Operations Committee Progress Report, July 29, 2020

Ron Clamser reviewed and committee members discussed the issues that have been raised in the committee and the work that is already in progress in the following key areas:

• Establish and Communicate Cleaning & Disinfecting Protocols
• Meeting with the district’s cleaning company to develop the plan for cleaning classrooms, common areas, bathrooms, and high touch surfaces
• Purchasing a stockpile of cleaning and disinfecting supplies and equipment
• Purchasing student and staff cloth masks
• Purchasing other PPE equipment and supplies as necessary
• Adding additional hand sanitizer stations 
• Adding portable hand washing stations
• Disengaging hand dryers and installing paper towel dispensers
• Removing excess furniture where possible

• Deploy Signage
• Establishing one-way traffic flow in hallways, stairwells, and common areas as necessary
• Creating signs for proper hand washing, social distancing, proper use of masks, etc.
• Creating social distancing (6 feet distance) signs in places where people might otherwise congregate and utilizing stanchions to organize lines
• Posting signs for visitors at entrances

• Establish Protocols for Visitor Management
• Utilizing the visitor management screening application from Capital Region BOCES
• Looking to install door buzzer, card swipe, and visitor management system (driver’s license check) on the exterior entrance doors
• Purchasing thermal check kiosks for each entrance
• Removing furniture in areas where people congregate
• Installing polycarbonate shields in places where interaction with visitors is necessary (security booth, main office, etc.)

• Facility Usage 
• Restricting building use for outside groups

• Establish Protocols for Food Service
• Most of this is being done in a separate planning group with Aramark and the building Principals

• Establish Protocols for Student Transportation
• Most of this work is being done in coordination with our neighboring districts with whom we share buses and the contract bus company.
• A separate transportation survey will be sent to parents.

Operations Committee Progress Report, July 22, 2020

• Signage needs
• We have a sign printer at Springhurst that makes vinyl signs (for floors, walls) that will allow us to meet most of our signage needs in-house.
• Content for most signs can be downloaded from CDC, Health Dept.
• Will need signs for:
• Traffic flow (directional arrows, one way)
• Protocols for visitors
• Hand hygiene 
• Distancing
• Face coverings
• Make sure they are age appropriate
• Will mostly be at entrances, bathrooms, stairwells, hallways

• Hallway traffic 
• One idea for HS stairwells: have stairwell near auditorium for up only; stairwell near LB’s office for down only; middle one for staff only
• Stanchions or barricades are not allowed in hallways
• Probably no lockers being used, which increases space in hallways
• Hallway traffic less of an issue at Springhurst because students can stay in one classroom for most of the day
• MS: will need to allow students to carry backpacks 
• MS: one-way traffic in hallways won’t work everywhere because some hallways are dead ends

• Transportation
• We can wait for the survey results that the transportation consortium is conducting.
• We share bus contract with other Rivertowns districts so it needs to be coordinated together
• For parent pick-up at Springhurst, we’re looking into technology solutions that allow parents to stay in their cars.
• “School Dismissal Manager” is used in Scarsdale; looks promising but requires several staff members to run it
• Might also be able to use the same system to do pre-screening questions for health checks

• Health Screening
• Not manageable to screen everyone in person on-site
• Pre-screening at home will have to be part of the plan
• Screening on-site only for those who forget, visitors
• Westchester Health Department is providing guidelines for what exactly needs to be asked in the screening questions
• We’ll need to appeal to everyone’s sense of community responsibility so people are honest and careful with pre-screening
• Must be careful about how we do the pre-screening because we can’t store health data
• There is a tool that about 30 districts are using from an upstate RIC/BOCES; we’ll look into that.

• Schedule considerations
• Many of the operational decisions we make will depend on which hybrid schedule we adopt
• Lots of meetings with other Rivertowns districts to try to get us all on the same page
• This group of districts is leaning towards 2 days in/2 days out or alternating days.

• Cleaning classrooms
• If we need to clean every classroom between groups of students in the HS:
• 36 rooms in the HS
• If cleaners can do each room in 5 minutes and we allow 10 minutes between classes, we would still need 18 cleaners on site for every class change
• Students are not allowed to do the cleaning
• Can we simplify furniture in classrooms to make this quicker?
• Where do students wait while classrooms are being cleaned?

• Food service
• Nutrikids -- allows for ordering in advance online
• Can this be modified so classroom/teacher is identified, making delivery of meals to classrooms simpler?
• Must provide meals every day (even remote days) to free/reduced lunch students
• Will numbers go up because of the economy?
• Will all be converted to free (not reduced price) like last spring?
• Can students bring home lunches for remote days beforehand?
• Eating meals in classrooms -- must be careful about food allergies
• Continue open campus for HS at lunchtime?
• Would get many students into fresh air
• Would reduce number of people in the Commons
• Would help local businesses

Operations Committee Progress Report, July 20, 2020

• Reviewed main operational takeaways from SED guidance released on 7/16
• 6 feet distancing in general; 12 feet for music, singing, PE
• Keep smaller cohorts together as much as possible
• Stagger arrival and dismissal times
• Multiple drop-off and pick-up locations to avoid crowding
• Reduce in-school movement as much as possible
• Open windows whenever possible
• Desks arranged so students don’t face each other

