Video Gallery

Virtual Parent Forum: Update from November 9, 2020

Go to Video Gallery Added Nov 17, 2020 •

Copy this URL:
Embed code:	<iframe class="edlio-embed-player" type="text/html" width="640" height="360" src="//www.gananda.org/apps/embed/?v=300706" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe> Change dimensions

Go HD

Join Gananda's Superintendent, Dr. Van Scoy, for an update on current Covid-19 information, a discussion about where we go after January, an update on extracurriculars and athletics, and what we need to reduce our taxes.

Show Transcript

I have a whole piece on Finance, on school Finance and what's going on with school finances for us. So that's kind of the agenda for tonight. I'll kick it off with just a general overview of covid-19. Are you going to record this one? Yep, it says it's recording. I'm not, not seeing you're recording on my end.  Usually I get the record button if it's recording. It's recording. As long as you've got it. Yep. So thank you everybody. I want to talk briefly about covid-19. Where we are at with Covid19, what we know today, what's different. We'll talk about athletics, that won't take long unfortunately. Then we will talk about finances and things regarding school finance that we think is important for our residents to know. With me tonight facilitating is Shannon Bergstresser, she's our PR specialist. We have our board President, Bill Buchko and then Shawna Phillips and Robin Vogt who are also on the board, joining us tonight. So if there are questions that they need to answer, they can also jump in on some of this also. So, covid-19. The latest news as all of you have probably seen, the Governor identified Monroe County as being a yellow area with micro clusters. So the whole County of Monroe County and  Erie County are in yellow. What that means is that, yellow means you are supposed to test, for school districts it means 20% of your students and staff population. If you don't do that on a weekly basis, than you have to go all remote. So that, that designation was provided today. Most of us missed that because the Governor decided to do that via radio rather than do that live as he has done in the past. I know we struggled to find it until it was over with. My colleagues listened to it also and then we caught up with Mendoza and Annabelle about halfway through their presentation which is very irrelevant. So, we will, if we  in Gananda get to yellow, so it won't be... let me backup. Monroe County is in yellow but that doesn't mean that all towns and all school districts in Monroe County are subject to the yellow microcluster designations and the work they have to do. So I believe it's Penfield, Pittsford, Irondequoit, and there were two other towns that were associated with that. So as a result of that, the school districts in those towns need to test or they need to go remote. For testing, they have to do 20% of their student and staff population every week; it can't be the same group from week to week. So within 5 weeks you have to test 100% of your students and staff population. So there are a lot of struggles to make that happen. Dr. Mendoza talked about the fact that he'd spoken to the superintendents last week, spoken to them today, was going to speak to them tomorrow. They're going to figure out things like there's a waiver that has to be signed by the states in order to do the testing. You then have to figure out who's going to provide the testing. I heard Dr. Mendoza say that administrators or other staff could give the test. I know I'm going to need some reassurances about that, that someone other than our nurses can really give those tests but supposedly it's a rapid test. I'm not sure anybody really wants me giving anybody, or their student a rapid test, so, so we'll have to have a conversation about how that's actually going to happen. I assume there's going to be some training that needs to happen, regardless of who it is, and maybe it is going to be me, but there's gonna have to be some training regardless who it is, on how to give a rapid test. It's supposedly a nasal swab, doesn't go all, it's not the deep nasal swab. It's just an inside nasal swab, pretty easy supposedly. So they'll be training on that, training on how to do the test, How to read the test. We're gonna need to get waivers from parents saying they agree to have their child tested, I'm going to need to get waivers for parents. So there's alot of work that's gonna have to happen. So that's if we are in a yellow zone, it's probably not going to mean, if we, if we as a district decide we do want to test,  so we can be in person, it's not going to be something that we have happen right away. And you're probably thinking well, we've got time to think about it and figure it out, you're right, we do. We had a meeting on Friday with Wayne County Department of Health, we have another meeting tomorrow with Wayne County Department of Health. They are overwhelmed. So the problem is that in order for them to help us figure it out, they've got to have the time to help make that transition. So Wayne County Department of Health actually has fewer people than Monroe County and they are struggling to do their work at this point. It's not that they're not efficient, but I know Diane Devlin, who's in charge, is working all weekend long because apparently the county does not have their health department staff on staff over the weekend. So she's working all by herself all weekend long while her staff comes in and works Monday through Friday with her. So I think that's the concern, is that the amount of staffing that the Wayne County Department of Health has to help them. So that's a concern. So it will take some time, hopefully, to get our plans up and running. So if we were to go Yellow this week, we'd probably be out for a little while. The hope is if we go yellow, maybe a month from now, hopefully never, but if we go, you know, we'd have some time in the next month to figure these pieces out with the Wayne County Department of Health. So that's kind of the concern at this point. Can I interrupt with a question quick? Yeah, absolutely. A friend of a family, has a son that goes to Gates Central School District and they are testing randomly currently. If the family does not want their child tested, they're required to go remote. Do you know if that would be the same for us? Yeah, that would be the same. So, we have to, we have to test 20% of those that are choosing the in person or hybrid model. If you refuse to be tested you're going to have to go remote because we won't be able to get 100% that way. Now how will that happen? Will you have to, you know, I think that's one of the things we have to work out. We'll probably be watching Monroe County to see how they do it, or listening to other Districts to see how they are doing it downstate and other places, but you know it's been suggested that maybe the first week we take volunteers and we test the volunteers. That makes it easier for people to transition over a period of time and to see how it's done and to hear about how invasive it is. I don't know if we can do that, or if we're going to have to go random right from the first, the first get go. So those are good, we don't know how it will play out at this point. Our county is not, does not have that information to share at this point. I think the other thing you should be prepared for is that the governor, two weeks ago, talked about mask mandates, that the County's can do that. I wouldn't be surprised if in the next two weeks, our County mandates masks for school districts. We already have an expectation that the students are wearing masks, but we're allowing mask brakes, we're allowing