Good afternoon and welcome to today's energy seminar. It's a great delight for me to be introducing our speaker today, Jane C.S. Long, who I knew when she was only, Jane Mogg, about 25 years, starting about 25 years ago. I guess that's the price of fame, Jane. She started with a BS degree from Brown University, probably one of the first females to do so. PhD from UC Berkeley, I worked at Berkeley National Labs for a while, then went to be the Dean of Engineering at University of Nevada, Reno. And then my great fortune is when she was the Associate Lab Director for Environment and Energy at Lawrence Livermore Labs. She actually had a division with about 230 people at her own building that held all those people, including me part-time for a while. And then moved from that position at the lab into strategic studies. And then as she left that, got into more strategic studies, which is one of my favorite things to be doing. And now, consults for the Environmental Defense Fund as a visiting researcher at UC Berkeley, Co-Chair of the Task Force on Geoengineering at Bipers Policy Center. And most importantly, I think for today's talk, the Chairman of the California Council on Science and Technologies, California Energy Futures Committee. I've always envied people in and around the California Council on Science and Technology because of the work they do. And today, Jane's gonna talk about a CCST study, the Chief Organized Hunchhood Coordinated called the SB 100 Pathways Project. So with great, much less ado and great affection, it's my pleasure to introduce my former boss, Jane, CSLav, Jane. Thanks, John. It's wonderful to be here with you today and it's great to see you again, John. It's been too long. John mentioned this is a study that we, collaborative study that we've put together on SB 100. And it was a collaboration between the Environmental Defense Fund, the Clean Air Task Force, E3, which is a consultancy and Princeton University and Stanford University. It was a self-organized project and it's kind of important because we didn't write a proposal to say, here's what we wanna do. We deliberated what the questions were as well as how to answer them. And I think that made a huge difference in the product. So basically we were looking at the situation where California had passed SB 100, requiring the state to go to zero electricity sales, retail sales by 2045. And we said, well, how are you gonna get there, especially in light of the governor's executive order requiring the whole economy to be carbon neutral? So how can you affordably and reliably get rid of the carbon from electricity by 2045? The project design was to basically end up using three different optimization models and each of these models identified strategies for meeting electricity demand. So all of them were created reliable energy systems, reliable electricity systems and they also had to eliminate emissions. So those were the constraints. And then they ran these models with and without a class of energy called clean firm power and clean firm power is defined as power that's available whenever you need it for as long as you need it. So in some cases, they ran the models without allowing this kind of power. So it would be mostly wind and solar energy and then gradually add in and batteries and then gradually add in other forms of generation. Then because the constraints were that had to be reliable as well as minimize the cost, you could evaluate the impacts on cost of the various portfolios and how fast the build out would have to be what kind of land use they would require and some storage and transmission. Sorry, my finger is a little triggered happy here. So you can evaluate these factors and compare the different models. So you can compare what constraints, how the constraints you place on the portfolio affect cost, land use, transmission, et cetera. So three different models, they actually did things slightly differently. The E3 model is one that's used in California extensively as a consultancy. A lot of the policy work in California is supported by E3. Stanford with E.J. Bake, a Sally student did a fantastic job with the Stanford model herbs. And then the Princeton model was Gen X and they all looked at slightly different geographies as kind of illustrated here. I won't go into too much detail but different geographies and slightly different ways to optimize and make their calculations. And this kind of summarizes the differences. So they're all linear models. They all have a different temporal kind of spatial and temporal resolution that they looked at. The only one that looked all WEC-wide was the Princeton model. The most limited in terms of geography was E3. They all included neighboring states in some way and they all had rules about imports that you couldn't take more than for your fair share and that you're not allowed really to cause emissions to go up anywhere else. So that was all, again, just to reiterate system always meets demand and the total cost of the system is minimized in all of these models. They just do it a little differently. So we made some assumptions about what it was gonna look like in 2045 that electricity electrification was gonna go and that was essentially gonna roughly double the demand which is a pretty common assumption in California planning. The future costs were based on what we found in the literature mainly work that has been done by NREL. And as I mentioned, nothing in California can cause a problem someplace else. So you can't solve your problem by, as the city of San Francisco did there, we're gonna have zero carbon electricity so we're gonna stop selling our Hatshachi power to anybody else. That would cause somebody else's emissions to go up. So you can't do things like that. And also when you go to zero, there are no offsets. Zero is zero, so we did not allow offset solutions. And as I said before, we're no constraints on land use and no constraints on transmission. So these become things that we can compare. The resources that we allowed are in the portfolios were on the left, the variable resources, wind, solar, small hydro and batteries. And then we gradually allowed the use of a firm or a clean firm power sources of energy, so carbon capture and storage or advanced nuclear zero carbon fuel. We didn't actually look at geothermal explicitly but geothermal would qualify and would act much like CCS. And to be clear, the role that these play in the energy system is for some of these sources, for example, for zero carbon fuel, we don't have to differentiate where that fuel comes from in terms of these models. We just look at it as a price range for different kinds of fuel because the behavior of the fuel in the system is the same. So this is just, I'll just throw this up to hear the prices that were used if you wanna get into more detail, that's here in the materials. So clean, again, let's talk a little bit more about clean firm power. Here are some of the things that you can include in clean firm power. It could be geothermal, biomass with natural gas, any kind of clean fuel. So it could be methane that's reformed to hydrogen and then the CO2 put underground. It could be blue hydrogen or green hydrogen. It could be advanced nuclear. So any of these things, even though they behave very differently, they're all clean firm power. They're all available for as long as you need it whenever you need it. California, why do we need clean firm power? Well, basic fundamental reason we need it is because we could build a lot of renewable energy but in the winter that supply of renewable energy goes down dramatically. And both for solar and wind, and especially if we're going to electrify and especially if we're going to electrify heat, the demand for electricity is gonna go up in the winter while the supply is going down. So this is a seasonal mismatch between supply and demand that is really the biggest reason why we need, why we're gonna end up needing clean firm power. And here's another way to look at it. In this graph you're seeing the daily load in the solid line and the more green it is, the more able the renewable energy is able to provide for all the energy. There's plenty of renewable energy in the summer but it gets redder and redder. In other words, less of the load is able to be served by renewable energy in the winter when it's not there. So what do we learn? First of all, how much does it cost? We got what I think is a fairly remarkable result that basically no matter what kind of clean firm power we picked and they have all different roles in the energy system and all different price ranges. If as long as we had roughly 30 gigawatts or so of clean firm power, the price of transmission and generation, the cost of transmission and generation doesn't go up in California, stays about the same. But if you don't allow these resources then the price goes up by something like 65%.  You don't use it most of the time but you have to overbuild it in order to cover those what we call dunkel flaute or dark doldrum times in the winter. And so that's why it costs so much more and because in this case, I'll go back here the utility of the clean firm power is so high that even though it is per kilowatt much more expensive the system costs are kept low because the utility is so high. And I think that's one of the most important points out of this study.  It's really important that we put in some clean firm power so those prices stay about the same. There may be other reasons that the price of electric is gonna go up but we don't want it to have to go up for carbon removal if we don't have to. We looked at a whole bunch of different sensitivity studies on price and basically what you're seeing here is again the issue is the utility of the clean firm power so high that it doesn't really matter much that it's more costly per kilowatt. And this is a case now where we're gonna see the long-term issue, the long view of putting these kind of resources in play is very important. And if you stuck to the short view the short-term view where you would only look at price per kilowatt hour, you wouldn't put these in and it's only by looking at the system costs over the long view that you understand why it's so important to have them. We also looked at long duration storage and I could say too much about this except that it's only a partial solution replacement for clean firm power. You still need on the right, if you only have long-term storage and you don't have a clean firm power you're still gonna be looking at something like 25% increases in costs. So it's a good compliment. Maybe if as these things come along there's certainly nothing wrong with trying to do more long-term storage but it doesn't obviate the need for clean firm power. So how fast does it have to be built? This is a graph which goes right along with the capacity graph we looked at before. If you have to put that capacity in you've got to build it by 2045. The red line is if you only do the renewables and batteries and don't allow clean firm power. And at the bottom left you see the current buildout rate, historic rate. We're talking about many orders of magnitude increase in rate and then on the lower wedges there if you have fuels or gas with CCS or nuclear power or even all of them you significantly decrease to well something comparable to historic rates of growth. The ability to build out the system. So the more options we have on clean firm power the less fast we have to build it. So meanwhile, for those people that are promoting renewable power there's nothing wrong with that. The renewable power, all of these models build a lot of clean solar and wind particularly solar. And you can see here all these different portfolios that we put in place and you focus a little bit on the yellow bars here which are the dark yellow is solar and the light is wind. And you can see except when you put in nuclear they pretty much get most of their capacity build is in solar. So they're still gonna build a lot of solar and the energy that the system derives from the portfolio is even