001first of all we want to say thank you for waking us up this morning with a reasonable portion of health and strength and for this we want to say thank you heavenly father this evening yes that you arrive with us and we ask that you people can the middle school family and also our lookout elgin family in your prayers we've lost two staff members in the last two weeks so the father answered you put your wall of protection around us and keep us from all common dangers that may come our way there was always to be ever mindful that he would not create it with the heart of fear but we always supposed to overcome our fear of facts and love we ask that you put your special protection around our school board members all
002those who are in the side of my voice today keep them safe from all harm in danger and we'll be so careful to give you all honor and glory that it's to you and it's in your name we pray and it's in your navy count it all down amen board of trustees meaning october because that motion to the doctor proposed agenda even knowing all those in favor that we know about those [Music] that's where there's two facilities properly promotion by mr mcdonald's second understanding in the discussion given all those in favor as well by saying hi to the polls this evening that moves us down to a public forum [Music] thank you for allowing me to speak my condolences to those families to our losses terrible laws except for a few years in college i've
003lived in this community all my life i'd say that i have an insight in how we think and how we conduct ourselves i have had issues with the school district in the past but for the most part i've had a strong support of the school district i was raised by an educator i know most of you and many of you i consider friends i am now in full understanding of your public foreign policy and apologize for my ignorance on our last meeting we all make mistakes i'm here today not to speak about an individual employee of the district but rather to point out your mistake and to try to gain better understanding of the processes and procedures this board uses as it relates to employee disciplinary actions public communications and other areas of dire concern
004does this district have a formal disciplinary action process in place if so does this board support this policy or does this board feel it has the authority to alter or circumvent this policy in a fashion that you choose this public punishment mistake shows poor judgment and it appears as if you are just making up policy on the fly just as mr charlie nash said in the editor uh letter to the editor to the chronicle independent there seems to be a lack of communication between the school board and its constituents these are wise words that should not fall on deaf ears does this school board feel that they have a right to issue a press release that publicly punishes an employee and would certainly damage their reputation and cause a community upright your actions are an
005embarrassment to all the teachers and all school district employees they should never feel the threat of such high-handed treatment ever these are all internal observations what kind of message are we sending to the corporate world do we want to come off as a community that is punitive the way we run our school district this public punishment could very well be the reason a company chooses another community this is an inexcusable mistake by this board and the administrative staff and it caused the question if you made these obvious and very very public mistakes what other mistakes are being made they're not able to see i'm not privileged to know is this issue just the tip of the iceberg one of the best stipulations we have in our contracts for superintendents is that he or she is
006to live in our community this ensures that we are observing that they are observing and absorbing our culture and paying taxes little skin in the game why are you making exception in this case this is a mistake to allow even a minor breach of contract and it sends a confusing message to all our employees of this district who are held to honor their contracts if you're letting this slide perhaps there's even more critical mistakes you're allowing to happen the best question how many new hires in the districts have you made in the district office how many new hires in the district office have you made who got big raises what were the justification of these raises how are they funded how did you conduct the interview process who and for what reason have you hired
007as outside consultants how are we spending our federal funding are these renewable revenue streams how are we handling vendor and consultant contracts these are all legitimate questions in the light of your public mistake they should be investigated ladies and gentlemen this board you work for us your decisions are a reflection of our community these mistakes and judgment place a burden on our community and has called the question what is important should we publicly punish our teachers and principals should we allow contracts to be breached are we using the best possible way to hire employees are we spending our hard earned tax dollars in the proper fashion that fits our community fiscal abilities how do we move forward do we continue to bicker do we wait on the next election please understand we appreciate your service
008to our community we appreciate all the hard work by the superintendent and his staff these are great people and many of them i've known a long time they deserve better leadership we all make mistakes these were mistakes acknowledge these mistakes my humble request is that you write these wrongs be open and honest about your mistake remove this cloak of sex sex person apologize and resend all punishment to the school district employee you employ you publicly shame to repair the standards you have caused i ask if you create a blue ribbon task force made up of former employees and other business leaders to help you create a punishment guideline that better serves our community also open your books to this panel and allow them to see that your recent hires fires promotions and vendor contracts and
009align with our physical ability i ask you to be proactive please don't force this community to be in your watchdog our school district employee deserve to be treated with dignity and respect our community needs to be treated with dignity and respect you can fix this we are counting on you to do this thank you for your time have a good evening [Music] um good evening parents and our school board i am here because i care about our children i presented this book to be reviewed to see if it was acceptable for our schools unfortunately it was given a pass first of all what is woe the book says it is being alert to injustice if you google it it says the same in quotes we need to stay angry and stay woke this first point
010is about a mother allowing her children to talk back we all know what it means to talk back and our children do too the dictionary reads the expression is used especially when talking about children who are being rude to their parents what do you think our children hear when they read this the author makes it clear on what this book is to be used for she writes these points are instruction manuals and anthems and knowing that she writes in our next point we understand activism happens online and offline in the streets picketing and in the classroom's teaching um this picture depicts officers looking scornfully over these men's shoulders i'm asking does this unite us we all know what is going on with the anti-police movement and this picture is strategically in this book to promote