students when instruction is going on and they're all in their seats to take their masks off. I believe with a mask mandate the only time that students will be able to take off their mask is when they're eating lunch. So that is something that you should start to think about. As families that is something that I think is coming, I don't, I can't guarantee that one but I know the districts around the county are all in different places. We're probably more strict than most districts in the county about it, so I suspect in order to get everyone to the same place, they're going to take an even stricter stance than Gananda's at, just to get everybody to the same level. But I can't guarantee that, that something else could happen, but that's, that's my guess at making predictions. We're in a good place, we still have only two positive cases and so we're feeling that our procedures and practices have been pretty successful in the last week after we've had the two positive cases. So there's been no expansion, there's been no transference in the district which is good. That's what we want to make sure of. We're in a good place with that. There are a lot of questions, there's some questions about What happened with covid, so the first question, is the fully remote option, will that continue to be available after January? I believe it will be, we're going to put out some surveys. You gave us some responses to a survey that Shannon put out over the weekend. Based on that information, there's still going to be some people that want a remote option. I expect we're probably going to be doing that as long as we get about 10 to 15%, at least, we'll be able to do some level of remote after January. Do you think kids will take Regents in the spring considering the lack of time in school? So they cancelled, as you all know, the January Regents. Do I expect that they will cancel the Regents?  So the, so there, that's going to be a hard decision for the state to make because if they cancel the Regents, that also has a similar, then they're going to have to cancel the APPR which is the the evaluation system we use for teachers. So it's not just a one-off where they can just cancel the Regents. It's going to have a significant effect on the ability to evaluate teachers and it's going to have a significant impact on graduation and what colleges are looking for. So I think it's going to be hard to have Regents in the spring, but I, I wouldn't, I'm not ready to bet on that one. The Regents might look significantly different but it's going to be hard for them to cancel that, the Regents in June. Teachers are being given the choice to teach synchronously or asynchronously. Will they be asked to teach synchronously? So we are working on the next round of remote expectations. The administrative team has been spending time, we spent about an hour and a half today again on it, we spent an hour-and-a-half on last Thursday. We're preparing a survey to go out for teachers, we are looking for all teachers be doing something synchronously with their students so we're trying to figure out what is a standard expectation that we can put in place going forward. That is a concern we have, so it's kind of trying to find a balance that saying that you know we want to have some synchronous interaction between staff and students, at the same time we don't want all high school teachers having forty minutes of synchronous classes which means you could have asynchronous classes go beyond our 320 minutes at the high school. That's going to be 5 hours while I know no one is going to want 5 hours of online learning at the high school. It's figuring out what that balance is, at the same time if none of your classes are a synchronous, it's all asynchronous, there's a concern about lack of ability to have good interactions with students and draw them in and so we're trying to figure out what that balance is for our next time we go all remote. So we're working on that furiously because we're afraid of going out and not having that ready to go. So yes, synchronous will at some point will be expected for all teachers, we're trying to figure out what that number or that amount of time will be, but that's coming. What is the outlook for modified... so I'll get to basketball in a minute. After January will we consider switching the all remote day for middle school  and high school students to Wednesday instead of Friday so we can match other districts? Yeah, we would consider that. There was a reason we went with Friday, I don't remember offhand why that was, but I know we had a lengthy conversation of why we wanted Friday. But those are the kinds of things that we're interested in. The administrative team is engaged in those kinds of schedule conversations, that's different than the synchronous/remote discussion we're having right now; we're thinking long-term, you know do we do, you know someone suggested two meetings a go do we go 5 days on, 5 days off?  All those things are on the table for us. We've talked about, one of the things we talked about today was having a compacted schedule where every day you have shortened periods in the morning and then your asynchronous for the afternoon. It's something similar to what going on in Marion so that was a schedule we looked at. 30 minute classes in the morning and getting everybody home so there's a variety of things we're looking at to make those pieces happen. What other questions are you seeing about about instruction and during COVID? So I want to circle back to the yellow zone. Can you explain what would make us go yellow? Is it a specific positivity rate? It is a specific positivity rate and it's.. I want to to say it's at 3.5% that would cause us to be yellow, and it's looking at an average over 14 days. So it's not just one day, it's looking at an average over a period of time. I know when we talked to our Department of Health last week, they said it's mathematically possible, but not likely based on where our numbers were. So mathematically you'd have to have a huge percentage increase just to push us to yellow, because we are looking at a 10-day average, but we're getting closer to hitting that 10 day average for being yellow. So for our elementary students that are in class 5 days a week, if we have parents that don't want them to be tested, does that mean they go remote 5 days a week? If they don't test; they will have to be fully remote, yes. If we're in the yellow. If a child is required to quarantine as a result of exposure in school, how do parents find out when and how the exposure happened? So, so you're going to... you should get a call from Candice at the high school, from Paige at the elementary school, or Kim from the Middle School. So if you have high school student and they were exposed to one of the positive students we have, you should have gotten a call from Candice or Kim. What they would say to you is, they would say your child has been identified as being in contact with a COVID positive student. We're telling you your child cannot come to school and you're going to be receiving a call from the Department of Health representative to inform you that your child has to quarantine. Now, the first time we did it, those calls, we made those calls and the Department Health representative made the call then in 24 hours, it was up to 48 and now they're up to 72 hours before they make those calls. When I say Department of Health represenative, its someone from a company called Comcare, so they've subcontracted out. So you should be getting two phone calls, one from our school nurse, maybe an administrator, depending how a busy we get, informing you that the Department of Health is going to be calling. So