The Park City Board of Education met Tuesday night for their final meeting of 2020. They adopted a school calendar for the next three years and heard from the President of one of the Park City teacher unions requesting that the board respond to requests they made to back in October.
During public comment, the American Federation of Teachers Utah Chapter President Brad Asay asked school board members to respond to a letter he wrote to them on October 30th.
The AFT-Utah Park City Chapter was organized this fall because some high school teachers felt the school board didn’t address their safety and workload issues impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic.
“October 30, AFT Park City communicated several issues to this board and the Park City School District concerning COVID-19 and its effects on faculty, staff, and students. They still have not received a response to their initial letter. AFT Park City’s ongoing concerns outlined in that letter.”
Asay says the letter asks for transparency in active COVID-19 case counts and reporting that follows state guidelines. He also said there are several other requests made in the letter which have not been addressed.
“A metric and plan for changing learning modalities and follow through according to state health department guidelines. This is yet to be defined and made clear to teachers. Contract time to do their jobs and teach all their students. The board said they would like feedback on early out Fridays. AFT Park City would like to be included in that discussion. In addition, ongoing concerns: AFT does not support the effective immediately, mask-to-mask, quarantine changes made two weeks ago. The current school manual on CDC guidelines did not support these changes at this time.”
Asay also asked the school district to consider changing the platform it uses for school board meetings saying the existing system isn’t user friendly and discourages people from participating in virtual meetings.
“The format of the Park City School District school board meetings is outdated. They're not advertised, hard to access, difficult to follow and increasingly challenging to actively participate during a pandemic. Encouraging and welcoming participation in school board meetings would go a long way to improving communication and trust.”
KPCW has also asked the district to improve its meeting platform due to the difficulty in hearing clearly what is being said by board members and staff.
In addition, Asay asked the board to engage members of AFT in productive dialogue and respond to the letter submitted six weeks ago.
“We respectfully request that the school board and administration first acknowledge and respond to AFT’s letter dated October 30th. Second, provide state or CDC documentation justifying mask-to-mask quarantine changes and notify parents of the changes. And third, improve the accessibility of school board meetings via the Park City school district zoom account so that more may participate in the process.”
In other business, the board approved the school calendar for the next three years. 55% of the respondents to a survey selected option B, which Superintendent Jill Gildea highlighted during the board meeting.
“Have the teachers starting on a Monday. Kids come back a short week which they always do. It helps us get our bus routes scheduled, you know. The routine kind of down. All of the calendars do restore the two-day fall break which is popular with our families and our educators. We keep the compensation day the day before Thanksgiving. It gives us a full two weeks at winter break. It gives us a week ski break, a week spring break which it does end with graduation on the last day.”
View the three calendar options at the Park City School District website.