011that please go to whiteblood.net on youtube and watch the protest and see for yourself what they think about law enforcement the intersectional concept of critical race theory examines sex class and sexual orientation this point states the truth is there are so many shades between boy and girl people who are neither people who are both people who live somewhere in the middle we don't have to choose is this not confusing our children in this point amari explains a crown a child is hesitant to tell their younger brother what they have learned it references his child's friend and said when they are in the store almost always someone follows them it's like a shadow of distress women above their bronze skin they say it's because we look different i try to explain to my little brother what
012i learned in history class and why i'm so sad and i want to tell him but he grabs my hand and squeezes because the words get caught in the tears threatening to run from my eyes i just want to cry now you tell me is what is child learning empowering and this point is this poem not teaching our children to fear going to a store the american varsity crt challenges white privilege this point what's in my toolbox states privilege makes it easier for some people a white person can walk down the road without being discriminated against while a person of color cannot is this really how you want our children to think to fear walking down the street will this not make them respect one another or is this the seed of hatred and division
013planted in their minds as i mentioned in the beginning and under google's definition of what equates we need to stay angry and stay woke this point right to reads each shadow surrounding our right to be outraged it goes on to say listen closely our bodies bubbling up angrily at the lies we have been fed and then this picture of fists in the air is that when we want our children to be angry in this last point it says we live in a world that likes boxes and it goes on to say so resist the box burn it down i believe this picture is very demeaning it shows a desperate child stuffed in the box no wonder our children are so depressed i have a bachelor's degree in english literature i know how to analyze and
014read the written word and i can tell you this book is not here to lift our children up i'm here to respectfully request that this book be reevaluated specifically for the themes that says promoting crt gender confusion white privilege intersectionality and disrespect for authority i am also respectfully asking our school board to look at this book and read it from the child's perspective this book is poison it's mixed with sweetener to make it smell and taste better please do not let it fool you the author knows exactly what she is doing she specifically says the points are to serve as an instruction manual for our children please do not be fooled our children do not deserve this i see on your wallet says educating all students for success and i believe that too we need
015to speak into our children what they are to be strong brave confident smart they are what we tell them they are you're worthy you're awesome you're going to be great we are all brothers and sisters here we don't need to do this to our children thank you so much for listening miss bradley i think i emailed you if you would just put that request in writing and then i'll move to the proper channels thank you so much hi everyone i have a whole list of notes that i'm not going to take a lot of your time but i just wanted to show this to the side and talk to you guys for a few minutes just openly and honestly um i'm here to support ms bradley um when she first saw this book her son
016brought it home she sent me some pictures and we looked into the videos of the book um i just want to stress basically everything that she said and just like back in july when we spoke with dr robbins and we did the q a a lot of parents expressed concerns about critical race theory he reassured us that that did not have a place in crochet county we see on the news every day our children see it they see it on social media they see it everywhere they look this divisiveness of pulling us apart i wore this shirt tonight as simple as it is just to make a message we don't need this device it is destroying our children it is going to destroy the generations to come if we continue to point out what's different
017about us instead of joining together and what unites us as brandy said we are all brothers and sisters we are all the same if i bleed and you believe we believe the same color we are all in my opinion brothers and sisters of christ and there is no difference i understand that children based on where they come from social economic status gender race there are things in the world that are discriminatory and i'm not we're not in any way attempting to undermine that or belittle that we just don't think that sending this message to a second or third grader is helping the college to unite these children together and and i i am terrified of what my children and my grandchildren are going to be raising their children into if we continue down this path
018and continue to allow people to separate us and pull us apart and turn us on each other whether it be black versus white vaccinated versus unvaccinated or whatever else there are thousands of things right now that the media and some of the government is pushing to divide people and i'd like to think in kershaw county that we're better than that and that we look at each other we judge each other for the content of our character and not the color of our skin i have a splendid family and i have nieces and nephews of all walks of life and i promise you i've never looked at any of them any differently i've worked in this school and i have seen children from all walks of life that struggle it is not a race thing it
019is an economic and a social thing it's i'm sorry i just want to stress that that we this is not what we need here and i do think that there is a disconnect between the board and the parent i see a lot of parents who are afraid to come speak to the board i see a lot of teachers and staff members who are terrified that they will lose their job if they come speak to this board and address concerns that they have that is a problem there's a major problem that needs to be addressed um the last thing i want to say is a completely different subject um as i stated i wanted to touch on code briefly i just want to touch on the vaccine clinics that are going to be happening at football
020game um i have done some inquiries and checked into that and i understand that there is a limited medical staff that will be available i just want to urge everyone here before we continue to push these vaccine clinics on children that we take a look at the studies that are maybe not the ones that you're seeing on cnn and mainstream media and maybe take a look and at least consider the possibility that some of these issues of myocarditis and things that these young people are having are truly happening and not turn a blind eye because my biggest fear is that something is going to happen to one of these kids and that the next board meeting we're going to be giving our condolences to a child who lost their life because they had a vaccine
021and then went to a football game and wasn't watched or monitored since when do we vaccinate children in a football game why is that not being done do the clinics wherever you want to do them but they should not be done with children who are going to be out with their friends and doing whatever and nobody keep an eye on them so that's just my concern and thank you for your time good evening um i would like to say that i am happy to be present at any of the football game vaccines clinics to ensure the safety of all of our kids and i'm sure i can get physicians from all over the county to participate to make sure that that is a safe event our hospitals are full patients with covet they are not