you're going to get two phone calls. Right now we're limited to just the high school. The second part of that, that was positioned and I didn't go over, was that during the last round of quarantines, a particular student was quarantined for exposure on a date that they were actually remote. So how would we track back? Say that again? The student was asked to quarantine because of a possible exposure on the date that the student was remote learning. It maybe, so they may have been remote learning, and I may not have the details, so I'd have to look back at it. They should call and follow-up, but it could have been the day they were, the day they received the phone call from us would not have been the date that the contact happened, and also could have been a result of playing a sport, could've also been a result of riding in a car with that person, there's a, there's a variety of things that may have caused that to happen, not necessarily being remote at the exact same time. So I would have to look at the Covid tracking paper. What is the rationale for testing all students if it's been shown that transmission is not happening in schools? I don't have an answer for that. That's not my call. The rationale for me to test is because I've been told it's the only way, the only way I can have in-person instruction. So for me, it's it's a practical, that's above my paygrade, so to speak, so that is the governor's office saying if you want to stay in person, you need to do the testing, so because I want to be in person because I think that's the best way our kids are going to learn, I'm going to make the effort to make that happen. If we go remote, will specials be synchronous teaching as well? That's a great question that we are talking about. So we've looked at two tiers, if we're out for two weeks, Elementary the elementary specials schedule will remain exactly the same. So if we're out for 2 weeks, if your child has morning meeting at 8:30 and after morning meeting they have a small group ELA instruction, and then they go to, at say, 9:30  they go to PE, or they go to art, or they go to music or library, they would continue to do that via zoom into some type of synchronous setting. We would continue that for 2 weeks. One of the things that we're going to be trying to poke at as an administrative team is we're concerned that when we did that in the spring, parents became overwhelmed or concerned, we're concerned about parents. So for example Shannon, let's say Shannon you had three Elementary students. And so let's say Mrs. Phillips class is doing reading at 8:30 and Mr Buchko's class is doing reading at 9:30 and Mrs. Vogt's class is doing reading at 1 o'clock. How do you keep track of that as a parent? You have 3 kids going in three different directions and you're trying to manage that. Or if, you know, if Shauna's, if you're a parent and Shauna's at 9 is doing reading with Mrs. Kohler, and little Billy is doing a math with Mrs. Mader and Robin is doing science with another teacher, how do you as a parent run those three different schedules? So we're looking at for,  if we're out for more than 2 weeks, how do we start to create a common schedule so that parents know that all the kids are doing morning meeting at 8:30, and all the kids have ELA instruction from 9 to 9:30. So that parents know, we're talking about that. I'm not saying we're going to do that, but we're talking about will that help parents have some sanity in their household, if they know those things are common for all their kids across the board? The problem with that schedule will be that, that will play havoc with doing specials because then you couldn't, that would require that everyone have specials at the same time and I don't have enough special teachers to go around. So there's some balances, so any feedback on that, you want to send me an email or your opinion, we're trying to figure out is it better to have each classroom run their individual schedule or is it better for the elementary to have one common schedule across-the-board? You know it's a matter of, you know, balancing the need for specials versus the need for some sanity for parents and so we're trying to figure those pieces out. That's a long way from the question, yes, sorry. It was good. Will Elementary still be 5 days, all day, in January if the remote students want to come back? I don't know the answer to that. Will they be 5 days? We would like to be five days, we would like to be 5 days a week. I think if all the remote students came back, we would struggle for space. We would probably be on a 2 day a week schedule if we did that. That's probably the biggest piece for that. And we'd struggle for transportation. So there are some concerns if everybody wants back as of February 1, after January, that we're going to struggle for that piece. I'd also say that there is, we're struggling to get instructional time in for staff development for teachers. We're trying to figure out that maybe, do we make, as someone mentioned, do we do Wednesdays, or is there a day or half-day during the week we do so that teachers can have constant staff development for them at the elementary school? That's missing right now. That's two pieces we need to get squared away. So the straight answer to the question, if all remote Learners came back, we would have a problem getting everybody's needs at the same time. We'd have to do an alternate schedule somehow. has there been any discussions on IEP students, especially the elementary level, if we were to move full remote, how are we going to get the services that they need for them to learn? Yes, that is a great concern for Melissa. That was part of her conversation today. You know, that one of the guidance that we will be looking for at her request is, when they say we have to go all remote, is there any chance we can bring some of the special education students in? They allowed us to do that in the summer, they were starting to think about that at the end of the spring, so the question would they do that if we are unable to meet the 20% of students in the Yellow Zone, and we have to go remote, one of the questions was, could we still get 20% of the special education students tested? Would they be able to come in?  So Melissa was asking the questions because she's concerned about how we get their needs and can we do that in a significantly reduced setting here at school? But yes, that's a conversation. And that's a big concern. Have we considered psychological effects on young children who would be stressing about whether or not it would be their turn to be tested at school? Are we concerned about that?  