more focused on solar. And here you're just seeing the effect of very low price solar energy. The system wants to build a lot of solar as much as it can without making it so redundant that it becomes more expensive. So again, a lot of the energy is gonna come from solar. So how much does it need? Well, all of these models built a different amount depending on what they different amount of clean from power but from, you know, I've sort of eyeball it seems like a pretty safe bet that if California put a target on 30 gigawatts at this point that would probably be a no regret strategy for some kind of clean from power and they can keep it pretty open. We don't have to sign on to any one kind of clean from power pretty much every kind will be helpful. And they all but on the other side they all have deployment challenges. So obviously on nuclear, there's a law against new nuclear in California until there's a license repository. There's, you know, there's a lot of public resentment or that's a movement to keep it in the ground on fossil fuels. So the idea of continuing to use gas and sequestering CO2 is difficult for people to believe as a good solution and would require a lot of retrofit available. And then the fuel issue, which isn't on this graph is also quite expensive. On the CCS side though, which is from my perspective one of California's best bets and we'll see this as we go along here even more because a lot of the facilities for transmitting the for transmission of the electricity for storage of the gas, for storage of other gases underground is already in place in California. And we have plenty of storage to last up through the rest of the century and even just depleted oil and gas reservoirs. So I think the, I think CCS is probably one of California's best bets. And if we built out nuclear, the build out rate, although again, it's gonna be a very hard sell in California is certainly within the scope of what has been done in the past. So these are not crazy changes as the solar all solar and wind would be. So the role of these different forms of clean firm power is a little bit different. And this is based on some work that EJ did as in the audience, I hope. And as you get questions, I hope she'll answer them but nuclear power is more like a flexible base and it ramps down a bit during the day when you have more solar and so does gas with CCS but maybe a little bit ramps up a little bit more and these both ramp up at night when there is no solar. And the fuels tend to be very expensive. So the systems that build only fuel for a clean firm power tend to build a lot more solar. And they are used only when they really are needed. But they all work. They can all fill the role of solving the donko flauta problem. And here's a graph showing the role that each of these play in a sample day. And you can see the nuclear there in the purple on the upper road ramping down a little bit during the day and the solar pumping in coming in and CCS coming in even more strongly and the fuel being the least prevalent of the three and having a lot more yellow, a lot more solar. So here's another way to look at why it's the least expensive solution because as you look at how much of the load is gonna be carried by each of these different sources and you stay on the lowest price curve for each of these, you get the first 10% of your load or 10% of the load, the most effective way to deal with it is zero carbon fuel. And then the next piece is from CCS and the next piece from nuclear. So basically what you're doing is optimizing the capacity factors for each of these and therefore keeping the cost as low as possible. That's why it does that. And this is another way to look at that same thing. I think I'm gonna move on from this though to get to some other points. So the other issue that's gonna come up is what happens to land use. And I think the difficulty that we see with the high renewable strategy is that it uses a lot of land. And what we saw in the case where it was only renewables and batteries allowed that this, the models were trying to use over 6,000 square miles of California land for utility solar. And that's actually quite a bit would be very difficult and would probably probably push up against barriers that would, you know, where land use for solar utility wouldn't be allowed or wouldn't be functionally allowed for some reason like you couldn't get the land holders to agree or it's too steep or it's too remote or it's on public land that's protected. There are many reasons why that amount of land may just be very difficult in California. And some recent studies are showing that it's probably the amount of land that you could probably use for solar certainly deserves a lot more attention and a lot more analysis, but it's probably less than 6,000 square feet to a miles and it's still a lot of land. If we allow the clean farm power, we're still getting maybe an order of magnitude less but maybe only like half that say for the fuel case if we wanted to go with the fuel case you still might be using an awful lot of land for solar utility solar. And so I think one of the big questions that this brings up is what's a realistic assumption about how much land you're actually going to dedicate to utility solar because to the extent that the system can't buy all the solar that it wants to from an economic perspective it's stopped because of their land use issues then the push and the need for clean farm power is going to increase. Likewise, the transmission, one of our Princeton model looked at transmission increases and found that without clean farm power over 9 million megawatt miles would be needed of new transmission whereas only two to three which is still a lot for clean farm power and the current amount of megawatt miles in California is about 15. So this is not a small thing either and if you can't build all this transmission then again you're going to be looking at clean more clean farm power. And again, I think this is another reason why CCS may turn out to be a godsend because it would necessarily minimize this. And remember this is not a transmission plan this is the megawatt miles. So this isn't telling you where the actual miles a circuit miles of transmission would go and some of them would obviously go along existing trunk lines. So, there's still work to be done to understand this problem. How much transmission can you really effectively expect to build by 2045? And if you can't build everything you want to build again more clean farm power. So in summary, which it doesn't want to do clean farm power is going to help keep the costs low about what they are today. They are going to, if we don't build clean farm power we're looking at building 470 some gigawatts of new solar and wind. And the entire generating capacity of the United States is about a thousand gigawatts. So it's a pretty hefty lift, hefty lift anyway but a daunting lift if you don't build clean farm power. Energy storage, all of these models were allowed to build as much short-term battery storage as they wanted, they built a lot. But in the case of clean farm power they built a thousand gigawatts hours, a thousand gigawatt hours of battery storage. And my numbers here are actually wrong. The largest battery facility in the world is being built in California. It's actually 0.4 gigawatts or 1.6 gigawatt hours. And that's, so you can see there's a huge lift on batteries and that's another area where you could question whether the competition for lithium or whatever is actually gonna allow you to get the amount of battery storage that these models really wanna build. Land use, we just talked about basically this could be the limiting factor on solar expansion and as could transmission. So keep in mind about renewable energy it's the price is not the limiting factor anymore. The limiting factor is gonna be land use and seasonal variability and transmission issues. So we need to stop thinking about saying, okay, we're all gonna do solar because it's just become so cheap. There are other costs and those other costs are gonna be the ones that dominate energy storage. We're projecting a lot of energy storage and we're just at the beginning of building this kind of this ability to store energy and battery. So I think the good question about whether we can get there with only batteries. Firm power, we can do, the good news is we can keep prices pretty much the same for generation and transmission but we need clean from power to do it. And it doesn't matter what kind we build it really is the system costs are gonna be dominated by the utility of that power. And the other pieces that if we've led in renewable energy it's now time for California to lead in clean from power because we need it with all the solar and wind that we have a lot of other entities are gonna need to. So plan for clean from power. That's number one plan for realistic land use and transmission develop some realistic understanding of where we might get to with batteries and plan for some other batteries and other kinds of storage. So I think I'll stop there. I have a few slides about other questions but I'm sort of the end of the time. So we'll stop there. Great, terrific Jane, I appreciate that. We have a lot of audience questions but first I'd like to call on our own Sally Benson who is the leader of the Stanford team in the study. And of course you all know as the former director or co-director of the pre-court Institute for Energy our colleague here in energy resources engineering. So Sally take it away. I think you're gonna give up kind of set of comments from your own perspective but also from the participant perspective of one of the participating models in the study, Sally. Okay, terrific. Anyway, Jane, thanks. Thanks, great, great talk and summary of what was done. Number one, it was a real pleasure to get to be involved in the study. Really top-notch modeling groups each bringing something special. But together, I think Jane, as you articulated the main conclusion was that some form of clean firm power is going to be needed if we're going to cost effectively and reliably get to a zero emission grid. So engaging in academic studies around this topic turns out that in Europe and the United States, North America, there are actually many studies which support this notion that some kind of firm clean power is needed. But when you go out into the broader world of people trying to solve the climate and energy problems there's like a real disconnect between sort of what the academic community says is known based on many case studies. And really, I think the decisions being made in policy circles now that really have yet to recognize that we need to make progress on this idea that we need clean firm power. So sort of maybe when we come back to you again, Jane, it's like, how do we address this disconnect? And certainly, your study I think has gone a long way because it's very detailed study with specific examples but I think that this is a broader issue that would be helpful for every region or state or nation trying to contemplate how to do this. So that's sort of my number one observation is that there is a real disconnect in what we know and think we know. The second one, and I'm sure you've heard this, Jane, so many times is that presented with these results, we hear that nuclear is too expensive and natural gas plus CCS is too expensive that the levelized cost of both of these technologies is three to four times higher than solar or wind in the best location. And therefore, how could it be possibly true that these could play a valuable role in cost-effectively decarbonizing? And I think that there's a lot of work to do on the idea that what we're trying to optimize is the full system cost. And that by just finding the lowest cost individual technologies, it doesn't lead you to the lowest cost system. And anyway, I found there are real challenge to try to make the argument to support that idea. And I think the shame is that what we're seeing is people are not thinking about investing in these