022full people with vaccine related complications i was very disappointed to hear that dr robbins and governor mcmaster their assessment of our current school code situation was that this was a success i respectfully disagree i suspect the families of the children who have been hospitalized due to catching pogba in our schools disagree i suspect the families who lost a family member due to spread in our schools disagreed many of the parents who've had to miss work due to quarantine children and children who have had to miss work from school due to being on quarantine disagree also every case of spread in our schools is one too many especially when we have seen mass children contracting coveted from unmasked children as a parent i have no other protection for my children other than masses and vaccination while
023i'm hopeful that i will soon be able to vaccinate my youngest child it will still be five weeks after he's vaccinated before his protection my son is having severe anxiety gentle lack of masculinity he knows the guidelines he knows what keeps him safe and he's incredibly anxious about having to sit shoulder to shoulder with other kids in the hallways who are unmasked he is anxious when unmasked children come up to him and talk to him closely within a close range we are seeing increased nonverbal signs of anxiety in him he knows that his mask only protects him if other children wear masks also please choose to protect his physical and mental health and that of other children by mandating mass this is the right thing to do and now is the right time to do
024it david continues to show that masks are safe for our children and they prevent code spread in our schools and in our community it's a trickle down effect if we're not spreading in our schools we're not spreading it in our community while the numbers in our schools are lower this is because also because of decreased community spread personal county is still considered a high rate of transmission for copen the cdc world health organization d-hec and american academy of pediatrics still recommend universal masking in schools especially in areas of high transmission in my cars the districts that have mandated mass have virtually eliminated school spread and significantly decreased community spread and dhec is actually that with our conversation today they're going to pull that data so we we have specific data points for us school transmission
025of code leads to increased community spread of coven we are now losing one kershaw county resident per day from cobit that is unacceptable you now have the ability to mandate masks in schools and eliminate school spread which can and will save lives in our community this is the right thing to do and now is the right time to do it as a physician i am held accountable for following recommended guidelines in my practice and i am liable if i choose to do otherwise i strongly suspect that the kershaw county school district is liable if they choose to ignore the scientific evidence and the international national and local recommendations of healthcare organizations and pediatricians to mandate masks in schools now that you have the ability to follow the guidelines you have the op you have the
026obligation to mandate masks in our schools and protect our students our teachers and our staff this is the right thing to do and now it's my attention thank you and again and i am serious about that if you want a physician to be around during our vaccine clinics i will get doctors to keep presence [Music] foreign thank you good evening dr smith dr robinson members of the school board tonight we bring to you the same policies that were presented at our last board meeting she has information and tonight we're asking for your adoption of those just a quick review several of them are coming to you as recommendations from the south carolina school boards association on their annual review of court cases and changes in state blood state and federal law those include a recommendation
027to include instruction on the emancipation proclamation for high school history courses another policy change to add a suicide prevention hotline on our student id cards and a third recommendation from them on how we treat the evidence of work that we're receiving from students who are coming into us from a home school association as well as a regulation about adding sexting as our discipline code adding that word and be more specific on that in our level two and level three coming to you from uh principals and the academic department are two recommended policies one that all high school students with an overall a average can exempt their final exams other than those that are the end of course exams and the second recommendation that now you have a pure 10 point scale that the cut off
028grade for a student to participate in a credit recovery course be moved from a 51 to a 55. so all these are coming to you as recommendations we do have staff that review them that are available in the audience if you have additional questions or with complaints that might come forth that they are i guess what is our standard there for that does it go directly to the building administrator does it come to the historic office and then what's the criteria in other words are we looking for certain phrases words whatever uh just just enlightenment so this would not change the process at all it would clarify that this like other things as we evolve over years is something that we're seeing more of using technology in an appropriate way so it's putting language in
029there to clarify that this is inappropriate and they've done here's what the response would be as well as those who are coming to you from the south carolina school boards association so um and your agenda those are on two different pages there are four that are coming to you there from the psychiatric schools association and two that are coming to you from uh school industry administration so we're asking for approval on all of those acceptance chairman probably mostly by mr harrington yes is well good evening dr smith members of the board um i'll be so grateful when my you know my updated meeting is no longer about coveted response um but it is still that and it's still something that we are dealing with so tonight again i'm going to go over the isolation and
030quarantine data with you i'm also going to share with you where we are in terms of warranty and isolation with our middle school and our high school athletes also the upcoming vaccination clinics and maybe give a little more clarity i think we put that out at the last board meeting but we've already conducted one and then with the recent injunction that we've been communicating about we have and i made a hard copy for you all a just a draft of what a possible face mask mandate would look like based on scenarios i'm happy to answer questions and i know nurse darling likes to stay in the back and work in the shadows but she is very good and i'm going to ask her if she'll come forward and help me answer some of these questions
031the next slide here you can see um our numbers have dropped drastically very proud of that that fact we are finally under 100 positive students um in the district 4.83 and there is still some you know close contact racing that's taking place a lot of it's on school buses and we're in about 3.3 four percent of our students that are in quarantine due to close contact we have 14 positive staff members out of i think of note it is still very interesting statistic that we do track with the number of students that go into quarantine that then turn into a positive case and comprehensively from the start of this school year on it's less than one percent of the students that are placed into warranty we know it's it's unfortunate we have to do that
