001right first of all we'd like to say thank you lord for giving us our glorious blessing this morning you woke us up you gave us the use of our lives we can hear we can talk we can see and we can walk and for this we are truly thankful we ask that you come into our meeting this evening we invoke your presence we live higher your name we ask that we be guided by what is good what is true help us to realize law that words are very powerful but also help us to learn also that a good mark turns back the wrap of saying the wrong thing at the wrong time heavenly father this evening we ask that you go with our school children we ask that you go with all those who are
002involved with the care of our children put your arms of protection around them keep them from all harm and danger of the father we give you all honor we give you all glory and this evening help us to be the kind of school boy that you want us to do help us to not to be led by what we understand but in all that we do help us to be learned by you we want to do your will and we want to do it your way and we will give you all honor and glory that is to you and it's in your name we pray and it's in your name we count it all down amen board of trustees needing to order father 17 2021 known by richard and one that stands mr mcdonald because
003their motion to approve the consent agenda [Music] right we are delighted to have everyone that have gathered this we want to evening chronic or independent as well as wltx uh media that will stay with us this evening this time we will stop and have recognitions and acknowledge thank you dr smith um tonight i'm very excited to recognize several individuals for their work in the field of communications they're doing an outstanding job of sending and sharing a message on behalf of kershaw county school district we're fortunate to have a very strong team across our district who use a variety of methods to ensure that our stories and messages are being communicated the person is being recognized tonight are accepting these awards but work together with others in their buildings to achieve these results tonight we're going
004to recognize schools and individuals who are honored by the south carolina chapter of the national school public relations association over the past two school years in its rewards of excellence program this program recognizes various communication tactics such as newsletters websites videos facebook videos dr king social media with certificates programs and other activities are honored through golden achievement awards which receive especially crafted palmetto treats for the 2019-20 school year kcsb won eight awards when i call your school one award please head back to the logo in the back of the room so we can take your photos some persons have changed schools since these awards but we are honoring those who were at their school for the 2019-20 school years the first one is beth jeffers camden elementary school the cult chronicles newsletter the second one
005is valerie west the canon elementary school facebook page next we have melissa holder pine tree hill elementary school bullpup bulletin jimmy proctor lugoff belgium high school press releases and school newsletter and i know jenny's not here tonight betsy long adobe smell elementary school dolby's mill elementary and touch via facebook was identified as best in shows middle school post-it notes to support anti-bullying okay [Music] oh okay thank you all right for the 2020-21 school year kcsd won 19 awards some of these activities were pre-coded and others were during the pandemic when i call your school and award please head back to the logo in the back of the room so we can get your photo the first one is renata and avenatt midway elementary school the bobcat bulletin valerie west camden elementary school facebook page bambi
006for our north central high school three different awards uh north central high school's facebook page e-library site and dr charles king watery elementary school the principal of the subject matter best in show terry luther waller technology center for three different videos about their programs the agriculture program cosmetology program and the fire and emergency services was named best in show how do you think um [Music] get another team okay all right next up we have our district awards first one is julie putnam webmaster and multimedia coordinator for seven awards two photographs can't mask the joy and first aid friends kcsd facebook the kcsd youtube channel best in show kcsd covid19 dashboard the kcsd welcome video best in show and kcsd website and then marianne byrd our community relations executive director for three awards before there was
007a pandemic there was a tornado district reopening plans and state of the district best in show that's right okay thank you is five minutes per person my finished presidency and my husband finished grad school we had one child one on the way looking for a community to raise our cultural environment i fell in love with the community that my husband grew up in because the people in this community care for one another we look out for one of them i have only three biological children but i have a lot more that i've cared for pray for love and help raise there are many parents in this community that can say the same or not my children and that is why it is so important um that we take this seriously the children in our schools
008that that you represent they are all of our children today i am asking of you i am pleading with you to please put some concrete measures in place to protect our children since we met two weeks ago we started school our children have attended school for nine days in that time more than 1.6 of our children and staff have gotten coded and the numbers needed higher now 934 children are currently quarantined um the latest numbers that i have for all children indicate that that about 1.1 of children who get coveted will get severely ill will be hospitalized because of this so i think the last number i saw with 182 children so we're talking about two of those children becoming severely ill and hospitalized um who's that whose child will that be whose grandchild will