technologies, natural gas plus CCS as an example in the electricity sector. Often we hear, oh, well, no, CCS is for industry. But again, this study clearly showed that even though the levelized cost of natural gas plus CCS is higher than solar or wind, it makes it so you have overall lowest system cost. So that's sort of the second point. The third one is that if you look at the current policies you know, nationally and so forth and in California they're really focused on the next tranche of renewables and in short-term storage. And if we think about these clean firm power technologies they all have very long lead times. You put up the list of hurdles. And if we're going to absolutely need these by 2035, 2040, 2045 whatever you pick the date, I think now is the time when we need to do regional assessments of what are those clean firm power options available in different regions and what kind of policy measures could be put in place so that we don't wait till the last minute that we basically get to work on those now and give those the long lead times that they will need to scale up. And I've just got two more points. You know, another notion that I think we often hear about is that if we have very wide area integration of the electric grid. So for example, if you could integrate over an area as broad as WECC that somehow that the seasonal variability and renewable generation across this vast domain would somehow equalize out and therefore we wouldn't really need clean firm power. Maybe at all, or maybe not so much. And I think this study really put that issue to bed in some ways, you know, the Gen X was a WECWIDE model. E3 was a California model. Herbs was, you know, it's sort of a California plus model. And again, every single one of them concluded, you know large amounts of clean firm power would be needed. And that wide area integration is not gonna be sufficient. And then finally, just one last point, I think it was also striking that the models which had different geographic domains, but they also had very different approaches to dealing with time. In the case of herbs, it was 365 days a year, 24 hours a day. So really model an entire, you know every single bit of a year. E3 did representative days and Gen X used representative weeks, I believe. And I think there are many who would have said, oh, well, you know, you can't come up with major conclusions about sort of want, you know, energy storage and so forth, unless you do the 365, 24 hours a day. But again, the similarity in all these studies suggests that, you know, appropriately selected, you know, representative days or weeks or whatever, you know, can get you long way towards useful answers. And I think because these three models with such different assumptions were used, it really supports the robustness of the conclusion of the study. So those are kind of some reflections on both being engaged in the process, as well as maybe some food for thought that you might wanna say something about, Jane. Yeah, that's good points.  We get it. They understand it. And we gotta do something about this. And then they kind of fibrillate, you know, I think they just don't feel that they have the agency to deal with it and it's really fascinating. COISO probably more than anyone is saying, you know, this is it, we gotta do this. And then kind of, well, I don't, how do we do it? How do we get there? So I think that answer, part of the answer is kind of simply, simple conceptually, although I know it gets much more complicated in practice because of community aggregators and who's responsible for this, you know, who's actually gonna buy it. But on one level, if you can figure out what entities to nail on this, you know, saying there's a mandate here, you have to build this and we're gonna allow you to get cost recovery, you know, that and you have to start, you know, you can build whatever you want. You can do whatever experimentation you need, but you need to have X, you know, gigawatts by such and such a time and X more by, you know, 10 years later. And you figure it out. I think that would be wonderful because, but people aren't gonna do it until they can get cost recovery because exactly the point you made is the cost per kilowatt now is just much higher. So we're trying to force this system view, which pretty much nobody has. So the only way to do that is to, just like we said, when renewable energy was expensive, we still said, you have to do it. And then gee, guess what happened? The cost came down. So I think that's one aspect of it that's really important. And based on, you know, kind of what I've been seeing, I think there's a strong role for legislation here. You know, just like we had a portfolio standard for renewable energy, I think, you know, I think getting some kind of legislation that mandates again, that takes SB 100 to the next level and just says, okay, here's what you have to do on clean from power and just keep in mind, you know, don't get worried about, I'm not worried about them going on a strong push for solar right now. You know, they have to build a, you know, these models want a lot of solar, want an awful lot of solar. They're not going to have a regret strategy by building solar as fast as they can. So I think that's another piece of good news. The policy is not bad. And, you know, I think we get asked a lot about demand side management and regionalization and that's gonna solve all the problem. You know, we saw you make a great point. These models included all that stuff.  So I think we have a very strong case. I think the people are hearing us, they get it. They sort of thought this was true and now the data is there. Now they can see it. So the question is who has the authority? Who's gonna take the responsibility? And I think that there's a complicated questions in our environment. But conceptually, I think it's pretty simple. You gotta have a mandate and you gotta have a cost recovery. Great, thanks. Yes, maybe John Beck over to you. Okay, thank you. That was terrific. We're now up to 36 audience questions. I'll try to consolidate them a little. Most of them are very raw, raw. We understand, agree and strongly endorse what you're doing. I would say maybe half, maybe a quarter are, why don't you even do this one step further? And some of them are kind of questioning cost and upstream clean fuel power emissions and whatnot. But let me organize it this way. I would like to get back to your recommendations on what policies you think with regulations and policies you think would be best. But since there was a lot of talk about technologies in the presentation, a lot of questions regarding that, I'll break it up into a couple of sub-components. So did you consider in the category clean firm power, things like deep hot rocks, fusion, solar concentrating, solar thermal and the like? Or not, and if not, why not, I guess? I think people are trying to give you more ideas to add to the portfolio by and large. So all of those kind of things for the most part are going to be functionally, are gonna have a function that's similar to what we put in the model. And so once it's functionally similar, then the issue is really what price range we use and did that price range include that technology? So I think, for example, zero emission CCS, if we get alum cycle, the price drops dramatically, right? So, or if you got fusion, then, I don't know whether it would be more or less, I've spent enough time at Livermore, none of that, think that it's obvious. So, geothermal, for example, would behave much like CCS in terms of functionality. So in terms of the model, it's just a price range. And I think, so the answer's not explicitly, but it doesn't change the resultants very much. Yeah, alongside that there is concern that you left out, I think I know the answer to this, fugitive emissions from gas, air emissions from CCS other than on the climate side, nuclear waste and things like that. Yeah, so I think that the, I mean, we're looking at some of the ancillary impacts. So the next step is really for California to choose, right? What kind of clean from power? So you got this thing you have to do with how much land can we actually use to get the solar? How much transmission can we actually build? What kind of clean from power is California gonna build? Which of these obstacles are we gonna try to overcome for these? And along with that is the very important question of what is gonna be the short-term forcing that results from that choice? So if you go on a hydrogen economy now, if you move to a hydrogen as a clean fuel pool, there's work that's been ongoing at EDF showing that the fugitive emissions of hydrogen can pretty much negate the climate benefits of using hydrogen if you don't do it carefully and you don't do it right. So those are that strategic plan of which you choose and why we didn't do that, that has to get done. You know, we're just saying, look, you know, you choose whichever ones are the best, but choose something because if you don't, it's gonna be a lot more expensive. Another set of technology questions regarding the future of transportation here in the state. So one questioner even suggests that you do a stage two version of this study where you put more emphasis on that. So how do you think about that including how many EVs are on the road charging capacity?  You know, a couple of years ago, I led the CCST study on gas storage, evaluating gas storage for the state and I wanted to know after Aliso Canyon, you know, was it safe? Could it be made safe? Did we need it? Were we gonna need it in the future? And you know, gas, just as an example, gas is used both for electricity and heat and fossil fuels are used for transportation and electricity is used for transportation. And one of the things that came completely obvious to us is that there's no really good integrated model of the whole thing. So, you know, you will get a view on gas that has to do just with electricity or just with core customers who use it for heat. And you don't ever get the integration of the whole thing. It's very difficult to do because a lot of the information is proprietary but I think that, you know, that question is really important. We need, you know, even if it's a toy model at this point to have some kind of model that gave us an accurate if not precise understanding of how all of that fits together and I totally agree with that comment. We need that. Super. In respect of our guest visitor this year at Stanford remotely, I would say, Amory Levens, you'll not be surprised to hear several audience members are asking another set of what abouts and that is about energy efficiency. As you know, Amory is also growing for a system-wide benefit of kind of integrated energy demanded and used systems. So I assume Amory has talked to you or you've talked to Amory or people like him, especially if you're working with, but if you're working with EDF, I think he has his disciples and former employees there as well. So how do you, how are you thinking about energy efficiency? Well, people, I mean, these all included demand side management at some point, right? They include that.  I didn't want to have problems with efficiency and as it leads to a little bit of rebound then I don't really understand how, I think there's poorly quantified understanding of where we can get to. I think a lot of it sounds really good and could be really good, but in terms of modeling something like this, we do run into the problem of not having really good data. Data, yeah. Yeah, there is an effort to develop better data, but I've been trying to do that for 40 years, as you know, and it's hard, it's still hard. Maybe it'll be easier on the age of big data, but we'll see. It's a problem that does bring up another problem, though, is the true believer problem, you know? Yeah, yeah. And I think what we've accomplished here is there's no, there's no true believers. There was no real true belief underlight, right? It was... Yeah, I propose another guy you brought into our group at Livermore. I really like this evolutionary theory approach that you try a lot of things and see if you can demonstrate them in the real world. It's kind of the Jeff Bezos mantra.  