The WSSD Board of Directors held their last meeting of the cycle. The video is available on Youtube here and the agenda is available on Board Docs. The next meeting is the re-organization meeting to swear in the new board. The student representative report was hard to hear, but sounded like it covered recent sport successes and the schools collections of food and other items for charities.

Superintendent Report

The superintendent commented on the incident at WES mentioned in his email earlier today. He said the conversations around inclusivity needs to include the whole community not just the DEI committee and encouraged people to watch “I Am Not Your Negro“.

The superintendent also discussed the district’s health and safety plan. There will be a discussion on Dec. 13th about updating the health and safety plan and an “off-ramp” was mentioned by both the superintendent and board president multiple times. However, the slides showed that in DelCo cases are rising, from 598 to 809 (the units were unclear) and the positivity rate has risen from 4.94% to 6.33% in the past two weeks. Vaccination rates remain largely unchanged, with students in grades 7-12 between 56 and 74%. If parents are having trouble uploading vaccination data into Powerschool, vaccination cards can be brought in and shown at school or photos can be emailed to dsweeney@wssd.org . Vaccination clinics are planned on Nov. 29th, Dec. 20th and Jan 12th from 4-8 pm at the high school cafeteria.

The educational affairs meeting will cover the 22-23 school calendar and student services. The first policy meeting is happening tomorrow night covering a broad range of policies.

Board Announcements

The board president thanked Amy Caruso and Matt Sullivan for their service on the board.

David Grande suggested that the board should change its current practice and hold legislative meetings only once a month instead of twice as they currently do, with the expectation that more of the work will take place in the committee meetings. This would also bring the board into line with what many neighboring districts do.

The board president also made lengthy remarks on the health and safety plan and laid out many of the factors the board is considering ahead of changes to the health and safety plan. The board took no action at this meeting and he said they likely wouldn’t remove the mask mandate before the new year, by which time all students will have been able to be vaccinated.

Regular Business

The regular business largely passed without comments and there was only a single public comment reiterating opposition to the mask mandate again.

There were no reports from committees. The meeting closed with final remarks from those leaving the board.