032and it's inconvenient for families but it's still the best protocol for us to follow okay here gives you a graph i've been documenting this um every single day uh at 10 o'clock at night i get an email that has our close-out numbers for the day you know some of the schools like uh luke intelligent high school and canada high school to have more students the nurses don't necessarily have the opportunity to put in the data right away but you can see what the graph looks like in our trends it's also important to understand that even in these positive cases and i i often share this with people and reporters when they talk to me and that is these kids are in our building six to eight hours a day and they're at home 16 to
03318 and on the weekends and so it's not just a school effort to make sure we're doing the right things it's a community effort and so when we look at things like staying home with your hill and using good sanitation and wearing face masks in crowded spaces it's all the time it's not just while you're at school and so we do believe that we are the gold standard in the state of south carolina if you look at the school districts in the state and you look at our numbers that percentage-wise there must be much much lower than any of the surrounding schools and so and that's without a current face mask mandate so again we think we're doing a really really good job at managing a situation here is the athletic numbers and you know
034with over 500 high school athletes we only have one positive case and we have zero positive middle school athletes and again i think that's just parents doing the right thing and wanting to ensure that their kids can participate and so our athletic directors and secretaries at each of the buildings track this i don't have them every single day but every couple days so we can make sure that we don't see a particular sport or a school that has an increased surge in their facilities and we can keep a watchful eye on it so um our vaccination clinics and i'm going to yield to nurse starling on this but when we first started down this path you know we conducted six vaccination clinics for staff students and household family members in the past and when we
035went to look at this again and revisited it we thought we would try something a little more creative and when i called sue sugar at the hospital she recommended that we work through d-hec one of the nice things of working through d-hec is we could get two different vaccines we could get the visor which is the vaccine that is identified for kershaw county but we can also get the j j vaccine through through them or through a company that they contract with and that allows adults who are unvaccinated if they wanted to get the one shot to be done they could and our you know other people who maybe needed a second shot hadn't started the series one of the visor for those who are eligible for the shot that are under 88 to be
036eligible for that shot what we did for an incentive which is part of our sr3 funds is we have offered free entrance into any of the home football games for anybody that presents a fully vaccinated card or a ticket stating that they were vaccinated that night we have a community response category that we can then reimburse the athletic departments for any lost gate receipts out of to just try to encourage people to seek out and get the vaccination again we're not conducting these clinics matrix medical is actually the ones that are conducting at funding thank you and what's nice is they bring their own medical team so they have a full medical team they monitor the patients and they take care of all of that so they brought six nurses with them to north central
037high school and three support personnel so they have a full team with them there and they plan to do the same if not more for our next two clinics so they do the the support for that they do the vaccinating and it's a self-contained unit so it was a very nice it was a very nice thing very well run went very smoothly so how many more vaccinated we vaccinated two at north central high school one one student and one adult and just as a reminder um if it's if they're under the age of 16 they have to have the parent waiver and have someone there there is the holding area and that they have to sit and wait for 30 minutes so they can be observed by the medical staff as well so it was
038our first go of it we only had a couple people take advantage of two more than we had when we started um and you can see the next two clinics are at belgium high school in camden you know we're gonna try to promote it maybe a little differently and see if we can get more people maybe move the town a little bit we did five to seven the game started at 7 30 so i think we're going to move the time maybe 6 30 to 8 30 into the game time and try that as well so you are obviously all aware we've been communicating about the injunction that was passed last week then i immediately sent out a message um you know to the board and into our community as well and the one thing
039that we have agreed upon is although we are now able to utilize on face mask if we want to we need to know when we're going to use it because again you can look at some of our buildings and look at the data in our buildings and we have maybe zero cases maybe one case and that case happened outside of the school and so we want to make sure that we're being um effective and we're being consistent across the entire school district because it's a it's a broad range of people that we represent and so that's what we started looking at and i'm going to let elizabeth talk a little bit about some of the metrics that we're using and what we've just kind of come up with for your first look in terms of
040the draft if indeed he ever thought we might need to use a face mask mandated big text and some of this is based on um epidemiology like from influenza cases when you look at influenza you look at 20 or more in a cohort or group and that's when you consider it an outbreak situation so that's where that second bullet kind of is coming from 20 or more in a classroom and a cohort um then we would consider that masking would be needed for that group um the first bullet two or more test positive for coded 19 and a certain time period then we would look at that route needing to be missed of course your exemptions would include those that we had before with the waivers we would also do that again um and then
041if you look at the metrics 30 percent or more of students are absent or sent home always following our absenteeism that's a big deal if we have a lot accent for some reason we need to figure that out we need to dig into that and look at the reason for that so we will be following that closely as well any questions just help down on this on the the tumor more kind of break that down a little bit if you've got the 20 below that you get two or more what you could possibly have is to kind of walk just like a real life scenario so if you have a classroom situation let's say we have a kindergarten classroom and you have two tests positive in a pod you know they're in pods usually in
042four and five k you have three and a pod together and two tests positive in that pod in that time period and you're going to look at the other child in that pod and say okay what's going on any sentence there you're going to look at the whole class maybe look at the absenteeism rate for that whole class too and make a decision based on all those factors do we need to go ahead and ask that entire class do we need to look at the rest of that class and see what's going on could it be an outbreak situation so you wouldn't sorry so you wouldn't say i'm going to require that third student to be masked it wouldn't be the entire class well the two would be out so the third one would be