I would like to spend a little bit of time because you brought it up and I think people are interested in this. And policy, a lot of the questions were, we need policies to push in your direction and we have to stop pushing renewables so much. We have to stop banning natural gas hiccups and whatnot. So I'm gonna ask you to continue your nice list which I was trying to jot down of you personally who has done so much work over the long, since I've known you on looking at different systems and all these model things, non-modeling things. In your expert opinion, I know you speak to the legislature, what would you recommend as, say, the three or four most important things that they ought to be seriously considering and ultimately doing something on? Well, fundamentally, they need a strategic plan to get to 2045, right? I mean, and you sort of look at the strategic plan, they need some answers to questions that they don't have. They have to do a study to figure out how much land they're gonna dedicate. It's 6,000 square miles of California, even close to what they're gonna have. So I think it's possible to take every square inch of California and put it in bin whether it could be used or not and figure it out. What's the upside and what's the range? Second thing, if you put in all the transmission that you can, sorry, solar you can, are you limited by transmission? But what is a realistic transmission plan? So they need that strategy. And then starting even before that, they really need the plan for which clean for power they're gonna go with, how they're gonna get 30 gigawatts. I put the challenge out there, how are you gonna get 30 gigawatts? And that's just a starting number, you may need a lot more. So what is the, what's the plan for getting there? So I think those, if you did those three things, well, and as well, something on batteries. I mean, there's some people, some of our group thought that the batteries were just not gonna be a problem that the battery industry was gonna zoom forward mainly because of transportation. And so we're gonna be able to get plenty of batteries to do what we wanna do. I'm a little more skeptical, but I'm willing to put that in a slightly less concern box. I think the land use is huge and siding and getting permits for the transmission, huge. So they just, they really gotta bite the bullet on that. And then just saying, here's the mandate, you gotta get this clean for power and we'll let you recover costs through rate payment. Just an idea of how deeply you went into land use because I think it's tremendously important and you hear this as a more general thing. It's a separate question and that is what do you do with solar and urban areas? Is it parking lots, rooftops, car tops? Somebody said, maybe you put it on streetlight tops. How do you think about that? I know in general around the world, there's that big issue. If you're in, say, Beijing, what do you do with solar? Do you sprinkle it on the laptops? Do you put it remotely far away and then have to build a lot of transmission? Yeah, exactly. That's part of your strategic plan. So I talked to a friend in New Jersey and he said that the state utility is doing a lot of rooftop solar. And I said, well, how are you avoiding? I mean, one of the issues here also is equity and equity is not just about the price of electricity, which is the one thing that we've dealt with here. It's also about who pays for the system costs of providing this resource. So if you're like me and put solar on your roof because you were tired of having your power go out and every time we had a fire, the rest of the community is subsidizing us because we don't pay for electricity anymore, but everybody else has to still pay for everything, the other things that are being done. So that equity problem comes up very seriously. So in New Jersey, he said, well, the utility is gonna own all this power on people's roof. And I thought, well, that's interesting. I don't know enough about that to know what the right answer is, but I do think that that real estate's there and it's nice to use it, it is more expensive to get that kind of solar energy, but maybe that price difference doesn't make a huge difference. I don't really know, but the equity problem is, I think a serious problem and has to be dealt with. And likewise, in all of this equity has to be dealt with because if we're gonna build clean from power facilities in whose neighborhood are we gonna build them? You know, I think that one of the things we have to work towards is broadening the context of those decisions because as we go to a clean energy system, for example, air pollution is gonna be diminished for everybody. So, you know, we were riding our bikes down by the bay the other day and the traffic was just stopped on 80, just stopped full stop. And it was so quiet and so clean. You know, I think basically we have to try to understand these things in as broad a context as we can. Super, two more questions, hopefully both not too hard. One is everybody wants your slides and how to get more detail on the report. Is there a quick answer to that or should we get back? Yeah, so EDF.org slash clean from power What is EDF.org slash clean from power? We'll link to this. And if somebody wants the slides, just send me an email. I haven't been able to convince EDF to put them on the web, so. Yeah, yeah. If you could send them to Sarah, Weaver or some of our quarters you could distribute because people are already asking for about that. And finally, as you move into your up close and personal with the students, since you had such a long, illustrious, path-breaking career, what advice would you give to young people, current students about what kind of careers to pursue to help in this challenge that you laid out for us with, with actually some solutions in it? You know, I think, I think this, these students, I think the students of today should be giving us advice about how to think about these problems. I think we screwed it up pretty badly. No, I don't know. I mean, the main thing is, you know, to think broadly enough about this. That's, as you get into solving these problems to make sure that you think broadly enough. You know, that's narrow-minded solutions. And also to really, really avoid putting yourself in a career path that depends on an ideological approach to the solution. Pragmatism is what we need. Yeah, it is one of my personal mentors. You remind me of my original, the original founder of Modern Systems Analysis, C. West Churchman at Berkeley.  If you don't take the systems approach, you might not be happy with what you want. So on that note, I thank you for an inspiring seminar in that direction. Thank you so much for taking the time and sharing the study with us. Amongst all your other gigs around the state, we really appreciate it. Thanks again, Jay. Thank you, thank you. Thanks, everybody.


YouTube shopping is going to change the world. So I don't know if this is my idea or if it's just common sense but I've been thinking about this for over a decade even from before YouTube even existed And I've been sending this idea to all the Google executives that I can find YouTube executives Neil Monahan All the YouTube staff kind of that I can find on the internet sending comments on YouTube sending comments on the blogger posts Setting comments in the Twitter or in LinkedIn, but I don't see this implemented yet And I don't even know if they're working on it if they've considered it, but here it is So YouTube shopping is very simple, but I think it will change the world It will change how YouTube functions. It will increase monetization by something like 10x on Every YouTube video so that's really revolutionary because this means that so much better content is gonna be produced And put on the on the platform So it should be in YouTube's interest to consider this and implement it. So here's how it works You know how Amazon does affiliate links And if you link to with using an Amazon affiliate link you get 4% commission per sale Okay, so there's a lot of youtubers. They put in their YouTube comments. They put Those Amazon affiliate links or they put affiliate links to a whole bunch of other thing They use this genius thing that automatically makes Affiliate links for all the different countries in the world There's all kinds of affiliate stuff and I think it probably generates something like half of all youtubers income is all the stuff That's not YouTube It's outside of YouTube is affiliate stuff of a whole bunch of affiliate stuff commissions on sales and stuff like that So I think YouTube needs to implement that inside YouTube in a much smarter way And it's totally fine if YouTube takes the cut that might take 50% that would be fine because it would be much more Efficient than spamming and polluting that come the descriptions with all these affiliate links So here's how it should work. Okay, YouTube. I know can figure out how what product out there is the most relevant for every video They could even be more than one product like maybe somebody wants to buy this Nike shirt and YouTube can automatically Detect and recognize this is a Nike shirt, you know, so is this dream that's been there for decades with people are watching smart video like IPTV kind of stuff which is YouTube and then the idea that you can kind of click on stuff and purchase it But you know YouTube should be able to understand what I'm saying. They do understand They are understanding everything that people say on every YouTube video and Also based on what's in description. What's in the title? They can automatically identify the relevant product and Then just link to it automatically in one click people should be able to buy it Okay, it's very simple. It's like a layer on YouTube where you can buy everything in the whole world from any online store. So now does another thing people are gonna say, ah, but YouTube's evil or something. I don't I don't know but That's that's the thing the EU wants Google shopping to be open for competitors Search results to be in the shopping results. So for example, a lot of people using Amazon Prime So if viewers have an Amazon Prime account, it should be simple for them to just say I have an Amazon Prime show me Amazon results By preference in priority because I want to use my Amazon Prime. So YouTube shall let people use Amazon Prime I know it's gonna be hard for people to Imagine that YouTube would partner with Amazon like that because they considered to be like evil enemies Or something like that, but they shouldn't It should just be integrated automatically. The Amazon Commission is around 4% Give half to the YouTuber Something like that. Maybe it should be more than half. That'll be maybe more fair but I think half is fair because YouTube is an amazing website It's it's the biggest website in the world by far in terms of bandwidth There's no other website coming even remotely close to YouTube's bandwidth consumption People say that Netflix is bigger. Sometimes it might be like, you know at 8 p.m. There might be a lot of YouTube Netflix traffic also But YouTube is so huge like imagine that everybody in the world could Upload 4k videos for free Unlimited length as it's completely insanely amazing. So of course, there's a lot of cost in running YouTube So it's totally fair that YouTube takes something like half whatever they can, you know That's what they do with advertising supposedly so they can do that with YouTube shopping also And it's much better for the youtuber to take get 2% of a 10 time more efficient Transaction then putting these links in the description that nobody reads anyway I mean few people read and very few people are gonna click in the description So it has to be integrated automatically So YouTube shopping needs to integrate with every affiliate system in the world every commission-based Online store in the world. There should be of course the YouTube shopping