009that be whose neighbor would that be these are all of our children and they need us to protect them in addition an average of one um one-fourth of the people they live with will contract coded these are pregnant women these are immunocompromised grandparents these are our community members the cdc calls for layered mitigation strategies as my grandmother used to say an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure we have to use science and what we know works for prevention coverage is spread through the air no amount of cleaning is going to get rid of coping one of the biggest risks to our children is the lunchrooms and while we have stay the school district has stated that they will spread the children out at lunch this is not happening i know of a
010case in our school district where a child was masked the entire day and contracted habit of lunch when he took his nap down to eat our children cannot mask what they eat there are many strategies that can be used to ensure proper distancing we can put x's on chairs on every other chair and spread kids out we can use classrooms we can use outside spaces we can use gyms we've got to spread our children out during lunchtime whatever it takes but it must be mandated by the school district in for each of our schools to follow charleston and richland school districts have both issued mass meetings i know that musc persia health health has approached dr robbins about doing the same i'm employing the board to do this in the absence of the universal mastery
011our district needs to start encouraging incentivizing mass we have many studies the most recent last week from north carolina that shows that not only is universal medicine safe it does not impede school learning and it keeps our children safe it keeps covered from spreading in our communities [Music] one model from north carolina out just this week showed that if that of unvaccinated kids if there is no nasty 90 percent will get so we're talking about our elementary schools 90 of those children's unmasked will get coded that's a huge number um assuming a 25 vaccination rate in our in our district which is actually higher than what we have that would mean that approximately 79 to 90 children from our district would be hospitalized and that would mean about one to two deaths is this acceptable
012to the board and to our community if the district continues its failed policy of keeping that mask optional we will continue to see the numbers skyrocket and we will see hospitalizations and deaths that's just the facts our district needs to focus on other risk mitigation strategies and dr anna kirkley dr nicole hill we are happy to help any of the schools in any way possible we have a strong and wonderful community let's pull together to protect our most precious members the children and the families that we all know and love let's meet next thank you i was actually um interested in coming here after reading an article by united states parents involved in education returning a uh i believe was dr roberts who gave a presentation to the kershaw county republican party on culturally responsive
013teaching and the lady who was present questioned whether that was all related to crt and in short the lady who developed that is known for her critical race theory teaching and the reason that it concerns me is i actually spent several hours one night pouring over pages of documentation on cultural responsive teaching just trying to get an idea of exactly what it was and it was so ambiguous that i really couldn't make heads or tails out of it um the reason for me that it's so concerning is because all of this is actually um related to a school of philosophical thought known as the younger gay leaders right um this is where communism socialism all comes from and the dirty secret of this is hidden by marxist materialism and that is that this is this
014philosophy is not a political philosophy it's a religious philosophy peggle's entire body of work had one one thing to gain but before i even get into that that was to awaken the absolute to itself as god critical theory comes from the frankfurt school antonio branchi is the one who masterminded that in frankfurt school they were blown away by the failure of the communist revolution of marxist revolution to take hold in the western western world right um and they concluded that basically life was just too good capitalism was strong you know to turn the proletariat against the bourgeoisie and so they calculated that it was the culture the western culture that was preventing this revolution from occurring and a gentleman by the name of gregory lukach came up with this idea of basically utilizing oppressed people
015in america that historically our nation has oppressed homosexuals african-americans native americans and using them and using their oppression for their own game to turn them against the culture and cite them against the culture antonio gramsci came up with this idea of cultural hegemony the cultural revolution he said that the revolution needed to take part in two phases cultural revolution the hard revolution which the second part the hard revolution would be referred to what he called the soft coup right and so what that was was an infiltration a subversion of western institutions the church the educational system um in order to basically destroy the culture which acts as a catalyst for our national identity and my area of study i'm not as educated i looked up the school board you guys got some some impressive credentials
016um my area of intrigue is actually religious history and so that's where my um that's where my knowledge and being able to follow this kind of comes into play and one thing i've always noticed is that throughout all of history and this is consistent 100 of the time we can introduce religion into a new place into a new culture that culture will change that religion before the religion will change the culture and so the brilliance of this cultural hegemony that gramski came up with was to basically can use ideologies you know basically take control of the culture and the ideology and spin it this has been going on and progressing for some time and it's it's caused terrible things we're seeing it now in cuba with the resistance there with the people there in venezuela