043in the pie by himself at that point would he not be required to quarantine he might if he's not been three feet away he might if he's been considered a close contact he would absolutely you know some of the pods are set up three feet away and some are not so we would look at all of that that's a very good question it's a lot of measuring we've got a lot of measuring this year i mean there's a lot of tables i don't need to beat the dead horseman but then that first pair that's a little confusing to me of you know when would you mask the entire class is it like i said if you've got two let's say that all three of those pod students test positive right right would it be okay
044there was no contact where there was no contact with everybody else in the classroom without an abundance of caution from after that class for three days as opposed to setting them all on course yeah we would definitely look at that we would talk about that that's when we would talk about do we have any others with symptoms in this class have we had any others test positive in the past 14 days in this class what else is going on in this class are there any other absent in this class for that reason so there are a lot of different things involved that we would look at that's a great question if you have verbage ideas again this is a draft i'm trying to process it here because that's the first time i saw it so
045yeah i appreciate it last thing i'll say is it just seems with this that we've talked about this as another tool in our our arsenal to fight this and keep the kids and it just it seems like um i don't know if you can articulate if a then b on the logic breaker it's kind of like if they didn't b might be c d e or f and it could change per grade level per class per everything so there's a lot of i guess moving parts to this there is and and it's for us i think it's important to understand not all things are equal and that's why just a blanket you know mandate doesn't necessarily meet the needs of our entire district and so you have to look at the data you know the
046other thing is is where are these kids contracting this are they contracting inside our school walls and will and mask actually help to prevent some of this and so that's why we use the chart we use you know each building and we follow up to see you know what our data is telling us so it is a different than the type of scenario versus just a linear statement a little more work but we think it's it allows us to be consistent when will thank you [Music] i understand that you wanted an update on the number of teacher vacancies that we have at this time um we have 24 24 and a half actually and they vary throughout the district the most trouble that we're having at this time is with the specialized physicians for example
047special education spanish math english those core uh courses on the on the secondary level we have a few in elementary and to give you the exact number for elementary certified positions we get 10 vacancies middle school five high school three an adult at 0.5 um we're not looking at this year as compared to last year we uh we're probably up about two or three percent because at this this time last year we we did have a few more individuals who were out there applying for positions however you know with the pandemic many people are quite cautious about accepting positions regardless because they don't know what's in the air and what they are liable to take and they may have loved ones at home that might be affected so we are doing our best to recruit
048individuals into our school district we have partnered with wltx who is who will be working with us on some marketing campaigns uh dr jenkins is also doing some things to um to allow us to promote the district we have a career fair coming up in october uh you know i think that wasn't for certified individuals that's in november this year in addition to the february job fair that we have we are also partnering with several universities usc usc upstate project create and they're there and congress college a number of colleges have partnerships and with the teacher cadet program i think we probably need to make a more concerted effort to to encourage our high school students because that's one avenue that they can receive financial assistance from so our teacher connect programs in high school
049will generate some additional applicants for those um i know you didn't ask but we are in native bus drivers also we we are down 23 bus drivers and about 65 i think mr clinton told me uh assistance and uh we have some ideas about how to counteract those things too um i have been in touch with a gentleman in greenville who was who is interested in putting veterans to work or partnering with veterans and and also i'm not sure if we if many people know about this but we can still have student drivers those responsible student drivers that by the age of 18 um i know we don't like to think about it but uh they can drive school buses if they have their cdl license the only exception for that is that they must
050be age 21 in order to drive out of state but then if they are to drive in state that's an option so we need to utilize all the resources that are within our power and i would encourage you if you have any ideas or if you know of people and can do some personal recruiting for us we would certainly appreciate it that is a good question we raised their hourly rate uh early in the year erin do you know i think it's a little over 13 an hour when we can get that point between 13 and 14 hours in the old days i was a 16 year old bus driver and see the good thing about being a bus driver is that if you continue working in the state you count towards your retirement and
051i know several people have done that mr hopkins are there any questions okay thank you [Music] so i have met with doctors coming up and i've met with dr sanja and this team it's uh obviously canvas is a very hot topic in our district and um as they're making their way up here i just want to remind the board that back in september of 2020 we were given a survey from the state department and it told us that survey said you need to choose one of three learning management systems and those three choices were schoology blackboard and canvas they foresaw us moving down the digital learning path and they were purchasing an lms and they were giving us again one of three options google classroom was not a choice and so my first choice when
052i filled out the survey was blackboard the reason i chose blackboard was because we use blackboard for other platforms in the district and an lms in my opinion is an lms it really didn't matter to me the state reached back out and said only one district and that was orangeburg has chosen blackboard do you want to reconsider and i said sure i said so that left schoology and campus and so we chose canvas i am familiar with the google classroom transition to canvas um in my previous position um but we owned the we actually owned the licensure with that here the state owns the licensure so it's been bumpy to say the least covid has not made it any easier with anxieties high but this team has done a tremendous amount of work to try
053to support um teachers i've got three very good teachers that are on dr sanders team so they understand the nuances of the classroom and i really wanted them to walk you through what we're trying to accomplish and again um we are open to suggestions from our teachers if we need to modify how we're rolling this thing out um and and i'll just stop there and i'll let them talk and you can ask them questions mr smith the drivers thank you very much for making us come uh i think it's another statement dr rob is saying that it hasn't been a rollercoaster for us when we started this with the statement available the nms's we started looking at the possibility of rolling the game last year and uh robert mcdaniel who is not here by the