algorithm the Google shopping algorithm should be right there But it should be very simple for people to switch to another competitor to Google shopping in terms of another Price comparison engine if they prefer another one. Maybe they prefer price runner Maybe there could be like a whole bunch of competitors. They can come with price comparison Solutions and there should even be an easy Kind of UI where you can compare all the different price comparison engines and really find the cheapest price if that's what you want Or if you like for example prefer Amazon Prime you can have that as kind of like the primary thing but kind of on the side if they're YouTube shopping Google shopping sees another store that might be cheaper or you prefer Comparison engine or any other price comparison engines find something a little bit cheaper It could also say hey, maybe you don't want to use Amazon Prime because it might be cheaper on Best Buy or some other place Okay, so this little thing YouTube shopping I Keep guessing or thinking that it's gonna increase 10x the revenue of every youtuber Because I really think that you know It shouldn't be because it's not advertising it is a little bit evil because you kind of Want people to consume more stuff and buy more stuff kind of but people do anyway But instead of them watching stuff and then googling it without giving any commission to this to the youtuber It should just be smooth If I make a video about let's say Camera or something like that Right, they should be automatically like let's say you're watching it on TV You know this ok button that's on the remote ok usually pauses the video But something like the ok button there might be a new button on the remote But I think it should be kind of like basically the main button ok When you pause the video there might be a thing instead of just having the option to play the video again You might have the option to just click Kind of the icon that says buy now kind of and that If you want opens the shopping per procedure the checkout process on your phone While it continues playing on your TV So you say you you're not interrupting the video.  You could also even buy it on the TV So this it should be so simple, but it should be kind of like a one-click process So it should be super simple to just buy that thing Continue watching You know not interrupt not go and if you want you can read the specs on your phone But it should be automatic, you know like if you're doing Chrome casting from your phone Then your phone is a perfect place to also do this checkout procedure while the video continues on the TV The same thing should happen on the phone if you're watching it on the phone you pause. Oh It's it might be kind of like a little um Thing in the corner Perhaps, you know like you know like the branding comes up in the corner It says you can buy and just you know doesn't really disturb too much It should just be like this kind of feeling that the the viewer should have this feeling that they can always buy what's relevant And it should always be automatic and the youtuber can also adjust if they see that the algorithm is pointing towards The wrong product they can say no it's not that camera is actually this model You know or something like that just like tweak it just slightly It might also be the viewer that might tweak it slightly if they see a recommended product. That's not quite Seems to be correct. They can you know notify that it should actually be this one not that one and that would be more relevant or something that so it's mostly gonna be automatic Detected automatically, but there could be a level of Adjustments by the youtuber by the viewer to just make sure that the most relevant linked affiliated thing is Really the most relevant and the youtuber should also be able to integrate all any and all affiliated Plans directly into this system. So you know like if it's all these things where you I don't know You set up a wicks website or whatever people want to kind of be the main thing that they want to promote with affiliates and all this stuff or sign up to uber sign up to Airbnb whatever people linked to it should be automatically You know that it shouldn't be such a difficult for Google to integrate with every affiliated system in the world And just make it so easy to you know Basically, you just passed the link in the description and you chips. Okay. We handle the affiliation, you know You just handle it from now. So that's what I think about YouTube shopping. I Don't know why it's not there yet And I really think it's it would solve a lot of issues for a lot of youtubers because Advertising I mean it's amazing that it works like this and I It's really cool, but it's very small. So, you know, sometimes it's I don't want to say the numbers I don't know if I'm allowed to say how much numbers are but it's it's so small You need to get millions and millions of views to be able to do this as a job But what if suddenly demonetization was 10 times more Imagine the revolution in media landscape for the whole world Imagine that basically nobody would want to not be on YouTube.  You know, they Of course, they're the biggest in the world and they might wonder if they can manage growing to something that's 10 times bigger But it kind of has to happen. So Every content creator in the world will just want to have all their content on YouTube every movie every TV show Netflix will come on to YouTube Amazon will put all their content on YouTube. Everybody will just do it because it will be a loss of monetization not to do it So Okay, so that's what I'm thinking YouTube shopping the future of the whole world


Welcome on behalf of the iSchool student services team. I'm Sheila Gurtu, iSchool's student outreach specialist, and I support the iSchool associate director who coordinates graduate advising, and I help develop and offer student success resources for the San Jose State University School of Information. I also coordinate our certificate programs and the iSchool open classes program. A big part of my day involves answering questions from both prospective students and current students. Students and prospective students can reach out to our student services team through a variety of service points such as our daily live chat service on our website, via our help desk online, through email or via our help forum on the iSchool advising and administration portal in Canvas. Our student services team takes care of all student records, inquiries, communications, and reminders throughout the student services life cycle from admission through graduation. Our mission is to provide both electronic and personalized support through custom curated e-advising tools, referrals to faculty experts, and guidance on a range of issues from procedural to course planning. We're here to facilitate and support student growth as students meet these milestones toward their career goals. Our services foster belonging and engagement such as our new student checklist and graduation planning checklist, new student registration tips webinar, lunch and learn, MLIS pathway workshops with faculty advisors, our YouTube recordings, online tutorials, and our e-advising toolkit which feature helpful tools such as course rotations, a unit planning tool, a downloadable MLIS planning workbook, and searchable FAQs among others. Students can sign up for individual personalized advising sessions offered over Zoom on administrative topics such as understanding SJSU policies, academic standing, coaching on how to use the e-advising tools to choose their electives, planning steps for an internship, referral to campus wellness and accessibility resources, and receiving a grad check prior to submitting their degree candidacy plan. One of my favorite outreach events is our alumni and student community impact poster sessions which we have held in conjunction with our iSchool networking receptions at professional conferences. It's been fantastic to observe our students and alumni sharing the spotlight at these events and some have written to me later to let me know how this opportunity has helped them to network and present for the first time at a conference. It's really helped build their confidence in the profession and in some cases led to some exciting professional opportunities. To be successful in the program, we always recommend students stay open and reach out and stay connected with their instructors and support providers if ever they are experiencing an unexpected bump in the road. Take early advantage of all the resources we have to offer from our career development consultant to online tutoring, to scholarships, assistantships, and student group leadership opportunities. Stay open to exploring classes, technologies, and topics that stretch you toward new possibilities. Hi, I'm Alfredo Alcantar and I'm the iSchool's learning management system services coordinator and I'm proud to be part of an incredible team of five full-time skilled technology professionals who are dedicated to helping iSchool students succeed by providing personalized assistance and expertise when needed seven days a week. Whether it's creating a customized online tutorial to help students navigate Canvas, meeting one-on-one in Zoom to troubleshoot their technical issues, or simply hopping on a phone call to assist with troubleshooting, our philosophy is high tech, high touch. Set yourself up for success from the start by investing in the right technology. Before enrolling in an online course, make sure that you understand all of the technical requirements including any required software or hardware. I live for that aha moment when a student understands a new concept or sees how technology applies directly to their lives. When you're feeling frustrated or unmotivated, remember why you chose to start online learning in the first place and remember to enjoy the journey and to take time to celebrate your accomplishments along the way. Please do not hesitate to reach out to me if you have any questions. I hope to have the opportunity to work with you. Hello, my name is Bethany Winslow and I'm the director of online learning at the School of Information at San Jose State University. My role at the iSchool is somewhat behind the scenes, but I do work closely with other colleagues and our faculty to make sure our students are well prepared to get the most out of their time here and to really become part of the iSchool community. I work with new faculty to help them get acclimated to teaching here, but I'm also the course coordinator for the first course all new incoming students take in their first semester. The online learning tools and strategies for success course covers everything you need to know to get started out on the right foot here. I also recruit and train the peer mentors who take on a teaching assistant role in that course. Peer mentors are some of our very best students about to graduate and they're an incredible resource for our new students. Being an online student can be uniquely challenging, but it offers tremendous opportunities as well. I know of what I speak because I'm a lot like many of our students here and that's what makes me so passionate about what I do. I went back to graduate school later in life. I completed a master's degree in education that was specific to online teaching and learning and my program was 100% online and I was also working full-time as an instructional designer in the higher education field and all the programs and courses I worked on were also 100% online. So I've seen things from a lot of different angles but as Oprah says here's what I know for sure. As with all things in life you get out of it what you put into it. So being truly mindful is critical. I would encourage you to be particularly attentive to where you invest your time and energy. One of the best places to invest those things is in improving yourself and another place is in cultivating deeply authentic relationships with others both personal and professional. Whatever path you choose for yourself I wish you all the best.


