A special board meeting of the Windsor Unified School District Board of trustees has been called for July 27 to deal with a few housekeeping items amongst the changing landscape of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The meeting will open with a closed session item that is a conference between the district a several property owners for the purpose of discussing price and terms of payment for adjacent land to WHS property and the so-called North of Arata property.
In the regular calendar, there will be two items,
First up is an adjustment to the calendar in the face of distance learning. The Board of Trustees approved the 2020-21 school calendar at its regular meeting on Feb. 4 (pre-pandemic), based on input from stakeholders, including unions. That calendar included new provisions for an “Emergency Weather Week” to account for the possibility of losing student attendance days to PSPS, smoke, fire, or other unforeseen emergencies.
However, the pandemic has required an extraordinary degree of planning and preparation for alternative school attendance models, including new and enhanced approaches to distance learning and hybrid models that include complex alternative approaches to deliver education for the students of Windsor.
Part of that work has been to map out the additional training and preparation necessary, and has developed a revised calendar that features the following:
1. School start is delayed by two days to allow time for additional professional development days before the start of the school year. This includes reinstatement of the recently canceled Aug. 7 professional learning day, and two additional days of learning on Aug. 10 and 11.
2. Additionally, Oct. 16 is reinstated as a professional development day for teachers to allow for follow-up learning and collaboration after having some initial experience with online learning. This time will also be valuable to prepare for additional transitions that might become necessary.
3. Two days of “Weather Emergency Week” (April 1 and 2, 2021) are added back to student days to balance against later start, and maintain 180 student contact days.
The final item will be a readjustment of the salary schedules for teachers, middle school counselors and high school counselors. When the schedule was approved by the trustees on May 5, they voted to adjust them to reflect that two professional development days were removed from the calendar as a cost-savings measure.
However, based on proposed calendar revisions and additional financial resources through Learning Loss Mitigation Funding, the administration is proposing to add four additional professional development days to the calendar for teachers, middle school counselors and high school counselors. These additional days affect the work calendars for these employees, and subsequently the salary schedules proposed add four additional days.
The full agenda can be found at https://go.boarddocs.com/ca/windsorusd/Board.nsf/Public.
