March 30, 2020 at 8:00 AM - ALL STAFF Zoom Meeting: March 30th Update

Rationale: 

                              Communication
Effort          Respect             Responsibility        Belief

One Good Thing!       
New Book:  The Coffee Bean (Jon Gordon)

1.  Weekend update:   On Saturday morning, the Governor declared another Directed Health Measure for the counties of Butler, Merrick, Polk, Hall, Hamilton, York, and Seward.   This means there have been cases of COVID-19 that are community spread. The schools in those counties (East Butler, David City, Cross County, High Plains, Palmer, and Central City) will need to extend their closure to May 6. It may be a good time to consider closure until the end of the school year. Among other things, the DHM orders gatherings size of 10 or less.

2.  State and Area Meetings:  Meeting with Governor, Commissioner, and State Health Officials:  These meetings have been moved from Sunday afternoons to Mondays at 4:00 PM.  Any recommended changes generally come from these meetings and the follow-up meetings with East Central Health Department and ESU 7 Superintendents.  Not sure yet the schedule for other meetings this week.

3.  Packet Pickup and Delivery:  Please make sure if parent/students come to get their educational packet that we work with them to practice social distancing and crowd size disbursement.  Any remaining packets will be mailed on Wednesday.  Shelley and Sally will work with your building offices on this mailing to make sure we get bulk rate postage.

4.  March 30-April 3 Work Schedule:  Administrators will meet this morning to work out the details on options for flex days where staff can choose to work from home on designated days.  Below are a few questions we may need to answer before finalizing this recommendation.
 
1.  How will you maintain an office to answer and route outside calls?

2.  What work will we expect from our teaching staff?

3.  How do we make this fair to our custodial and food service staff who may still be required to report?

4.  What work assignment will we have support staff do from home?

5.  How will we make sure our teachers are available to visit with parents/students with questions about "packet" work?

I am sure there are many other questions we will face.  We will use our SAA meeting on Monday to address these and your additional questions.  In the meantime, We need to identify jobs we need teachers to complete as well as a form to allow staff to post jobs that others may be able to do either at school or at home.

 I have asked Dr. Gibbons to create a "GOOGLE DOC" that would allow teachers/principals/directors to identify jobs they have for support staff to do at home or at school.  Possible headings for the google doc might be:

                                                                              Support Staff     Estimated            Date                        Date
Teacher/Staff     Building               Job Request      Acceptance        Time              Assigned                 Completed
           
We do not need to track hours, but may want estimated time to complete task?  This protects all support staff and gives meaningful work that we need completed throughout this closure.  I plan to ask teachers to think about work that needs to be done that our support staff could work on either at home or at school.  Once we open the google doc, Staff will be able to begin populating the system with proposed jobs.

Thank you again for your work and your patience.   If we get this worked out our goal is to have two flex days (Thursday and Friday this week where staff may choose to work from home or in school.

5.  Teachers Work Schedule: We need to prioritize those things we need teachers to complete for you this week.  In turn, they will need to share what support they need from hourly employees.  Any employees working from home on administrative leave need to be allowed and/or scheduled to complete work at home.

6.  Lunch Pay Request:  Jamie Ramirez asked that her staff be paid "hazard pay" for distributing lunches.  First of all, schools cannot put their employees in hazardous situations.  if there is a problem with the safety of our meal distribution systems, we need to review the safety protocols and make sure we do not put our staff, students, or families in unsafe or hazardous situations.