Yes. We're concerned, that's where we're going to need help from parents, talking to parents, talking to the students. I'm concerned that you would have a student that is anxious coming in to be tested and they're going down to the nurse's office, they've never been to the nurse's office before, and here's a 6-1 tall bald guy and who is he sticking his thing up, you know, there is significant concern about that. That's a part of the plan will be doing, is there some way that we can do this after hours where parents can be there to bring their kid in to be tested? Is there a remote setting that parents could take their kids over a weekly basis and we've kicked around could there be a setting at BOCES? BOCES has got a pretty big facility. Can parents drive their child over there if they don't feel comfortable with us doing it to be tested? So there's, so philosophically we as superintendents have kicked around a lot of things,  we're still not sure what we'll be allowed to do, but that's, that's a concern. It's a very valid concern. When we did H1 N1 shots back in 2009 we set it up, even when we did it during the day, parents were able to come in and meet their child and walk down with them to get that  H1 N1 shot. We're not going to allow parents in during the day with covid-19 but we'd certainly work to figure something out. We've done that before, that would be a priority for us. Do we know if the tests are going to be less invasive, if it would be more of like a cheek swab instead of a nasal test? So it was explained to us that it would be a cheek swab last week. Mendoza talked about a lower nasal swab today. So I'll be honest, I'm a little confused about which it is, hopefully I'll get a better answer. I know there are two different tests they are talking about that are supplied by the state. One is a test that has to be processed. There's a machine that they would give us and takes 15 minutes to run a test. The second is a kind of a rapid instantaneous one, which it was explained to be like a pregnancy test where there's like two two lines you looking at to appear. If  both lines appear then you're positive. If only one of the two lines appear, you're negative. But I don't know if those, how either of those are obtained so that's something we're still not clear on. Do you know if our school counselors could get involved with parents at all to help guide our kids through this uncertain time? Uncertain time of testing or uncertain time of covid-19? If it's Covid-19, they are available, they're waiting for, they're waiting for your call. They'd love to talk to you about it. In terms of testing, I...they'll be available for conversations, I'm not sure that a kindergartener with stress, they'll be available, they're currently available to talk to with Covid-19 issues and the stresses of Covid-19. They're currently doing that. In terms of testing, we would certainly have them on hand. They're always here. If a student is struggling with hybrid learning, is there an all in school option for them? Specifically high school. There's not an all in school option for most students. If you haven't, if you're student is struggling, you need to talk to your principal and explain what the issues are. They're doing some different things for some different people. We have some special needs students that are here four days a week, we've got some Alt Ed  (Alternative Education) students they have a different senario created for them, but generally speaking, we don't have people here 4 days a week unless there's some special circumstance that's driving that. Just a clarification question. So can you confirm that our district did offer H1 N1 shots in school? Yeah, back in 2009. That was... I think we did it in the elementary gym. Curious... A curiosity question. Approximately how many tests are 20% for our district? If we had todo 20% weekly, how many tests would that be? I think we figured that to be 220 weekly Approximately.. If remote students come back in January, would that decision be locked in for the rest of the year? My guess would be yes, unless there is something that changes the the covid-19 status. You know, if there was suddenly a change in expectations of regulations, or safety precautions, or if there was suddenly a mass available shot that we can all have, that could cause a significant change. But it's tepidly going to be an obligation for the rest of the semester, the rest of the school year. When will we know for sure if remote learning will continue to be an option after January? My goal is to have that to you beginning to mid- December. We plan to put another survey out at the end of November to get a sense of where you're at. With a second survey sometime mid-December for you to have those answers as to what we're planning. We're trying to get what you're comfortable, understand what you're comfortable with, where the problems are, things we need to address. The big one is going to be how many people want all remote and if, and if the indication is that there's not many people that want all remotes, it may be hard to pull that off. I've heard the rapid tests have a higher false positive rate. If that's the case, do they have to quarantine for the full 14 days no matter what or will there be an allowance to test prior to the 14 days being up? My understanding is the first test is like an indicator and if you tested then they want you to take the more precise test, is my understanding. I could be wrong on that one too, like I said the overview we got last week was pretty, pretty... was not as in-depth as most of us would have liked. But my understanding is that it's an indicator, like the person said, it's not a perfect test. I am gonna circle back for a minute to the synchronous teaching for specials. There's a lot of questions about if there's a way that we can make that happen, is there a way now to do it, as opposed to waiting until reviewing it for a fully remote option? Ask the question again? If we have in person available now. For our fully remote students, that are fully remote now, they're not receiving synchronous teaching in their specials. Is there a way for us to do that now? No, not in the current structure. So it is... we are not doing synchronous instruction in our existing classrooms, we've got some work to make that happen so that's the problem. It would need to be different setting for them and I don't have enough teachers to do that the way we're designed so that's why we've got to look at the design differently for the second semester. Doesn't the State require public schools to offer a fully remote option? So, they do not. The governor has said we need to, and we should, and we have to, but he's not, he's not put that in writing any place. That's the thing that we're all, the superintendents are struggling with is that he's put an expectation out that we do it, but it's not written anyplace. There's no legal obligation. So we're trying, everybody's trying to do it because it's the right thing to do, but it's technically not, there's, it's not obligated any place. So just to clarify, if the current Covid-19 situation remains stable, we will still be offering two choices at the elementary level for let's say February through June. That's my intent. Ok, so either fully remote or in person. And the decision would have to be made in December? That's a great question. We would want, the hope is that we would know sometime in December so we can change our,  we can design where we need differently. So it's assuming that we have to change schedules, you know, it takes time to do that, particularly at the middle school and high school. To change a schedule, there's a lot of a work that has to happen, to make that happen, and it usually takes our principles two months to three months to get their schedule up and running because there is a lot of time at the middle school and high school in particular spent fixing. So if you've ever had a kid at the high school and you know, they come home with their schedule and they're in this class, and they don't want this class, they want that class, and you know French conflicts with with Band, which conflicts with Project Lead the Way. So it takes time to work all of those permutations out. In every district I have ever been in, it takes time unfortunately and that time is necessary for the secondary building. It also could impact us, I think our concern is at the elementary school, is it could impact class organization. It's possible that if we have more students come back, or more students go out, it could be a good reconfigure classes. So we would want to have some, you would have some,  we would not want to... we want to make sure they have time to process that change for students and staff. Also... it's for