on a big project that, and if we have to approve it, there's a level of responsibility here for that large sum that we should have some sort of a documentation attached to this from the permanent town building, or the high school building committee, or somebody that says they've looked over these expenses and they're justified to give us sort of a level of comfort in approving $4.29 million. So all of these invoices are, for the most part, I have gone through a review process that's even prior to the expense incurring goes through our finance committee, subcommittee of the building committee project, where we review any change orders and all of the contract documents. So these expenses are known expenses. Then it comes to, once the work is completed, it goes through a process with the construction manager, which is Skanska, and the architects also review to ensure that all the charges are accurate, except the architects do not review their own invoices. That's review was held by Skanska, and then the town reviews it, which it's first stops at the town manager's office and is reviewed by the town manager. The town manager then signs off on the document. Then my department receives it. We then do our review and then sign off on it before it all gets to you. So I hope that information helps you feel a little bit more secure. That's the current process that the committee has adopted in terms of processing these particular invoices. I'd like to have a paper trail attached that if we're gonna be approving $4.29 million in one vote. Yeah, it's gonna be a substantially large document of over 200 pages of information, but it can be included. I'm not sure if you would want all of that unless you at per request per the particular committee member. An abridged version or an executive summary would be okay to show that the process that went through when you reviewed it. But it seems right now all we're looking at is $4.29 million that we have to vote to approve. But the issue is that that warrant is not the warrant that's on the agenda, right? So this, we need to approve 20319. And then we can take up the, what number number? I'm looking at it in my emails. It's a different number. Different numbered warrant. We can see. It's 21012. 21012. So we can take up 21012 at our next meeting. Mr. Heiner. Just to clarify, in order for that to come before us, we have to sign off ahead of time. And I think I agree with Paul. I get the payroll warrant once a week. I sit down before I sign it. I go through it. If I have any questions, I talk to the payroll, different parts of the payroll thing, and you get a clarify. These warrants that we get are signed after the fact, not prior to the fact. Maybe going forward, you provide Mr. Mason for any member that wants to, a link or something to go through the document. And then we can sign off on it. We can include it in the package, but once again, actually it's the, to correct the statements, I want everybody to understand that the checks are not released until four members of the committee signs it, and then also on top of that, a comptroller would sign this document, as well as the town manager. So it goes through several processes before this, the checks is released to any vendor or person. I'm able to back check the payroll warrant. There's no problem. All I'm suggesting is that some, that members have an ability to look at it. That's all. Dr. Allison Ampe. How about if budget looks at it the next time we meet, and I'll talk to Paul in the meantime, and find out exactly what would, and Mr. Heiner, and find out what would be a satisfactory thing. I'm thinking if there's just a memo that says, it's this, you know, it covered this and this, and these people have already signed it. We're done. Jane, if I can say one more thing. Yes, sir, Mr. Mason. I just would like just for you all to know that. So those, it might be that these invoices should not be included on the warrant, because this is not subject to the school committee approval. So it's just a result of the school committee being assigned, the school department being assigned a responsibility of processing these invoices that is getting stuck on these warrants. So what I will do going forward, what I think is the solution is to actually remove it from this warrant and instruct my staff going forward to try to include it on a different warrant that goes through the town. And this won't be presented in front of you and you won't have to feel a certain way, because the town has to sign off on every warrant regardless, but maybe it should not be presented in front of you, because these are not the budget amounts that you vote on annually. Great, so if, and I'm going to come back to you, Mr. Schiffman, so if you guys could all circle up on that with Dr. Allison Ampe and Mr. Mason, that seems like the best, most expedient course to resolution, Mr. Schiffman. Yeah, it's just that the bottom line is, when you have four school committee members signing the warrant, it's sort of like a trust that you now have a majority of the school committee saying that we are going to vote for this. The full committee has the responsibility