One of the items on the agenda for the 04/12/2021 Appleton Area School District Board of Education meeting was “Potential Updates to Safe and Resilient Framework (Secondary Learning Model Options)”
This ended up not being discussed and instead was held until a Special Board meeting that will be held some time during the week of April 19.
Per Superintendent Judy Baseman a new option has come to light but they were not prepared to present that new option during the 04/12 Board meeting along with the other options they had prepared.
Jim Clemons wanted to know if they needed a formal motion to hold the item because it had been a potential action item. He also mentioned that people are starting to decide what school they want to enroll in for the 2021-22 school year. He understood that AASD had some positive news that they had to share and he thought it would be good for them to make their plans for the 2021-22 school year as public as possible.
Superintendent Baseman stated that the plan for the next school year is for AASD to be fully in person at all levels. She said they shared that formally with current families in a family message and that the feedback they received indicated that people are pleased that they are planning to start the year with a fully in-person model. She said they don’t know if there will be mitigation strategies that will need to continue depending on the conditions of the pandemic in terms of distancing.
Jim Clemons said that currently the plan is a pre-Covid back to school, unless circumstances change beyond the District’s control. He thought that was great news. [Personally, I didn’t get the impression that things would go back to a pre-Covid normal. To me it sounded like mitigation strategies would very likely still be in place.]
They returned to the issue of how to handle not discussing or voting on the item regarding learning models.
Kay Eggert said that she would recommend tabling the discussion for the special meeting next week.
Deb Truyman was concerned that the potential start date for an in-person late start was the 21st of April. If the meeting wasn’t going to happen until that week how would it affect start dates?
Superintendent Baseman said that depending on the option the board adopts, the start date was flexible. She didn’t want to say a whole lot more because they have not fully communicated all three options. But they would start as soon as possible depending on the model that the board voted to approve.
They returned to the discussion about whether they needed a motion to hold the item.
Clara Kopplinger (Executive Assistant to Superintendent Baseman) said that because it was only listed as a potential vote they didn’t need to take formal action but they could if they wanted to.
Jim Clemons thought it would be cleaner and more appropriate if they held it and specifically mentioned they planned to bring it back at the special Board meeting to take action on it.
They voted to approve the motion to hold it.
Jim Clemons also asked Superintendent Baseman if she could safely say that implementation of a new learning model could happen within a week once approved, and she confirmed that she could.
View full Board of Education meeting here: https://youtu.be/lRnp5vueza0
View BoardDocs Information here: http://go.boarddocs.com/wi/aasd/Board.nsf/goto?open&id=BZTM5G580335
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