parents. If we're making a change and we're going from 5 days a week to 2 days a week, you as parents don't want us to drop that on you with two weeks notice. There's work you are going to have to do too so everyone will need time if there's changes made. If your student is already in person full-time at the elementary school, will their teacher remain the same for the second semester? Hopefully, yes. That would be the intent. Do you know if we will be providing all the pertinent information regarding testing out to parents before we have them make the decision on whether or not they will consent and remain in person? For the Covid-19 testing? Yes, we would. I don't know what all the information is, but there would be a waiver that I expect some kind of waiver the parents will have to sign off on, I expect to get a packet of information they'd have to say yes I approve this, or no I don't and I understand that I'll have to go remote. I think one of our concerns is if there's an increase of people who will refuse that and we'll have to figure out how to manage those students so that could and force our hand depending on how those responses coming in too. So we'll want some time to get those back and processed before actually starting testing. Assuming we have to do it. It is possible that whatever guidance comes in, we say it's too much we can handle that, or we don't have the staffing to do that, so there could be hurdles that cause us to say no, we're going remote that are beyond our control. I hope there aren't. I hope we can figure it out, but that's a concern. Okay, what happens if parents give consent for covid-19 testing, but then on that day the kid will not do it? That's a conversation with a parent. If they're refusing to do it, my hope, we'll have to figure that out. We're not going to yell and scream and force them, you know, that goes back to the conversation that there may be some need to have some type of testing opportunity where parents can be present. So we may need some parents, that you know, that we do that in some kind of remote setting where it's not going to expose parents to the the school setting, but we'll have to figure that out. As of right this minute, I don't have any more questions on Covid-19. So Sports drops today that.. that basketball is essentially a no, wrestling is a no, the only things that they are going to allow, and some of it as usual doesn't make sense, they're going to allow bowling, okay, they're going to allow swimming, they're going to allow gymnastics, and they're going to allow indoor track. Now I don't understand indoor track. If you've ever been to an indoor track meet, you got hundreds of kids crammed in a into a location, that one doesn't make any sense to me. Okay so, but basketball and so it's not a direct no on basketball and wrestling, the answer, you have to read the answers, it's kind of the same answer they gave for football and volleyball. It's basically a way of saying no, without saying no. We're going to order a hold on the date until we can decide later. It's so there's no answer. I see someone asked about competitive cheer. I didn't see competitive cheer in there any place. That's a great question. I assume competitive cheer is probably a contact sport. I think it's a high-risk so it's probably a no for cheer, is my guess on that one. I know the ones that are a yes and cheer has not been one of them that was a definite yes. So right now we've got girls varsity soccer has a sectional game. Girls varsity swimming is still ongoing. We have modified boys and girls swimming starting, I believe it's this week, and mod and varsity boys swimming starts I think on the 30th. So we're going ahead with the swimming pieces and Girls soccer is still a go. We are trying to run our extracurricular activities, so ski club is up and running. We are looking at running clubs an activities. Our musical director is trying to figure out, can he do a play or a can he do something else that would be allowable and do that remotely. So I know he's engaged in figuring that out. I know that we've had math leagues, has been competing remotely, they've had the mathlete competitions. So we are trying to provide students some level of social engagement. But it's not where it has been and it doesn't look like it will change anytime soon given what's going on in Monroe County. That's it, kind of it for Sports. Any other questions besides the competitive cheer one I saw flash up? Can a student-athlete tryout for bowling and/or swimming and then switch to basketball if that does get the all-clear? So we don't have bowling, unfortunately. They can try out for swimming, and they can then switch to other sports. So in our league, you can, there's a term that I'm going to struggle with, but basically you can play two sports at once. If you can, if you can make both teams and you can make the schedules work, technically in our league, you can play both sports, so yes John Tichacek has talked about that, that you could switch sports if you,if that opportunity presented itself. Or play both, if you had to play both at that point. Can we do something for seniors who won't be participating in their regular sport? I know that coach May has been having, starting open gyms when that's kind of, you know, we say open gym, and it's not anything like an open gym as we've run in the past. It's six kids all shooting at the basket, all by themselves. Yes, our coaches are trying to figure out what they can do. I know that football has had a couple practices with no idea that they're going to be able to play anything, but they are having, football's having practices. Surprising or not, I know they had one Friday night or Monday Night. Football has had a few practices. They are able to practice, it's non-contact, they've got a whole regiment of cleaning the the footballs after every touch of them, it's pretty amazing. But yes we could, I'm sure if you've reached out to the coach they'd be open to doing something for their players. We as a school district would be open to it. Just a clarification. We had put it out there that basketball is delayed but then you just also said that it would be.. not happening. So I just want to confirm, at this point, we are just delayed, right? Is that what John, is that the language John put out? Today? I think we said delayed, but it wasn't, we haven't gotten confirmation. that it would be... Hold on I'll open up my other screen. I'll bring it up on my screen. I'll bring it up right now everybody, hold on a second. I'll show you what it says. I'm gonna switch screens. Can you let me share my screen? Can you do it now? So that's what it says. please confirm when they can, can start. So that happened, what time did I get this today? At 4:10 this afternoon. So it's confirmed that bowling, gymnastics, indoor track and field, skiing and swimming and diving are permitted. It's implied everything else is not going to happen. So that's what I mean by, it's the same thing they did for football and volleyball. They approved one set of sports and for whatever reason they are incapable of saying no, or saying you're not going to do it. They just let it, let us interpret that from the document. So it's not, it's not going to happen. We might be able to do some practicing and some things like that, but there's not going to be basketball or or competitive cheer, or wrestling, or any of those things like would normally occur. Can sports that miss their season have organized get-togethers? No. No organized get-togethers. No. So that is, so that's the conversation with the County, that's the conversation if you listen to Mendoza, that's the problem. Any kind of organized gathering is a problem. We