017this cultural hegemony is is 30 seconds a radical religious ideology that will just only tear us apart thank you mr chairman members of the board um i appreciate the opportunity to come for you tonight uh my name is michael wright writes law here in town but i'm here tonight to speak to you all on behalf of my son finn wright who just started kindergarten nine days ago i promise you that my presence here tonight is not gonna be any indication of how often i'll be here throughout this duration of public school it's just suppressing matter with respect to the same topic that that dr jenkins i think that the mass mandates despite what we're seeing in the governor's office from our attorney general i believe from a legal perspective that you all can pass a
018mass mandate on behalf of griffin county school district utilizing local funds or utilizing federal funds appropriations act says you can't use state funds nothing would preclude you all from using those local funds or utilizing federal funds that not withstanding i do think that there are a number of other measures some of which dr jenkins spoke of earlier that the schools should employ measures that the school used last year classic barriers in the classroom separating some of the desks from one another not eating in the cafeteria or spacing out in the cafeteria different tools that are in y'all's bucket if you will to protect our children dr jenkins talked about some of the statistics the numbers from today if you add them all together over 11 of students and staff are either positive or quarantined i
019think by dr rahman's in the past the general consensus is that having our students in class is a much better round than the remote learning however these students that have to be quarantined for obvious reasons are not having that ability to be in the classroom and i think mitigation measures that the school district can put into place while i advocate for a mass mandate one that's narrowly tailored for those students that can't protect themselves 5 to 11 years old to allow us an opportunity to let those children stay in class but even if this board decides not to look at the avenue of a mass mandate i urge you to consider and put in place some of these concrete measures that dr jenkins and our health care professionals are far more well-versed than i am
020but i do know that i like my son i love him i like her to stay in school and i'm concerned that if we don't put some of these measures in place to lead to tell these principles of these different schools that it is okay to put these concrete measures in place that they're not going to take that action on their own and some of these kids are going to continue to be test positive must be quarantined or worse uh end up in in some of the hospitals in this area mr chairman thank you very much for your time i just want to remind the board that mr surya and i will be going to the law school conferences been speaking about the relationship between the new york city and because y'all have holding a
021free drive through over 19 vaccine clinic kershaw county students staff household members on this wednesday host 18 from three to seven pm health resource center is located on battleship road 124 that's all right dr smith um and you know i know you had a mask on nurse darling and i know that that wasn't really a smile you gave me but if you could come forward and assist me here um i just want to say uh thank you to elizabeth she's she's been amazing as we've tried to work through a pandemic on tracking numbers both staff students contact tracing supporting our nurses in the buildings and being ahead of what's coming out of the cdc and bheck with guidelines and guidance and working with our administrators to make sure we have the most relevant data um
022[Music] actually i'm going to skip ahead of you since i already started you go ahead and go to my slides so what i what i'm going to cover tonight is our current isolation quarantine data with our middle and high school athletics program i created that dashboard today to start tracking that the vaccination clinic and then a face mask statement so and this this is a dynamic slide for the next slide um with our our copic dashboard it is interactive when the numbers change when the nurse has someone come in the office they go in and they input this data so it sounds to me like a couple of people mr wright and dr jenkins have presented have probably more up-to-date data because i pulled this late this morning when i was creating a slide deck
023but that was where we stood at that particular point in time our quarantine numbers are considerably high but we do have five buildings that have zero positive students and only one quarantined student that's all in the northern part of our county in the north central district um at this point in time 399 of our students were elementary students who were quarantined that seems to be the case because we can't socially distance quite the same they use their carpets for reading time and they do several other things that puts them in close proximity what i think is very important is our our adult staff who have had the opportunity to get vaccinated we only have 25 positive staff and we employ 1600 individuals in the kershaw county school district of those 25 14 of them are
024teachers 850 of our employees are teachers i think that's a really good statistic we have 10 quarantine staff and only one of them are teachers at this point in time when you look at and i know this is small on the slide for you all you guys have the slide that shared with you but when you look at athletics last year we had to close down lugo belgium high school for two weeks because we had a significant amount of spread with athletic our athletic programs what i i felt was more important to do this year was to look at each school and look at each sport versus the whole program and quite honestly um we're doing really well in our athletic programs i think it's probably because they're in their own little bubble and an