054way we have other team members we are not just it there are people in the background that are doing a lot of things um he and i went to a meeting online we heard canvas people talk to us we were about six sub school districts after listening to them talk us through processes that they were treating us school districts i decided that i wasn't going to implement it then it wasn't going to be good for a school district so what i did was i suspended it so to give us time and give our teachers time and give covey i hoped uh a chance to just blow our way it didn't so we're still here um so with that said uh beginning of the year we started looking at implementing it we had quite a number
055of people involved uh dan matthews and ginger kettle from cni we had obviously robert and lavoy from ets my department we had mary eric who helped a lot with communications because we needed to message out to our teachers so with all that said we made decisions this team including those that i mentioned made a lot of very hard decisions in terms of how we need to go about doing this and so the first thing of course was as we rolled in as we do the backdoor work with robert and the rest of them we needed also to make sure that we provided our teachers with the very best training that we could provide them with and that has been our focus our task was implementing it and providing training and so what you're going to
056hear from us today from this and dr very clearly honestly very able uh ladies who have done tremendously more than i can ever ask anybody to do and they have done i mean seriously and you will see they will demonstrate you what we have done and we're still you know this is not a done deal it's a process uh it's an application that is very complex thousands and thousands of nuances that work within lms if you know the the technology behind it is very complex but very powerful and once you have it in place it begins to yield its results and that's what we're looking at um at the beginning of course we'll have this house that we have to work over make corrections adjust when necessary and then move forward as we move forward
057within the next year i hope we have a very fluent lms running within our school district this is going to be one of the major contributions that kcsu would have had technologically in terms of coming with instant school district so having said that let me introduce to you um nicole nicole richie ashley actually mark carmichael and betsy burr they're going to walk you through some of what we have done in terms of training and i'll start with basic all right so first we're going to look at the roadmap and so we rolled this out um initially with our pilot group and our pilot group and our tis's which consisted of 33 individuals across the district so it's a very small group to start with and to allow them to kind of get their feet wet
058and experience what canvas had to offer um and so we started with that group back in february we gave them a lot of information kind of preloaded with that group and then we went into a brief introduction with the school district and our delayed start which was in march and so we kind of said this is what's coming we want you to know there are going to be a lot of pieces following but we want to introduce this new lms that's going to be transitioning into our school district um in our march to late start wednesday um so we gave that brief introduction and then from there we rolled out their um learning roadmap so our canvas learning roadmap from success had a combination of asynchronous activities and the things where they're going to be
059able to go into canvas um go through tutorials build play get their feet wet and go through the teacher experience and the student experience so with that they were able to go through that and be able to learn and see what both sides and perspectives would look like in campus and so that was a valuable experience for our teachers to go into growing with canvas teacher training and so from there we continued down the road map and they had a combination of activities and so this combination of activities started in april and they rolled in all the way to the beginning of this school year in august and so with each step in the roadmap they were able to gain additional skills and experience and have a better understanding of what navigation was going to
060be like in canvas and then we hoped that from there they were going to feel a little bit more comfortable getting started with the school year knowing that this is going to be a learning process throughout the school year and we're going to continue to finesse this skill and the navigation of canvas and what it has to offer our students as you go you'll see that we offered face-to-face level one beginner trainings um throughout may so before teachers left contracts so before summer started we offered face-to-face trainings we offered them regionally so we went to the west waterway area and offered trainings we went to north central and so we offered a variety of locations and so we ended up having 46 different sessions um with a combination of trainings we maxed the combination of
061seats so it was 25 seats in each session because we wanted that um experience to be a valuable experience for our teachers so they were not sitting in a mass training um so they recapped each training session at 25 seats um so that offered a thousand one thousand one hundred fifty opportunities for beginner level training before teachers um went out for summer break um of course during summer knowing that we did have a short summer this past year and we were doing the best we could to get through that we did offer training opportunities for teachers who were able to come in and wanted to come in and so knowing that that was on their time we offered additional trainings in june and july if they wanted to brush up their skills and kind of
062learn a little bit more so we had intermediate and advanced knowing that everybody is pretty much still learning so we really call them level two and level three trainings knowing that no one's really at the intermediate advanced level yet we'll kind of building growth and to get there um we also offered those asynchronously so as we build as we have those face-to-face trainings we also offered those through canvas and they were also available through our ets training portal which ashley is going to speak about in just a minute and then at the beginning of july that six through eight we offered the opportunity for teachers to come in and so in different content areas and grade levels they were able to come in and build shell courses to allow other teachers who had not necessarily
063been able to come in over the summer the opportunity to come in at the beginning of the school year and have a shell course to kind of get them started so they had navigation home pages set up those initial standards and content areas those key vocabulary and so they had the pieces to get going so all they had to do is go in and add their content for their school year to get started so they had that shell ready to go for the school year so that was a valuable experience and many teachers have praised the teachers who created that content for them because they were like that has been so much help because coming back in after a short summer especially if they weren't able to find child care or such over the summer