do not want our players gathering. Not that we don't want them together, but we're concerned that, that's how transmission is happening. It's not happening in school, it's happening at events outside of school, gatherings outside of school. I can't stress enough that if you're hosting, or helping, or you're aware of gathering, you're putting your the district, the students at risk for the remainder of the year, so, or for the next couple weeks after that event, so, no gatherings. Please, no gatherings. Gathering. A group of people that get together that are not family. I just want to clarify, we had said before, that we would be supporting extracurriculars and things like that, but it's going to be under guidelines and they're not going to be gathering in groups and there's going to be certain things we have to do to keep everyone safe. Right, so like if you go look at a soccer game, the kids kind of joke as they come off for a mask, they come off for a mask break, they don't, they don't sit together they're all like eight feet apart on the on the field so that they can maintain that separation. That's what even the coaches are afraid of, they want to be able to say, "no they're not close to each other when they come off the field with their mask off." It's the same thing at school, we're running classes, but they're masked, particularly at the high school and middle school almost all the time. There are very little mask breaks going on at the middle and high school. So, you know, anything we're doing, we're expecting kids to stay a part, to stay separated, to be masked at all times and you know, the thing I talked about with staff today, is that when you have a group of more than 4 people together, the the opportunity for it to impact others as significant. So there are there are good examples of how things have impacted schools. So let's see, everyone knows that Clyde-Savannah was shut down for like a month to begin the school year. That's because of a gathering. That's because a person had covid-19 and interacted with other bus drivers. That shut down their transportation department. You've got Red Creek was shut down for 2 weeks. An internal person tested positive, they had lunch with other people, no one knew that until after the fact. That caused 13 staff members to be out at Red Creek. Shut down their district for 2 weeks. The classic one, is one of our neighboring school district's, all the administators are currently on a quarantine for 2 weeks because they had a staff meeting last week one of those people turned out to be positive, no symptoms, and now the whole administrative team, none of those administrators can come to work. They've had to rely on their interns to get through the the two weeks. When we do the couple, when we did the contract tracing for our two positive students, it didn't matter that students were in classrooms with masks on. It didn't matter that you had the positive student on one side of the room other students on the other side and they didn't talk to the positive student, it didn't matter that they didn't walk down the hall together, it didn't matter that all of them had their masks on at the same time. They do what's called time stacking and the fact that they were in the same location with them for a specific amount of time, or for a cumulative specific amount of time because their time is stacked together, they're automatically out. Our concern is that that someone, it's very easy for a person to get it and then you start stacking people, and we're at 39, we're at 39,  actually, we're at 41 counting two other students, we're at 41 students that are not at the high school because they're quarantined. One or two students can have a huge impact. I can't stress it enough. I know it's not easy for parents, but gatherings... What is a number? I suppose the county can give us the exact number as to what a gathering is, but non-family members is what I'm using. I do not have any other questions. So with that, I'm going to transition to talking to our our finance piece. This is something we have been talking about as a School District, the board and I for 2 years now, and our business administrator is concerned about how high are taxes are in Gananda. We want to talk again about that tonight. Last time we kind of gave you a general background of how it works. Tonight I want to talk about the revenues, and where we get money from to run a school district, and start to talk about what the problem is in Gananda. People assume that the problem in Gananda is that we just don't have enough businesses and there's more to it than that. I'm going to get into some of those details tonight. This is something the we think we can have an impact on, but it will require that the community help with and support with to actually move this piece along. So I'm going to share my screen again. I'll start talking about this. So again our goal is to have adjustments made to the current Foundation Aid formula, the financial aid formula. It's how we get money and address the needs of the Gananda school district. Currently school district's get money in two ways. We get state aid, and that's the money to get from New York State, and currently Gananda is disadvantaged because the Foundation Aid formula has a flaw and I'll talk about that. The Foundation Aid Formula sees Gananda as wealthy, so we're not getting money because the formula from the state sees us as wealthy. The other revenue stream is is property taxes. And the problem we have with property taxes, and everyone knows this one, is that we're disadvantaged because we have low property value. In other words, we have homes that are funding our property value, we don't have businesses. So, because of that, we don't have property value. The other 3.4% is other sources like like Federal monies and some other very small revenues we get from other places. The majority of it, 51% of our money, comes from the state, and the state thinks we're wealthy, and we're not. I'll talk a little bit about that. So I can hit this, and this my business administrator wanted to make sure I highlighted this, you'll see in yellow, special note: this is all verified data. So this is all data that New York State says is correct and they agree with this data. So according to this in 2019, we had the third highest tax rate in the in the state. You can see your tax rate was a $31.05 in 2019, and the average for New York State was $17. That's based on true value of homes and the Wayne County average is $21 so you can see that that our tax rate was significantly higher than anyone else. The closest to us is Pal-mac, or was Pal-mac in 2019. So how is sales tax calculated? I'm not going to run through this whole formula, but basically it takes all the assessed values, A,  for Macedon and Walworth that are in Gananda, takes the total values of those, multiplies it by an equalization rate to figure out what the full value is. So according to New York State, we have 327 million dollars worth of properties in Gananda. 52% of that property is in Macedon. 47% of that property is in Walworth. So what that does, is based on those percentages, it takes where tax levy was, is for that year, the 2019 data, our tax levy in 2019, the total amount of money we collected in taxes was 10 million dollars. So it was 5 million dollars sworn by Macedon residents and $4.8 by Walworth residents, which meant our tax rate, so what you do is, you divide your tax levy by your assessed values, and that gives you your tax rate. So you can see that, if you're assessed values go up, that can impact what your tax rate is, or if your assessed values go down, or if your equalization rate, so these are all formulas ar multiplication formulas to figure out what that rate is per $1,000 of the home. So with Macedon, for the $31 per thousand, if you had a $1,000 home you just multiply it by the $1,000 of your home. So $31 times $100,000 would be 31 times $100. So I'll get off that one. So what is the property tax disadvantage? So if you divide Gananda by the number of students, you'll see that on average, we have $322,000 per student that's backing them. 90% of school districts in New York State have more property value, property value backing each student than Gananda. 