025awareness of what can happen but currently we only have uh five high school athletes that are positive but again because they are in teams and you cannot separate them we do have 53 high school athletes who are in quarantine due to close contact at the middle school level we only have two positive athletes and 13 that are in quarantine i would add that we have 526 student athletes at the high school level and 230 at the middle school level with that being said i'm going to pause and i'm going to turn it over to nurse starling to talk about our vaccination so one of the things that we have um really i think done well in our district is offered vaccination clinics for our faculty for our staff and for our students we did four
026vaccine clinics last year two for our faculty and staff and two for our students and really reached out to our community in doing that also um dr robins and i both brought in cars to give shots [Laughter] to children and their families in the spring and we're going to do that again tomorrow so we are fortunate to have a partner personal health health now musc is our partner and we are very fortunate to have them as a partner i know other districts have trouble getting partners to do vaccine clinics and so we are we know we are very fortunate to have them they have been wonderful to work with us to provide the vaccine and to provide the space in the spring we did retail sites for students but tomorrow we are doing wednesday at
027the health resource center it will be a drive-through and we'll have school nurses and dr robbins giving shots and we will be monitoring them in the parking lot like we did before for 15 minutes it'll be the pfizer vaccine also just as we did before uh just as a matter of information we've done this before what percentage of our teachers have been vaccinated i believe our numbers we don't know an exact number of our teachers because we cannot ask that specific information of our teachers but when we did our vaccine clinic um we had about total when we put the two together was a little over seven 700 is what i was thinking come through that planet but we don't know but we won't we can't overstaff right and that's not something that we would
028we could ask them to just i mean we could ask them to voluntarily disclose that information but any um sign up in advance they just pull the light up they can just pull right up no pre-registration required so we've really tried to promote this um and i know it you know we say it's for eligible students faculty and staff household members but quite honestly we don't really care you know just if you come through and you want vaccinated then the nursing staff and myself will vaccinate you i mean crucial health has or in usc kershaw has been very supportive of us in this effort [Music] we put this claim together in about a week and a half okay go ahead and go to the next slide so you know obviously what's on everybody's mind to
029mask or not to mass to vaccinate or not to vaccinate so i have some prepared you know words on the share of the board and elizabeth and i are more than happy to answer any questions first of all we are using several mitigating factors in our buildings our protocols are the same as they were last year they are just more challenging this year because last year we ended the school year with about 70 of our students back face-to-face this year we have 99 of our students pretty much back face to face last count we had under 300 11 000 students that were in our virtual academy we are cleaning our buildings every single day we're cleaning our buses every single day we have plexiglas that's available in our buildings we will we have a building
030administrator meeting tomorrow mr hopkins has done a great job of managing all of our face masks cleaning supplies and plexiglas logistics we are going to re-emphasize it once again we have emphasized it in the past the cafeteria is an issue that i did speak with dr kirkley dr jenkins is dr hill about and i immediately sent a message because that really affects our elementary schools and asked them to make sure they were using gymnasiums outdoor space non-instructional spaces spread out as much as possible use classrooms if necessary i know elementary teachers don't necessarily like eating in the classroom because it can create a mess but we've encouraged them to do that something we learned from last year and so they've been asked to do all those things we're still tint checking when you come in
031the building and we're highly encouraging face masking especially if you're unvaccinated and we are requesting you wear a face mask if you're a visitor to the building and we have restricted the amount of visitors that are in the building just to safeguard our staff and our students so those are several of the strategies that you all probably will remember that our 50-person task force came up with that we continue to use i have spoken to the governor's office on multiple occasions they have been very interested they like our interactive dashboard as a matter of fact i spoke to the governor's office right before this meeting i continue to ask in every interview and when i speak to the governor's office for flexibility in applying protocols i'm not asking for a mass mandate from the governor's
032office but if we deem appropriate in certain areas in our community we need as a as a school district the flexibility to be able to be that appropriate right now currently it would be very difficult for me to recommend to this board that we need a universal mass mandate when in the north central area all three of those small elementary schools up there have zero corn or excuse me one quarantine and zero positive cases zero positive staff and zero quarantine staff so that's the purpose for the internet active dashboard that's also the purpose that we included a dashboard for athletics so we can make a decision based on what our community is presenting us you know again for immunocompromised individuals obviously face masking is very important and they should con consider that the short term