And we are now recording I want to welcome everybody to the Amherst Community Chat for Thursday, December 3rd. We have Dr. Mike Morris from the Amherst Regional Public Schools, superintendent of the Amherst Regional Public Schools joining both myself and your town manager Paul Bachman. So welcome. Thank you for being here Mike. Nice tie. So we've got a lot of questions today that were pre submitted and we hope for folks in the room to be able to ask their questions live they can do so by using the q amp a function, as well as raising your hand from zoom or star nine if you're calling from the phone. Before we get to that I want to give a chance for both both your town manager and your superintendent to give a brief report out. You want to start Paul. So there are a couple of things I want to mention. First is, we have a new program that started this week, where we're partnered with the business community and local restaurants to provide dinner meals a couple times a week to people who have been pre identified as being in need and suffering from food insecurity and that's a really exciting program. That's basically just through December. It's a limited time program. We have partnered with the family outreach of Amherst to who have already identified people who were working who are needed and needed additional support in this area. The second thing I want to mention is that the community safety working group which was the group that was put together to examine how we do community safety specifically policing in the town of Amherst has begun meeting. They've, and, you know, there are two former principals on it. Paul Wiley, who is former principal of Krocker Farm School is the chair of the committee and Russ Vernon Jones former principal Fort River School is on the committee, along with five other really talented people and it's really an exciting committee. It's meeting every week every Wednesday at 530 if anybody wants to zoom in and listen to the meeting. It's a, it's a, I think it's a stellar group of people with a big agenda and limited time so we'll see how they do. Great. Thank you. And Mike. Sure. So I've got a little lengthier list of updates. I'll try to keep it brief. So we have more time for the Q&A for sure. But want to start by just acknowledging that the state of the town is on Monday and Paul and probably will remember the time better than me. Although I know it's on my calendar. 630. Thank you and school committee chair Alison McDonald will be presenting a report about from the schools as well as there's reports from other town departments and well as the town itself so that's just an important one and it's also just, it's a really nice event. In my opinion where we get to see the different departments of the town. And, you know, I think to the public we each can be look pretty siloed. And the reality is Paul and I talk or text routinely close to daily I would say in the same for Emma drag and the health director, you know, she's come on we're in regular contact. And I think that's one of the major departments as well. Tim Nelson send me updates about weather and, you know, all these things so we do function together and but we don't offer we're not often in the same, you know, literal or figurative place. And so just wanted to acknowledge that and really thank Miss McDonald for putting together I think it'll be a comprehensive report and I'll preview one thing which which I've said in other settings of late is one of the major focuses of the school committee in the community in the past few years has been diversifying in faculty and this about a week and a half ago the state updated its uploaded its website with the most recent data and so five years ago as compared to five years ago, we've seen close to a 50% increase in our faculty or BIPOC, you know, our staff of color. So, you know, we're, you know, we're, we're about 105 years ago staff of color and we're at 150 now between the Amherst and regional schools so really good work done by Doreen Cunningham our assistant superintendent our principals directors. It's been a very intentional focus there's a lot of research and evidence of why it's important to be able to diverse have a much more diverse faculty and staff, and just want to, you know, share that so it's that'll be a prompt or a tease to see the rest of what Miss McDonald is putting together as well as the other departments on Monday. So I can think I want to mention is just to thank the food service department. A couple, a couple months ago we went over 100,000 meals served since the pandemic started. And for those of you don't know you can find this information or website or they have their own website because Amherst food calm. So many meals for any, any child ages five to 18 who resides in the town. We have over 10 sites with specific time and it's Monday Wednesday Friday, and Monday you get a breakfast and lunch for two days Wednesday get a breakfast and lunch for two days. And on Friday you get breakfast and lunch for three days to cover the weekend. It's a great resource it's completely free it'll be free all year, I will say I'm a resident of Amherst. I have children like it I continue to pick up from there multiple times a week, and it's spread throughout town so there's a site no matter where you live in Amherst there's a site pretty close to you. It's not one of the pieces of feedback we've been trying to sort of correct is that some people think it's only for certain populations within Amherst. It's for any child ages five to 18 in Amherst there's no you don't have to bring a license there's you don't have to give your name, you pick up the meal that we just have to note it because of reimbursement from the federal government it actually helps our district the more meals are picked up, because we do get reimbursed for them, based on our existence in the summer meals program prior. So just want to thank our food service staff, but also really want to reinforce that it the meals are there. They're good, and they're for anyone in the community. And third thing I want to mention is the school committee last week talked about how to discussion about this week, excuse me about athletics winter athletics and they'll, they'll come to some votes on next Tuesday so if you have any thoughts that agenda will be posted I think, like later today or certainly tomorrow morning but they plan to vote on winter athletics next week that's certainly high interest for many in the community. And so I wanted to communicate that a couple questions that both Breonna got but also that I've gotten by email and I tried to address on the school committee at school committee relates to the the memorandum of agreement between the school committee and the Amherst Palms Educator Association teachers union here locally. And what I'll try to restate what I tried to say clearly on Tuesday which was that my job is to implement both the policies of the school committee and then and legal contracts between all of our bargaining units not just the teachers union and our school union at this point. I know people have been asking me why do I have to follow and I have to follow up because it's the law right so there's always, there are sometimes gray areas in contracts and that's what we try to work out with our bargaining units and that's not just a local thing that happens everywhere that sometimes there's conflicts. The language is really clear in my opinion on that particular front and so I know that there's been a lot of families and community members would like us to reopen school and disregard the MOA and that that's not something that I feel like I can legally ethically do based on what I know about the law and what I read in the contract so I know that's frustrating for folks in the community but I at least wanted and that's not about blaming anyone school committee APA and I said this Tuesday night very and try to be very clear about it, but it is a reality that from a labor law perspective, I need to follow contracts that are signed. So I wanted to clarify that. I want to thank our schools we had really what I thought were fabulous open houses I was talking about that a little bit earlier before we went live. The schools did live sessions with principals or leaders and then some videotape sessions with teachers to go over you know the different parts of the curriculum and and how families could access them and they was really well received I think they were really clear guidelines I want to thank in general was our first open house and it went really well and all of other schools followed their lead, but in a virtual environment it allowed for you know, a building interact but also an ability for family members who had their kids there at the same time often just as a nature of things these days to be able to at their own pace select the teachers that work with their children find out about the curriculum and really open the door to the parent conferences that were to follow so really well done I just want to think I think our staff are doing that. We do have three distance learning centers that are operating in our schools one is completely ours and that's for a relatively small group of intensive needs students who without in person support. Don't have access to the curriculum so we have 13 students right now that are being educated virtually but have in person support at the high school physically at the high school building. The second group is through LSE so or Amherst recreation. See if I got that right on off that name changes happen yet. Hopefully I'm not the faux pas Brianna will edit it out if I'm ahead of ahead of where I need to be on that who's operating in the building I'm in now at the middle school. And the last one is the marks meadow after care program and again they're providing in person support for students access distance learning appreciate all of our partners on that. One of the things that we continue to hear experience and read about is the very real concerns about mental health and well being students as we enter. Start entering the winter months and it's getting colder and snow in the forecast maybe on Saturday and for some people they rejoice for that other people like me who wants to change my background to a really warm climate and pretend that I'm there. We had one event a couple weeks ago we plan for two more with our bright partners brights a program based in Brooklyn but we partner with them, their experts on mental health. I thought the first, the two clinicians that let it had tips that were not only helpful me professionally but frankly personally to you as we head into winter how to support students and ourselves for for hopefully our only true covert winter that we have hopefully the those pieces make things better in the future and we're not quite in this situation here from now. And so we'll do another one to be on the lookout for that but we want to provide tools and resources for families. And that realm and the, I think that's it sorry I did a little more time that I thought but I wanted to have been on here in a while and I want to share some updates with the town and the larger community. And I'm happy for answer any other questions and dialogue that comes up. Great thank you so much Mike and I think the intro was great because it did address some of the questions that got sent into us previously. So I hope the folks that sent in those questions and who are on the call portions of your your comments and I'll answer but I will try to address the ones that haven't been as we take questions from the room and pre submitted so there's a couple questions that have come into the room. We've got a comment and a question from a parent of a Wildwood student one of the questions you just answered but dear Dr Morris thank you in the school district for your hard work in this difficult time. Any questions about in person teaching. So what can, what concerns the teachers about in person teaching and what did the district do to ensure that teachers and staff are in fact protected. Thank you. Yeah, so we had a very robust plan. I think it was like a 38 page document that delineated procedures that went well and above what the state recommended in terms of safety. Since we bought we have five digits numbers of can 95 masks, which was not necessarily a recommendation from the state there's was more for more typical masks, but we purchased those. The state said we only had to have students masked if they were above a certain age level for us, unless they had a medical or disability related reason to not wear a mask, we mandated everyone to wear a mask so you know we felt like we tried to provide the most safe environment that