90% of school districts in New York State have more property value per student than we do. We're in the lowest 10% of property value. So this inhibits our ability to raise revenues. 50% of our revenues comes from property tax, but we've got the lowest amount of property to tax because it's hard for us to raise revenue locally. There just isn't any property to tax. So if you look at similar districts with similar property wealth, so if you look at Candor in this sheet, or Sherburne-Earlville or Lisbon, Chenango Forks, Maine Endwell, all have similar property values. If you look at how much aid they're getting per student, look at the pink, Gananda's getting $5,967 per student. Candor's getting $10,000 per student. Sherbourne-Earlville is getting 13 thousand dollars, Lisbon's getting 10,000 Chenango Forks 8000 Main Endwell is close to us and they're getting 5,000 but the average is about $9,000 per student. So if you imagine, if we had $4,000 more per student, if you took the average, and you multiply that by a thousand students, that's $4 million. So there's a lot of money that we're not getting because of our, because of this formula. So the State Advantage. Currently State Aid distribution is based on the the foundation Aid, and looks at extraordinary need. So it's not looking at our property value, it's looking at free and reduced lunch. So 30% of our students receive free reduced lunch and 9% of our students do not use, .9% of our students do not use English as their first language. The state is looking at what's the number of free reduced lunch numbers and how many English ELL learners do we have in Gananda? So because our numbers are so low in that area, they consider us an average need. The problem with that, is that if you look at this next slide, and you look at districts that are extraordinary needs, you see our extraordinary needs is a point 235. You see as a result of that, we're only getting $5,000 per student. The problem is that these other districts, that have extraordinary needs in the fourth column like ours, they have huge property values that are double ours or triple ours which means they have local ability to raise taxes and raise revenue. So when you've got low extraordinary needs, it typically means that you have other money to to fund your school district. We don't have that. Again, extraordinary needs similar to ours, they have higher property values to fund their schools. They're getting similar State Aid to us, but they can get money from the other stream which is a property taxes. The state is supposed to use something called the CWR. CWR is the third column, that's what they're supposed to use to decide who gets money. It's called the combined wealth ratio and it looks at what was your wealth is in terms of property value, and the income of your residence. 1 is average. You can see New Paltz is at 1. They're an average, considered an average wealth district by the state's formula. You can see Gananda's at point five. So under the CWR formula, we should be considered half as wealthy as the average school district. The problem is, is that that's not represented in the amount of foundation aid we get. So, even though the CWR sees us as poor, New York isn't. New York is currently only looking at extraordinary needs at 30% free and reduced and that ELL population. Our low property wealth means that were unable to make up for the extraordinary need, and the result is we have a high tax rate. So again, we don't have property value, we all know that, we've always known that, but for most districts that are poor and have struggles, they're getting Aid, let me go back to that slide, they're getting aid from the state. You can see Candor 10,000 per student, Lisbon 10,000 per student, Chenango Forks 8,000 per student. They're getting money another way, we're not getting it. So that is, that is the problem we have is that you are paying your fair share of taxes, more than your fair share of taxes, but New York State is not at this time, supporting us to help pick up the cost of our students. My opinion, and I think the board members as well, and I will open it to them if they have any additional comments on that. We are working to address this. The Board has met, again, with senators, state senators, state assemblyman, we're trying to move this piece and have conversations because it's a change that we need,  it needs to happen at the state level. That is not something we direct control over. In the future it means we're going to be talking to you about what we need from you and how you can help us carry this conversation forward. Is there any chance after that long boring conversation that there's any questions out there? Are there any comments from anybody else? I don't have any questions about that. I think the piece that, you know, that we want you to know, is that we're working hard, we know that you're bearing a burden, that you're supporting your school. Our message to you is that we don't think that burden is fair and we think that New York State is not sharing it's a portion of what it should share for us when we look at other districts. We know that this is not an easy fix because the governor's office is really controlling where money goes. They're ignoring, there's a Formula, there's a foundation a formula, it hasn't been followed for about eight years. If that formula was being followed, we'd be getting close to two million dollars every year additional. That's not happening. The Governor's driving money and ignoring the formula, so that's part of our concern is trying to figure out how we how we leverage change. I was just going to add something, on behalf of the Board, we've been working on this for several years now, trying to take out a deeper understanding of it because we wanted to do our due diligence to make sure that we understand why it is the way it is, and if there is opportunities for us to do something to change it and school finances is not a simple topic, even for people with financial Acuity. It's done very differently. I've always had the mindset that I think they do it purposefully to confuse the average person, to make it difficult to understand, and therefore you can't argue it. So we're trying to break it down and as I'm listening to this, even with the breakdown I still see some things that could be confusing, so we're going to just continue to provide additional information and education to help people to understand it to see if there is opportunities for us to do something about it. So that's all I wanted to add. So a couple of questions have come in. Are we able to write letters to our State representatives to help get this increased? So yeah, so Senator Helming and Brian Manktelow are both aware of this. We've met with them repeatedly on this. they're aware of it, they're generally supportive. The problem is that they're both Republicans and they're in the minority. So I think it would be useful for them to know that you are concerned about this, they're not blocking at this point, but they certainly need to know it's important to you, and that you want their support, so certainly. Letters, for me, I'll be