033we are offering as you now know a fifth and soon sixth round of vaccinations again and i think the school district is going above and beyond to try to support the health and wellness of the kershaw county community our nurses including myself will volunteer at this event to provide anybody who wants a vaccination a vaccination and so again we're trying to encourage you know the positive things to help us keep this spread at a very minimum while offering a face-to-face education to our students i shared with our staff the very first day of school i made a statement to them i said we don't have set in stone protocols we need to be prepared to pivot based on what we observe in our buildings we are a county school district that covers a large territory
034with nearly 60 7 000 residents from the north central community that's ruled to the camden area to the west water e area we need to be able to make decisions based on what we're seeing in those areas so currently that's where we are the budget proviso does not allow us to to enforce a mandated mass mandate again it's different than the usc um kg response it's reason i called the governor's office to see if this gave us flexibility however she assured me that when the legislators come back in session they are very interested in what we are demonstrating on our dashboard and the requests we are making and i'm very excuse me i'm very hopeful that that's going to be something that they'll consider for us so with that being said nurse darling and i
035are happy to answer any questions the board has with us i have a question about the students that are quarantined or how they being so we are in the middle of a transition but we're using and depending on the level of the student but i spoke to a parent right before this meeting and they're using canvas and so when they go into quarantine they access their assignments really kind of similar to an e-learning environment but they access it through canvas which is interactive with the teacher it's not live interaction in terms of instruction but the teacher then will respond to them if they have questions you mentioned that plastic glass is available is it still in the classroom as we had previously previous video so mr hopkins and i have talked about that out of
036link we've got a ton of plexiglas when we sent out the kind of the warnow saying hey if you want plexiglass in your classroom we highly encourage you to use it he started to get some requests but i you know again tomorrow we have all of our administrators face to face and we're gonna highly encourage and it's just gonna have to be something that we go in and we spot check to make sure that they're actually utilizing in their classrooms do you want to add anything to that then yes all the students have pledged to class from last year and some of them are replenishing some that may be damaged but we have a fair supply on hand that we've been able to accommodate every request we've had this year with this sheets of plexiglass
037so it shouldn't be an issue nor a problem with anyone right now but we will get additional details on that tomorrow stop robin said dr with some of the spikes that we're seeing yesterday's for the smaller kids would it be good protocol to go ahead and mandate the plexi class for a season i mean it seemed to look pretty good last year uh i'm just asking i'm not into schools as far as seeing them the smaller kids when we lose by by doing that nothing i actually think that that's one of the things that mr hopkins is going to address with the principles tomorrow is mandating that they use it in the classrooms especially because we have more students in each classroom now with it at the elementary level again it's our our biggest concern
038not that the older kids don't concern us but you know they're in a more isolated environment so that is something that we will definitely do the other thing that i'd remind the board too is we did budget in our sr3 playing a hundred thousand dollars for ppe which ppe is face mask shields plexiglas gowns gloves so we if we run out which we had plenty last year we'll order more next question if you don't mind is just looking at our numbers we made a decision last year that if we needed to you know adjust fire and close a certain school down would we have some freedom to mandate mask in a certain school if we saw someone spike or not that's what i'm asking for and that's what i don't have the authority to do
039yet we can close the school down but not for more than five consecutive days before it violates the budget provides though i really appreciated mr wright's mention of the use of funds here's here's where they get you and that is we are always using state funds it may not be for ppe or it may not be for face mask or but teachers are paid with state funds and so you know that's you just got to be careful and that's what they were cautioning me on if we tried to go through and enforce the mass mandate at this point again i think we're making a strong case that we're looking at it on a case-by-case scenario and where our concerns are it's easily viewable and they're looking at our dashboard and so i'm very hopeful that
040we're going to get that flexibility in the future that's a good question we are still offering the exact same quarantine guidelines that we did last year so there's a 14 day and then we offer the alternate options that the cdc offers the 10 day and the seven day but they do have to test negative on the fifth day to return after the seventh so dr brothers as part of your discussion tomorrow it's going to be centered around because i hear the words i heard the words available and encouraging when it comes to separating now we know what works for magic and i don't think when it comes to plexiglas and put up you know encouraging them to separate kids in the cafeterias versus putting the exits in don't sit here and sit there it worked
