SOUTHWICK – During the Nov. 17 Southwick-Tolland-Granville Regional School District School Committee meeting, the committee approved the first readings for three policies and received an update from Superintendent of Schools Jennifer Willard about ongoing negotiations with the teachers union.

To start her update Willard explained why the district was using the three percent positivity rate as a trigger to go back into remote learning.

“The metric that was readily available at the time was the Hampden County metric. It was used to measure the rates of COVID and as we were monitoring it we saw the trends going down over the course of the summer. When the state came out with a new metric on Aug. 12, we had already solidified what we agreed to,” she said.

Currently, Willard said her staff is negotiating with the unions to adopt a new memorandum that uses more current metrics.

“We are working together with our teachers’ union and paraprofessionals’ union to come up with a new memorandum of understanding that keeps the safety and health of all of our staff and students at the forefront and uses more current metrics we have available to us now,” she said.

While students are remote for now, Willard said she and the rest of her staff are working to get students in the classroom as quickly as possible.

“I want to assure the parents out there that we are eager to get back to school, we are eager to have our students back in school. We know there is no replication for what our teachers do with our students on a daily basis with in-person learning,” she said.

Willard also said the district saw an uptick in COVID-19 cases in its schools.

“Last week we did have a very significant uptick of COVID cases in our schools. We have one case at Woodland School, as of Nov. 11 there were three positive cases at Powder Mill School and I can tell you we have received more since then. Since last Wednesday we’ve had about seven students test positive at [Southwick] Regional School,” she said.

As part of the policy readings, the committee approved first readings of a public comment policy, a graduation requirement policy and a long-term substitute teacher policy.

At this time, School Committee Secretary Chelsea Berry read through the changes for each policy, starting with the updates to the public comment policy.

“This has come up a lot, especially when we were in person, people would come for public comment and we just have to stare back at them and it feels terrible, but it’s because public comment is not a discussion, it’s just a place for you to openly express your concerns, it’s not a debate between person and school committee,” she said.

During the public comment policy discussion, committee Vice Chair Pamela Petschke reiterated that while the committee does not respond to public comment during meetings, they do take those comments into account for their decisions.

“It’s not that we’re not listening, the point is to give an avenue for the public to express their thoughts and us to listen. My best advice is to prepare a written statement and come and read it because we do listen,” she said.

Berry then explained some of the changes to the graduation requirements, including alternative physical education.

“We went through and realigned the credits and payed a lot of attention to the alternate physical education course section, which was important because I think there is a lot of times with scheduling where students can take the caliber of courses they would like to take. By adding this into our graduation requirements, the goal is to get those academic courses onto the student’s schedule but still fulfill the physical education requirement,” she said.

With the long-term substitute policy, Berry said that one of the changes was that substitutes would be allowed to take sick or emergency days without affecting their pay.

“Important things to notice are that for our long term sub, that is for anyone who is anticipating to fill an absence for more than 20 consecutive school days, that they are allowed to be sick or have an emergency absence and that won’t break their service which is important when considering their rate of pay,” she said.

The School Committee next meets on Dec. 1.