is possible. I think every environment in the covert era carries some risk. That's just the nature of it and same the same conversation we're having about athletics. We had our all of our rooms tested there's no state requirements for ventilation we said that we would only have students and teachers and rooms that were above for air changes an hour which is a standard that you know, kind of Harvard public health is set but the state did not set it. When we get there we did invest a significant amount of resources into room sure fires with the UV light which were recommended to us as the best in the market. So we tried to address concerns that existed there there is no way to address all risk in the covert environment and I think that's that's just simply the reality of it, particularly as we see rising numbers in our area. The students learning centers are framed a little differently and that their their access to these learning students are way they're not getting together in groups the same way you might in the school environment over the last one I should say, that comes to mind in terms of safety as the state recommended a three to six foot distance. And our school committee very quickly affirmed my recommendation that we maintain a six foot distance between students in classrooms so we did have students in for, you know, about a week and a half. So in October, you know, feedback we received from directing students and teachers is that it felt good that that those requirements were being met for the most part and then there are other individual students who had to build up mass tolerance absolutely we're working on individual problem solving there. So, you know that those are the steps we took and I want to, you know, also suggest that, you know, to assume a risky environment is not is not is not real in a covert world so there are some things that we cannot control but we recently got approved and got a state grant where we can have a symptomatic testing of all teachers and staff members and students. So we'll be implementing that and our distance learning center the one we, we take ownership of at the high school. So anytime a student or staff member has any symptoms of COVID and as you know that the long the list is quite a long list. So we have testing right on site that would need to be confirmed later but these are pretty high quality tests that can be done right away. As opposed to waiting and I think everyone's read the articles about some challenges with getting tested these days so we're we have final pieces that we have to send the state will be sent out tomorrow. So we imagine we'll have that up and running before the end of the month. Thank you Mike we have a couple questions that have come in live from the room so I'm going to take them in the order as they came in. So here's a comment and a question Comcast will be raising its charges for internet use so families may face higher bills while their children participate in distance learning. What will the school district do about this will they reimburse families. Right so we've looked at that and we've looked at, particularly for families who can't afford internet access we have more than 100 mobile hotspots that we were supplying and really much of that as thanks to the PGOs who had a project last spring to raise funds for that we've, we've exceeded the cost of those at this point and we're covering those from the district, which of course were willing to do. And I think that that is what we've been able to do is try to provide internet access for families who didn't have it and that's been our primary focus we've given out well over I don't have the exact number on me I apologize but you know, between K to 12 now are pre k to 12 I should I believe the numbers over 2000 devices, you know the very young level, you know kindergarten preschool that's an iPad's at the rest of the lab. That's been Chromebooks to make sure that folks had the technology needed to access it. And as we did our distance learning, you know survey, what we found is that very few people were maintaining we're having technology issues with distance and our focus is shifted much more to the pedagogical challenges that come from that mode of learning and we're trying to look at that and see how we can improve things as best we can best we can for the student experience. Thank you, and I can say just to having a third grader who is remote learning right now in the district she now thinks she's an IT and knows more about me for troubleshooting stuff so thanks for that. All right, so we got a bunch of more comments and questions I'm just going to go right through them. I'm a parent of a wildwood second grader and who is considering other options for my son in the spring given given that it's currently seems unlikely that children will return into in person schooling this year because of the MOA with the APA. Is there anything parents can do to help with the situation with the APA MOA who want to stay in the district but also see that our children are falling behind. People have and I think continuing to communicate with the elected officials the school committee, you know, I get CC on all those every every email I receive. But as they're the bargaining agent or one of the two bargaining agents, that's where I would continue to communicate with, you know, they have reached out to the APA to see if they were willing to renegotiate that process has not been agreed to this moment but I think continuing the communication and sharing those experiences I know every school committee member reads every email they get and takes that very seriously and that would be my recommendation and certainly can see see me but anything that goes to the email address at arts.org school committee one word at arts.org and all of those get forwarded to me as well so I do have access to those and you know that would be I think the best vehicle by which to communicate the concerns. So you can't just wave a magic wand and say everybody come back to school Monday right. You know, we have a contract that we need to implement and that's the way contracts work. And I think, you know, as we've looked to work with partners around distance learning we've been trying to try to meet some needs, some of the intensive student needs and students are struggling with attendance. And I know that working with those programs they are looking to potentially expand. When we get into January to open up more seats, it's not quite the same thing. I want to be clear as as opening school, but for some families, I know that's made a huge difference for them. And I was up there yesterday, really well run kids enjoying it they're around other kids even if they're in different classes I've got the headphones, but it's been a really successful model for some students. And then I think a lot of people are also asking so it's a school committee in the union and it's the two of them have to both agree to come to the table to change what's what's been agreed to so until both parties say yes I will sit down at the table. You know people are saying well what, when can this change and it's until they both parties agree to sit at the table and that's why you say contact your school committee members because they are the elected officials who are one of the two parties at the table. And we do have a couple of the questions in the room that kind of relate and connect back to that that contract question, such as, you know, is it the particular iteration expire at any given point and then another question asking if they don't agree when's the next opportunity to revise these criteria based off of a timeframe. Yeah, so I'm just gonna make sure I get the language correct but the MOA is for this current school year. Yeah the title of it is regarding the 2020 2021 school year. So, you know, if nothing changes in terms of renegotiating the MOA was written for the, you know, the school year that ends in the end of June. Great. All right, so we still have a lot of questions in the room so I'm going to try to run through those now. So we have mental health is not only counseling mental health could be helped in the winter snow if outdoor programs were offered for kids and teens to skate sled hike build the fire together etc. What can the town and schools do about it. Thank you. And so we actually had a conversation with the the LSSE is an hour the recreation department based on and so that's that's exciting. And the, you know, that the recreation LSSE is looking at lots of different options, including, you know, we've had a request for multiple skating rinks we've done we've created skating rinks in the past that talked with the health director she thinks outdoor skating is good if you're doing things outdoors, much better than anything you know, looking at, you know, activating Cherry Hill as a more as an opportunity for cross country skiing.  And, you know, I know we have the chair of the LSSE commission in here. You know, they are actively thinking along these lines to, and I agree with you 100% that, you know, mental health of the next three months plus is going to be really challenging for everybody. And we've got it for our town staff as well this morning, because it's going to be a hard time, and especially if the caseloads keep going up. And so, and being having children, especially outside activated in. I know that they've worked closely, the LSSE has worked closely with the school district to utilize the Pellum gym for basketball. And so that's really exciting because that has a really good airflow exchange. The buildings don't have that that quality of airflow exchange so we're going to be utilizing that space for basketball programming multiple nights a week I think. Yeah, that's where exactly I'll piggyback on that one Paul, and I'll get on Barb's good side by saying Amherst recommendation is working effectively with us. So one of my jobs is I'm also the superintendent of the Pellum school it's a different district. And as Paul noted their the ventilation scores in their gym were very, very high gyms generally aren't very good as you may have read in the newspaper now I'm not just talking about our gyms but gyms in general, do not have good ventilation Pellums for a whole host of interesting reasons that we'll get into on a here has particularly good ventilation and so we do have, we have allowed an outside soccer group that was for an all commerce to do a session. So Amherst recommendation is looking and send us a schedule to start up, I believe, right after the new year of basketball clinics for students I think as young as third grade and then as old as eighth grade. As I mentioned the school committee will be considering winter sports and voting on that next Tuesday. And, you know, I agree with the health director agree with the comment as well that it is going to be a challenge this winter as Paul noted, you know, case counts are going to rise and being outside is ideal. And so we do have one indoor space that you know, according to health directors both not just the current one but past ones, it's meeting the threshold for some indoor activity I think it'll be booked. Very much throughout the week from interested vendors because this is a rare resource, not just in Amherst and Pellum but in the area more generally.  