064to come in they could use that show course and just get rolling from there and then for those who weren't able to come in we knew that everybody's schedules were different we rolled in and had a what we called a crash course so we combined that level two and level three and threw them together and made it kind of consolidated what were the key essentials to make sure they were ready to get going and roll it out that first week of school so knowing that we're going to continue to grow and add to those skills as the school year went on yes um so the next thing uh that we wanted to do to make sure that teachers had the support that they needed was we designed and created what we called the ets training
065portal on there we loaded the canvas made videos so the ones that are that the lms made for uh for teachers and for students and then we also made some ourselves that were specific for kershaw county and so those videos are available not only on the training portal which is through canvas but also on our web page which is our knowledge base that is a public forum as well on that training portal we also created some resources as well that are available for teachers and staff members uh it's not just for canvas it's all technology so you'll see google and adventure products there as well then we also do an update or newsletter um on the training portal that's also emailed to our tis's which are locally at each school in addition to that we
066have a form on the training portal that teachers can fill out at any time if they need one of us to come out to provide training we can do individual or small group training i was in a school today and saw about 20 teachers throughout the school day just trying to help them feel more comfortable with um their grade books specifically um and so in addition to that training request form we also as betsy mentioned offered the asynchronous training on there so the summer trainings were loaded in the beginning of august as a um self-paced course which they can complete and even get certificate renewals for those we're continuing to build those courses as well so all staff were loaded into this training portal in canvas so they all they had to do is accept
067the course and had access to all these resources it is also a self-enroll code so if someone is hired later they can um self-enroll at each time so they can have access to those resources we also wanted to make sure that we had parent and student resources ready for our students when they came back to school so we made sure that they had a dedicated page that they would always be able to use the same url to access the material they need and that they had an email that was dedicated just the technical support for our parents and our students we also distributed materials to our teachers that they can share in their canvas classroom out to their students so orientation presentations videos tutorials for the students and parents so that they may not have
068to go look for those in other places the teachers could go ahead and put those in the canvas classroom we've also as ashley said are updating the kcsc ets knowledge base with materials there as well and we have provided parent night resources for our schools we've also had east all regional night supports i think blue golf elgin high school hosted the first one so that our hispanic population felt supported it could learn how to use cannabis along with their students [Music] one of the things that we do also is just we support teachers and that's like basically tis i know we keep using acronyms like that right uh technology immigration specialists we have one at each school and they kind of are the extension of what ets does they check the material that we send
069to them and they use it for our delayed stock wednesdays they are a key component of what you know rich is into schools as well as we work with the teachers um the 3tis which okay cis doesn't like that that's technology integration implementation specialists because they also deal with implementation just like we are with cameras they basically work with the schools they go to the schools they are always out there at schools working with teachers sometimes they go like actually said earlier today she went to school she sat there really dedicated she announced our praises and teachers are walking and talk to them we try as much as we can with the time permitted within the day uh to provide that kind of assistance for our teachers and it's continuous and to be honest with
070you this is only the beginning in terms of canvas because we have a long way to go we have a lot of learning to do my philosophy in learning is it's always going to be a learning opportunity we never stop and so what we want to do is to continue providing our teachers with that kind of support as we implement canvas one last thing that we just want to demonstrate here is uh a parent experience when they you know when they go into canvas to look at their specific students because this is really a powerful piece we believe that we're implementing cameras right a parent can go in and see where their students have been assigned see what assignments are there what grade be able to interact with that content more than it was before
071before cameras [Music] okay so um our parents would use this dedicated url which is kcsdlms.instructure and it sounds funny but it's instructure.com and it's forward slash login forward slash canvas so that's the parent url um there's also a canvas app so parents are able to um download that app for android or ios devices um but we'll show you the web version tonight so if i'm going in as a parent i would if i need to create an account for the first time i would come up here to the top and i would click create an account i would need my child's hearing code and then i can put my personal information in so i'm going to show you by logging in and so when i log in it's going to give me all these helpful
072pieces and it's going to tell me how to navigate but this is going to bring you to the dashboard initially and it's going to show you the courses that you are observing and loaded into so my student is enrolled in these classes the fastest way for me to observe their grades if that is my biggest concern and then i can always dig in further is i can go to this left menu over here and i'm going to come down to where it shows grades and when i click on grades it's going to give me the information and details and by the way this is not a real student so this is a fake student account all right so we have this student here and it's going to show the grade here and then all i
073can do i can from here i can see all of my children's grades classes they're enrolled in and i can go in and do their grades if i want to know more details because i notice why do they have an 83 in science i can click on that class and it's going to give me those details so if i click into this one i might be able to go in and then i can look at the details of that class and it's going to give me all the pertinent pieces it's going to tell me what the assignment was the score and what the value how many points it was out of okay um the other important piece is that if i go to the account bubble at the very top so where the little hidden
074figure is if i click there i can always go right here to where it shows observing and if i have another child that i need to add a pairing code for i can add additional students here and just hit the plus student and it will add the additional students and the last piece is that parents and any users of canvas are able to personalize their notifications so if they're using the app they can have push notifications allowed and then from here i can set my notifications so if i want to have anything i would just click on the item and i can decide what the notification i prefer for that item is so if i want to be notified immediately a daily summary weekly or turn the notification off and so i can do that