honest, the easiest is a phone call. A letter can take you 20-30 minutes to put together and put that out. A phone call, you can put a phone call and just say you saw a presentation from us, they'll be aware of what the presentation is, and just you'll end up talking to an aid anyways, but they still mark it or record it in the same way they do a letter. They keep a tally of who calls, and what topics from a district, and they keep track of that. So if you don't feel that you have the time, or don't feel comfortable writing a letter, making a quick phone call is just as valuable. Do we believe the perceived lack of support from the federal government during covid-19 is going to further affect the tax level? We are concerned that, okay that's a slightly different question but, I'll answer that. We are concerned, the governor has been talking about a 20% Aid cut since April or May. He has repeatedly said that there's not a cut occuring, that's not exactly true. There's not a aid cut occuring this current year, we have lost aid from last year. So in other words, there's money we should have gotten, we should have gotten last year, they delayed those payments to this year and they've cut money out of those delayed aid payments. So there have been cuts, I'll clarify that to some of our aid payments from last year that they delayed. We are very concerned that come February or March, when we get our biggest, biggest checks from New York State that those will be reduced by 20%. That's our biggest concern. If there's not a federal package, that's when we'll get those 20% cuts. We have been working on some strategies to protect us this year. We're very concerned about, but we're concerned that, you know, how big will it actually be 20%, and we're concerned based on that wealth piece, that we might get a higher than 20% cut. That 20% is an average 20%, so some districts could get more, some districts will get less than 20%. That is just an average, when the governor goes out says there's a 3% increase for schools across the board in NY State, usually that means that Gananda got 2% and other places got 4%. Do you know if we'll be sending out information with talking points, phone numbers, and emails to help people make calls? Yes, we're building towards that. That's part of our strategy. We are trying to give you pieces of information about this in chunks that are consumable. If we gave you the full twenty-five slide presentation at once you'll all fall asleep on us and you wouldn't do anything. So we're trying to chunck this together for you so you can see this in the zooms and the end is going to be an ask for to help us with these pieces. Our students have been receiving free breakfast and lunch. Is that coming from Gananda or the state, and is that going to continue through January? That's coming from the federal government. So that is scheduled to continue at least through January. I think there's been something else, when, I can't remember the exact, I can't remember if it's for the end of the year or just January? I think it goes through June. And Shawn, it's correct, it's helpful for the district if people participate in receiving those meals? It is. Two things with that. So, if you get that form for free and reduced lunch, it's always helpful to fill that form out, even if you don't think you're going to get it. The state looks at those forms and they can help us move that 30% or 31%. Anytime we can move that, that percentage up, it gets us more Aid and it allows us to apply for more grants. So that's a way to help us generate money. Currently, in the current fiscal fees, we get, it's helpful to us if you're at home and on your remote day you want that, you want that delivery, it helps us, it's actually, we make money on those as a district. So the food I think, the average meal reimbursement we get is $4.50. It doesn't cost us $4.50 to deliver that meal to you, so we make a little bit of money on that, so it's financially helpful to the district if you sign up for those meals at home. And certainly it's helpful if while your child's in school that they are all taking advantage of the free meals anyways, so thats automatic but if you want them at home, sign up for that and that would be helpful for us also. Have we mentioned when the next meeting would be? Have we decided that? I don't think we've decided that yet. I think, I think we're amazed that you're all attending. We're appreciative of that. I mean we have run open forums for years and we were lucky to get five people at them sometimes, so we're greatly appreciative of your willingness to sit with us for an hour and a half because we have wanted this and so obviously when Covid-19 is over we're going to continue this because this is what we wanted. We wanted to engage with people so this is working for you, so this is all, this is one of the things we will take away and continue. But know we haven't, you know we're still waiting, still waiting for people to not show up. So it's great that you're here tonight and we will schedule more meetings. Have I said that well, Bill, Robin, Shauna? Waiting for people not to show up...They'll keep showing up. Don't worry. Yeah, that's great! I can see us potentially doing one next month. December gets busy, but you know, I see pleased zoom helps, and it really helps all of us. We can sit at home and we can talk about these things and talk about these things at different rates actually. We do get to connect on a certain level so this is awesome, thank you. Thanks for participating. And we're open to other topics as well so anybody that registers for the next one can always put in suggested topics. Yep. There was one other question that came in too and I just want to make sure we ask it. Are we making any money off of the unnecessary testing that the state wants to impose on our students? We will make no money off of that. So, that will be interesting to find out though. Supposedly the state is supplying for, if we do, if we are in the yellow zone and if we have to do the testing, supposedly the state has got all, has got tests from the federal government that they're using. These are the, I believe some of these tests for are the federal government supply test they talked about. So it will be interesting to know if we've got it. There should be no cost to the districts to do that. Having said that, someone's going to have to administer the test and I think that's kind of the key because that may cost a little bit. I saw another question flash up, I didn't read it fast enough. It has to do with,  so it has to do with lunch signups. I will take care of that after we get off of here. I'm not sure, there's a comment about testing is not unnecessary if we are in the yellow zone. I'm not clear on what we are asking there though. If we're in the yellow zone, we're required to do the testing or be remote. Alright, so yeah, yes, we will establish another date for December with the response in participating tonight, we will certainly do that. The Board has a subcommittee, a community relations subcommittee that is Shauna, Bill, and Robin from the Board. Shannon and I meet with them to talk about issues, so know if there's a topic you don't for some reason feel comfortable reaching out to Shannon or myself, you can always reach out to Bill or Shauna or Robin and write them an email. Any five of us would be glad to hear if there's a topic that you want on our agenda for next month or for the future, we'd be glad to carry that forward. And yes, we can send the agenda out in advance. Thank you! I'm going to go home and do some math apparently. Enjoy. Thank you

Video Gallery

Virtual Parent Forum: Update from November 9, 2020

Popular Videos