•  Reviewed some of the practical ramifications of these things:
• Must remove carpeting, cloth seats, extra furniture
• Where to store extra furniture etc?
• Cohorts -- easier to accomplish in Springhurst as opposed to MS/HS
• Replace horseshoe-shaped tables in Kindergarten with individual desks

• Use of outdoor space -- discussion
• How do we plan around the weather? 
• Leaving desks and other furniture outside under tents; how to secure them?
• Cost of tents, laying a floor (to protect grass, tennis court surface, etc)
• Limits to using turf fields -- heat buildup, infill material is problematic, damage to surface
• Perhaps outdoor spaces could be prioritized for music, chorus, PE -- free up those rooms for other instruction; don’t need desks for those classes

• Discussion of operational ramifications for various hybrid schedules:
• Are there schedule possibilities for MS/HS that would involve longer blocks of time so there is less frequent movement in the halls?
• Should we consider trying to group MS/HS classrooms as much as possible by grade levels in the same area, so each grade of students is moving around the building less?
• Could not be done completely because of science labs, but could possibly be done to some extent
• Differences between Springhurst and MS/HS are significant
• Class schedules at MS/HS are already complicated to figure out
• Who cleans classrooms at MS/HS between classes? Where do students wait while room is being cleaned? → goal should be to reduce number of times per day that each room turns over
• Springhurst -- can we bring whole classes into the building on certain days and use the larger spaces?

Operations Committee Progress Report, July 15, 2020 

• Reviewed draft visitor questionnaire to be used to collect contact info and do health screening for all visitors
• MN and TN are exploring an app that could serve this function
• Should there be a pre-screen completed before a visitor arrives, or done at the time of entry?
• Use a version of this for staff and students every day?

• Reviewed NYS Health Department Interim Guidance for In-Person Instruction, issued on July 13, 2020
• Requires 6 feet social distancing
• 12 feet for certain activities (singing, instrumental, PE)
• RC and DR are in the process of measuring every room in every building to calculate occupancy with 6 feet (and 12 feet)  distancing
• District is reaching out to other entities nearby for possible extra space we could use, but those places are currently figuring out their own plans so no firm answers for a while (Mercy College, Greenburgh Hebrew Center)
• District is exploring possibilities for outdoor space for instruction (seasonal considerations)
  
• Keeping cohorts together
• Much harder to do at MS/HS with class schedules
  
• Can we continue to allow HS students to leave campus for lunch?
  
• Food services
• Can we have students order lunch in advance to ease planning and speed pickups
• Eating in classrooms -- must consider food allergies
  
• Traffic flow in hallways
• Probably no locker use; will make hallways effectively wider
• Schools not allowed to use stanchions to divide hallways; will use tape on floors to show directions
• Springhurst more amenable to one-way traffic flow than MS/HS
• Staggered schedules to avoid crowding in hallways?
  
• Entrances and exits
• Must consider security needs; probably can’t leave doors open
• For security, probably need to maintain one entry for each building
• Possibly more than one exit
• M. Nemeth, our security coordinator, is focused on this area of planning
  
• Hand hygiene
• Looking into hand washing stations that are portable
• Must consider how much time it will take for groups of children to wash hands when making schedules

• Communications considerations 
• How to most effectively communicate what students will be seeing in advance of returning to school
• Photos and maps of traffic flow
• Videos geared towards different age groups showing what things will look like, procedures, traffic flow
• Training of ALL staff well in advance -- including all substitute teachers, teaching assistants, security personnel; everyone who will be working in our buildings

• Future Work
• Committee members should continue reviewing the Health Department guidance and enter ideas/suggestions/questions into the shared Google Doc 

Operations Committee Progress Report, July 13, 2020: 

• Priority areas for this committee: 
• Establish and Communicate Cleaning & Disinfecting Protocols
  • What will our cleaning protocols look like for classrooms, offices, bathrooms, common spaces, etc.
    
    
• Deploy Signage
  • What type of signage will we be looking for?
  • Hand washing, sneezing, coughing techniques.
  • Floor directional
  • social distancing
    
    
• Establish Protocols for Food Service
  • There are currently a variety of food safety measures in place, but what is impact if students eat in classrooms or elsewhere?
  • Survey parents to determine if more students will be bringing lunch from home?
  • Can we still allow HS students to leave school for lunch? Can we allow food deliveries?
    
    
• Establish Protocols for Student Transportation
  • What will bussing look like?
  • We are currently collaborating with other districts to put out a survey to see if parents are going to send their students on the bus or use alternative options.
  • Traffic flow will need to be looked at if parents decide to drive their students to school as an option.
    
    
• Establish Protocols for Visitor Management
  • Develop survey/form through google forms that can be used for contact tracing if need be
    
    
• Facility Usage 
  • Develop protocols for building usage and how space will be utilized.
  • Change in policy for use of facilities by outside groups?
  • Use of outdoor space for instruction? 

• Meeting Schedule:
  • Mondays and Wednesdays at 11am 

• Other considerations:
  • Will know more after State Ed. Dept. issues guidance, expected today
  • More detailed planning will take place in August, once Governor makes final decision
  • We may need to bring in expert guidance in certain areas once we know more
  • Dr. Brady has weekly meetings with County Executive; she will share relevant information as it comes in
    
    
• Shared Google Doc
  • Committee members will record questions, suggestions, concerns, and areas to investigate in each priority area