Please you can send them to me can send them to Paul I'm sure he doesn't mind getting them or to send them to, you know, our bills at Amherst recreation I think the more ideas we have the better programming will be. In the Amherst recreation brochure, which includes everything that we just talked about plus a couple more activities will be coming out in the next couple of days. And Amherst recreation is transitioning away from LSSC. So they'll be will be putting out you know a new web address and a new email address to fall in line with that so that's some exciting stuff that's coming up for Amherst recreation. So back to the questions in the room. How much money have the town and region spent to enhance safety in the schools that now stand effectively empty. So most of the funds that have been spent have been CARES Act funds both the town which has been generous to share those with the school as well as our school specific ones but you know I don't have a specific number off top my head but it would be multiple hundreds of thousands of dollars of work at Wildwood and Fort River would be combined over $200,000 in terms of closing quads and making classrooms or spaces that used to have four classrooms to but full walls and changing the ventilation. So I can give a specific number but I can certainly say it would be a six digit number. Great. Can't the schools offer extra curricular activities for teachers who are willing to work in person would that be against a contract since it would be extra. And that's happened so at our high school we had the drama teacher did a dramatic performance actually multiple dramatic performances with students outside in the fall. They were really cool. I'm sorry if you didn't miss them this newspaper did a nice job covering them. Sports is another example of an extra curricular that's occurring outside the school so there's nothing barring that from happening at all from the MOA. Another question and comment ARPS is now one of the few towns in the county that has remained closed is this information being communicated with the teachers. In my experience some seem surprised that the public schools are teaching in person. Yeah, so I don't know. I don't control the information flow of what goes to all staff members. I do think it's been widely reported I think you can't look at the Gazette and not see an article about school somewhere and what they're doing. But I do think it's been, you know, communicated in a broader sense that at this point we are in terms of Hampshire and Franklin County, one of the few school districts that is not open at least to some level of in person learning. All right, I've got a couple more here in the q amp a that were from the room so I understand the ethical obligations to uphold a contract. What about the ethical obligation to provide free public education to our children. This person feels that right now that second obligation is not being upheld. Yeah, no, and I understand that and we've heard that from many family members. At the same time, you know, my perspective is that I can't knowingly break a contract that's been signed in good faith by both parties so I hear that and I understand that. And again I think, you know, the more people can communicate their concerns about that to the critical stakeholders and I'm one of them is a good thing. All right, so the last live comment that I have here. So feel free folks as we wrap up on our half hour is your last chance to pop a question in the q amp a and to, and or raise your hand via zoom. For those of you who did submit questions if they weren't fully addressed. I did copy the superintendent on those so he has your full comments and questions there. So with all that happened with the APEA and school negotiations this year we're hoping that everyone has learned from those mistakes and listen to parents about what we need for next year about what we need for next year our plans being made to address that. Actually, it's a great question and there was some dialogue about this on the school committee meeting on Tuesday and it'll be on the agenda for the next school committee meeting which is on the eighth next Tuesday is thinking ahead towards the 2021 2022 school year and a whole variety of issues not just about the MOA so I think. I can't speak explicitly for the school committee but based on what I heard on Tuesday night and what I imagine will be some dialogue next Tuesday. I think they're actively are thinking as soon as possible of clarifying what the program will be for next school year and to take into account lots of the feedback not just from staff members and parents but the larger community as well of what we want to think about for the next year. I think that comment spot on and that's why the school committee is starting these conversations significantly earlier than they typically would. Great. Okay, so we're almost at our half hour. I want to give the chance for for Mike and or Paul to, you know, leave the room with, leave people in the room with something that you didn't get asked or didn't get brought up yet. I'll defer to Paul, as I typically do to go first. You know, I think just the number of people who are participating in the questions, we know that this is a driving issue in the town right now I know the school committee and the superintendent are struggling with this and hearing everybody's voices. It's a tough one. And so I just feel for for the my colleagues on the school side for that. So I really have a lot to add. I did have one last question that came into the room that I'd love to make sure it gets asked if that's okay if we go over a minute. Yeah. So what is the school district doing about the high number of absences among students particularly low income minority students who are already underserved. Yeah, so we had about an eight point plan that was presented the last maybe two school committee meetings ago, about how to approach the absence issue the short story if those of you who weren't watching or the, the number of absences are attendance is roughly similar to last fall when we're in person but the distribution was troubling to us. It showed that students who are typically underserved in school so our BIPOC students are low income students, special ed students actually attendance was better. That actually showed minor, probably not statistically significant improvement but those other groups were highly concerning. So, every principle in their goals for me this year has delineated their plan. It involves, you know, some working with distance learning centers but that's gotten maybe more attention than some of the other parts, every school now has an attendance team. That's regularly tracking attendance making phone calls people have been assigned different roles and responsibilities to make the one on one connections to understand what are barriers that are going on. The feedback we're getting is technology is actually pretty low in the list of the barriers. Students are more often kind of individualized concerns about access to the curriculum based on language linguistic sting engaged has been a major challenge as probably everyone is call experiences being on screens. A lot is is a challenge and we're all adults and that can be a challenge for students so we are trying to address the root of the problem and what we find is there's no one root of the problem. Mike, if someone does know someone who does have a technological barrier can they reach out to the school district to health. If they say I don't hit they don't have a computer at home or whatever they can reach out to the district and get accommodated. Absolutely and we're finding that out so as these individual reach outs happen. There are very small numbers of people who are indicating that that's the barrier it just doesn't seem to be the predominant one but absolutely and that's why when we're noticing that it's accumulating we typically had an email that went out and a kind of set of steps and we're accelerating that so we're trying to be ahead of patterns that we would that would be concerning to us. So instead of getting email we're getting folks are getting direct phone calls and having direct communication to try to understand what are the barriers. It's a good point Paul I should have said that absolutely if anyone has a has a technology challenge. Please let us know what we found so far is that hasn't been the predominant challenge that has that folks have expressed about being on being a virtual school. But thank you Paul that was an important point and we've got, you know, was an international Chromebook shortage in the fall. Some of that was because of the pandemic but actually a lot of that was based on labor violations on the other side of the world that thousands and thousands of Chromebooks were confiscated, depending on who made a specific part to them so you know we did well our director found other resources and other ways to get them but now all of our back ordered ones have come in. So we're not short on ability to have technology. And, you know, it's, I think the challenge of distance learning for many families who are struggling. You know we've resolved the tech part, and it's the engagement, the learning part and making sure that students and families are receiving feedback routinely. And that's been more the theme that we've heard of late and so you know we have a pretty strong approach our schools are taking this very seriously. Again it's in every single one of their professional goals for the year to improve not just the overall attendance but the distribution because we know it's a problem. And we're trying to work collaboratively with families on how to solve that. We're going to ask something I didn't share so that's a good one. Two things. One is that we even extended December break the school committee had a great discussion about this in the summer and our winter our last day of school before the winter break is actually December 18 that Friday. So I just want to note that and some of that was, well, you know, we're not encouraging people to travel we follow CDC guidance we know that the reality is some people. When this decision was made the world was in better place with COVID or at least our world was in a better place with curve it. But we wanted to have an extended break because we just thought it was in the best interest of everyone to have a longer break of school I think that's proven to be a good idea. So we have a full two week vacation period starts on the 18th and students to come back on Monday, January 4. And I think the second thing I want to notice I just want to think, you know, this is obviously a contentious issue in just about every community. Any paper you look at is dominated with stories about this and as a quote I set up sort of like. Shmuel Rosner wrote it was a couple weeks ago fewer fewer things prompt hatred fear and vengefulness like a pandemic, right and I think there's some truth in that. And I just want to thank the community while there's been strong opinions shared and today and in other days. I think we've done in my opinion pretty well at having those opinions shared and not getting to a place where our community is truly splintered like it's happening. I'm just pretending that these aren't. These aren't hard conversations that people don't feel really strongly on one side or another or some third way. But I also just really appreciate the questions today the questions Brianna sent me, and they're being framed in a problem solving approach. I can't promise we'll solve all the problems, but what I can promise is we read every single comment. And I appreciate that that people are very often going to the place of, how do we resolve this how do we improve this how can this change, and not to a different place for frankly many superintendents and school committees, and other folks are experiencing very personal attacks against teachers against parents against school community members, you know, my job is just the nature of it I'll get the attacks and that's fine. I'll leave myself out of that for the moment. But you know, I, given the intensity of the issue I just really want to thank how people are framing their concerns there they're legitimate concerns for their children, they're very legitimate concerns for their children's future and the learning teachers very legitimate concerns about health. So I know it's contentious I know it's really hard. And yet I just, I hope we can maintain the sense that we can advocate without becoming, you know, adversaries and that's sort of the approach that I'm trying to take throughout all of this is that I hear everyone's concerns I have certain opinions. I think it comes as no surprise to someone that you know I wish kids were in school more often. Right I've said that since we started talking about this in June. I'm surprised there. That's not a controversial statement that you can go back watch school community meetings talk about some challenges distance learning and some of this all this what's happening. You know, I've spoken about we have, we have an MOA that we have the school committee is requested to sit at the table they can't do things. And it's a very frustrating place for many members of the community so I want to both acknowledge that but also share an appreciation for the framing and, and how people are expressing some very deep seated, very deep rooted concerns about their children and what they're experiencing. So I just really want to thank everyone for coming on this chat thank everyone for the emails that you're getting that you're sending. They're all being read they're all being appreciated by everyone who sees them so thank you all. Great and thank you, Dr Morris for joining us today. This will be Mrs being recorded will put up on our playlist and next week we will be having our public work superintendent to talk about public works updates and winter prep and all things infrastructure, etc. So tune in next week as well and I want to thank everyone who joined us today. Thank you. Have a nice day.