to approve the warrant. You're just getting a commitment from a majority to approve it, so that we're actually paying these bills before it goes to a vote of the full committee. And this is to expedite payment processes. We don't want to hang up vendors based on our school committee schedule. But we do have a legal responsibility if it's being paid through our budget to approve, not just sign off, but approved by a vote, all the expenditures. And if we've got something major going on here, we need to be able to have the documentation attached to it. Okay, so we need to vote on this warrant, but we need to move the 10 o'clock roll first. Well, can I get a motion on the warrant first? It moved. Second. Roll call, Ms. Exton. Yes, Mr. Cardin. Yes. Dr. Allison Ampe. Yes. Mr. Thurman. Yes. Mr. Shipman. Yes. Mr. Heiner. Yes. And I'm also, yes. 10 o'clock roll. No, no takers tonight. How long do you think we need to go, Madam Chair? At least until 1030. Move to extend the meeting, waive the 10 o'clock rule to 1030. Discussion. So, Ms. Exton. Mr. Cardin. Yes. Dr. Allison Ampe. Yes. Mr. Thurman. Yes. Mr. Shipman. Yes. Mr. Heiner. Yes. And I'm also a yes. Subcommittee and liaison reports, budget. Nothing to report. Community relations. I sent out a memo to all you folks. I participated in a focus group for the superintendent. I was truly impressed with the young former alumni. One of the issues that they brought up and a couple of parents brought it up with another focus group is communication with the school committee and stuff. One person mentioned in an email to me about our old coffee clutches, which waned fairly quickly. So I'm suggesting to do a remote one twice a month, one in the morning and one in the evening. And we'd invite members to just sit and listen as we've done in the past, listening not answering questions unless there's something simple. So I thought I'd bring this forward to you folks and share this. Discussion. Mr. Cardin. Oh, it's gonna suggest putting it on a future agenda. I put it on tonight's agenda. That's why you want to just wait till later, fine. Yeah, it's just under committee reports, the document is not listed as a agenda item. Thank you. All right, we can do it next Thursday then. CIA. Nothing to report again. And if it's helpful, I'm happy to have a meeting to discuss the plan since we're meeting as a full committee again in a week. That may not be necessary, but please reach out to me either Dr. Bodie or any members if that's going to be helpful. Facilities. Subcommittee met on the 15th. We had Jim Peany was there, Dr. Christy Allison Ampe, Liz, Jim Michael was there, Kathy. A good discussion, Rob Siegel. And you've heard some of the, in the email Dr. Bodie sent the next day that incorporated a lot of the things that we talked about. Policy. No report. Building committee. You heard about the report, we're moving along. Great. And then we'll move on to the superintendent search process. So we've had nine focus groups so far, not including the ones with faculty and staff. We've got two more scheduled that are community facing. The diversity inclusion group would be Tuesday, July 28th at 2 p.m. And there's a focus group for our LinkedIn residents Monday, August 3rd at 7 p.m. The capital planning and finance committee will be doing a focus group at 5.30. Next Thursday, July 30th. I also want to make a note with Mr. Heiner is that we had a focus group earlier this week with the REACHs and alumni. That was the most illuminating focus group I think we've had because they came at us with a totally different perspective really knowing the system with a lot of respect for the high school, a lot of respect for math, science and fine arts music, performing arts instruction and some very positive thoughts about how we should be going forward. It was really a very valuable group. And I know that Mr. Heiner's motion or a proposal is based out of connecting with that group of young residents who are really, really an asset to the community. So that's our report. Liaison reports, announcements, future agenda items other than the citizen and school committee talk. Seeing none. Yeah, he got somebody. Right. Sorry, sorry, Dr. Alison Ampey. I had wondered if we should have some kind of report on facilities and COVID preparations next time or in a couple of weeks. Okay. Great. Anything else? Okay. Executive session to conduct strategy session in preparation for negotiations with union or non-union personnel or contract negotiations with the union and non-union in which it held an open meeting may have a detrimental effect conducting strategy with respect to collective bargaining or litigation which have held in an open meeting may have a detrimental effect. Collective bargaining may also be conducted bargaining with the Arlington Administrators Association and Arlington Education Association. I moved. Second. Ms. Exton, do you guys want to talk about this? No. Ms. Exton. Yes. Mr. Carden. Yes. Dr. Alison Ampey. Yes. Mr. Thielman. Yes. Whitman. Yes. Revener. Yes. And I'm also a yes. And we do not expect to come out from executive sessions. So we will adjourn from there. Thank you everybody.