075for every essential element of a course and so you can scroll through and you can personalize your alerts based on that and so students parents and teachers are able to do that i'll make a comment middle school this is a wonderful program i like the part that you can go in and actually see what the assignment is and what it's expected of the child so she can't tell me i have new stories so i can look and see that you had to do this and also to tell you something is missing when something was submitted also get notification once it's been graded and once has been great that i get that notes i can go back to the the greatest see it was it was you know listed there it is a wonderful i do
076like that part of it when you actually know what they've done and you get the notice and you're going checking that grade is only there and i like when due dates are due no due dates so it's an excellent program and i really really like it because you get more information here in power school that than getting from power so this is really a good good system i really like it it is a valuable tool and i think that it puts everybody in charge of their learning and they're able to be accountable and so you have the content and if you need to revisit content or if you need to see it more than once you have that opportunity in campus which is valuable i think one of the things that i'm sorry smith is
077as they get through um the training it becomes easier and easier because it rolls in the system and so we're putting in the front you know the work in the front end and then next year in the years following it becomes much much easier for them that leads to uh my questions are parents receiving in the type of online training um so there are a couple pieces you want to talk well yes we are we we do provide training but the way we provide training we have videos that our parents can get watched but we really because we don't know parents that much we push that training through the schools because you know i mean if parents do not have much idea who they are but if we do it through the school you can
078we can say okay if the school's organized we will come support you we'll provide services for you you did provide one service recently um one of the things that we did was we created like an orientation um presentation for all schools and provided it for the schools to push out to parents so they could have done it through classrooms or through the school itself just kind of depended on the school how they wanted to do that so we created the presentation and shared it out um they've also scheduled to have one of us come to like answer questions especially technical questions while they're doing the orientations so we we are available to do that as well because we can answer those technical questions but it's really um the teachers who are going to answer their
079specifics for their their classes especially for grades and assignments and things like that most of me like the parents section is very helpful like shirley says you know i think this is great stuff that it puts out here but i have received a fair number of complaints by parents that don't understand it they get used to another system and they don't come in on the weekends and do a workshop and if we leave this to the individual school there may be a problem there because some people some schools may take this seriously and others less seriously and i do things that we have a good number of parents that don't understand canvas we have a good number of students that say they don't understand canvas that's probably a lousy excuse because they can use the
080apps on their phone very very well so i don't buy that but i do think we have dropped the ball a little bit in some areas probably individual schools in this because i can't see why anybody would complain about being able to look and see what the homework assignments were and what part their student didn't do and why that grade is the way it is so it looks like a great thing but if we drop the ball and don't give the parents they're not all they're not always literate on the apps on their phone and things like that we don't figure out a better way to get all the parents to be able to see this and appreciate it we've dropped the ball a little bit look at the background if you don't mind uh
081because i i received some complaints from teachers right uh and so anytime you have software changes you know changes is never uh easy and and i'll i'll i'll love this i've done some research here's the best way to compare it to is you know the wright brothers had a plane uh it was just a stick that school classroom it'll get you where you want to go um and canvas is more like a rocket ship but everything i've read said it's great if the proper training mechanisms are in place because it has a high and long learning curve and the problem i'm having is i'm not saying change this see the problem i'm having is in the middle of a pandemic where we're doing all different kinds of teaching things our teachers might be a little
082overburdened with learning something new if we are not just constantly loving on them rolling out training and asking the tough questions of them and the principals with no negative you know i don't know why you know why people think they're you know get in trouble but just to say hey tell me what the issues you're having with canvas put a survey out there right that you can look at and go oh looks like there might be some issues right i i don't even speak to you okay i might be missing if i'm just saying that from what i've read on this on my own research awesome program but a lot of moving parts in the long range implementations and do do you know how many uh how many of the students within our district have
083actually trained [Music] now that the parent did not know where to go and look so again apparently it must be a breakdown communication because the question that they asked me and have acts would have uh would have been answered if they knew how to go and go through the steps that you just demonstrated to the board i promise you i mean that's honestly that's part of i think why you know this conversation is great for me as we listen to to these comments of everything we will make adjustments one of the things that we were really excited about when this started uh or at least we were kind of not sure about was how many parents were actually going to signing us observers we have more parents who are signing us observers than we have
084ever had in the district we have over 6 000 parents who have signed it that's a huge number of people we used to have about five thousand so we went in good your parents are showing they're interested in the students learning and so training them we'll look at the you know mechanism that we're using right now what's best regardless of those might not be the best scenario so go back to the drawing board and see i think what todd said a minute ago is that it's very very powerful it looks like it is it's very complicated a lot of that complication may be for the teachers and not so much the parents it looked pretty easy here i mean you you've got these little boxes and you can check i want to know this this
085this don't bother me with this but then you have to know how to get on there they have to know how to download an app on their phone if they want that i mean you know it's really easy you got an app on your phone you go into it you got all your things set you know it doesn't seem like it's going to be that complicated to teach parents but the complaint i get is parents and and the kids don't want to help because another questions thank you thank you is um [Music] not discussing all the things that you know by sinner father we like to thank you for buying with us this evening we leave this place but never for your divine presence yes that you lead us safely back home and help us
086to find all this love when we get home all this blessings and i hold your precious name it's all done amen