041for us last year so i don't think that we should be afforded an opportunity to make that decision i think that's something that uh is your mandate yeah and i i wouldn't i don't want to make the statement that they're not doing that um i know that they didn't use x's they used apples you know and it was every other state so um we'll ask specifically what strategies they're using and you know i said encourage google mandate that they have a strategy much like the 4k 5k first day we created slide that for every one of them and we told them tell us what your strategy is to try to provide parents with as normal a first day as possible but not going inside our buildings and they did it they did it really well
042and i think it worked out really well we'll do the same thing with um with lunch room you know lunch time and and how they're doing it again different buildings we'll have to do it different ways because as i look back and see dr king he's got more students than what you know some of our other buildings do and so yeah absolutely for dr smith and we'll do that tomorrow thank you sorry man cameron smith dr robbins and members of the school board it's our pleasure tonight for miss putnam and i to present you with your annual report looking at some of the communication methods that we've used over the past year and breaking them down a little bit more and as we've shown tonight um it really is a team effort we may direct
043or coordinate or plan at the district level but it's really those school contacts that make a difference and we have a lot of persons who are at the school level who have a certain job say classroom teacher who are rising up and above and doing additional work to communicate and a great example is we're not an avid who is slid in behind now with the video camera there to help julie los angeles in front of the camera tonight as well but um we are blessed with a strong team of communicators across our district and it's just a pleasure to work with them tonight we'll give you a lot of numbers and we've said this to you before we're not looking for a certain number when we look at these statistics but we're looking more for
044trends you know last year was a different year with the pandemic and so we were curious to see how that would communicate with communication techniques that we use and i think you'll see that in some cases we know our digital presence was more important and needed to be emphasized and some other areas you can see where the fact that we didn't have as many activities and events in the school probably prevented some of our numbers from being a little bit lower than it might have been otherwise so i'm going to enjoy i'm just letting you talk you through and i may add live and go in but she's prepared this report for you tonight thank you very much um what we wanted to do the first um slide is where we want to show you
045uh our website hits this is just the district website and our district communication and so you can see this year um and when we talk about the year all these all the data was gathered between july 1st of last year to june 30th so it was a school calendar year so we actually were up to over two million um hits on our website um i think that shows a lot of the interaction that was going on with people looking for our district plans and the information we were communicating there so we saw that as a good trend um on the next slide for our direct messages this is where people contact us um we have the tip line which is on our website where people can um ask the super questions or ask us questions
046and then the web email is just where somebody emails the webmaster so you can just see from the trend in the last three years you know the first year only about 30 people the whole year had emailed the web answer with questions and now we're over 750 and those can be any kind of question from i'm new to the community i'm not sure if my home is in the right zone or i need a transcript to you know detailed information that that people request so um um miss burns i feel those complete those for our school websites um we wanted to show you the trends people were also looking at those websites interacting with those um we've got a couple screenshots of some of the great pictures that our schools are using there and of
047course this includes the three separate north central sites as well on that so that trend is continuing our district act people are continuing to use that and that number is continuing to kind of fill up slightly there but again um in a year that we had so many chat challenges um that's positive um marionberg made a full amount of calls this past year uh so you can see where over a million um phone calls sent home that's principles as well so that's what that is right and we use that during a normal school year to also do lunch balance accounts as well as attendance as well so um this is a tool that we didn't have 15 20 years ago and i can't see it ever going away from the way we communicate with our
048families so that is a fabulous tool we have there um our parent portal um where parents who checked grades in attendance in the past year you can see that it continued the trend students could also check their grades and attendance so that has been again continues to be a very powerful tool we did want to make the point um and i've got the next slide for that starting this current school year parents will now be checking grades and attendance in canvas so we fully expect parent portal numbers to plummet because people will not need to check that on a daily basis and we'll i'm not sure how you know we'll be able to gather the same data in canvas but we'll uh we'll keep that in mind for the next year i think this is
049another tool that um has changed the way that families interact you know and change that general discussion sometimes about how you're doing school and i know how you're doing this kind of thing so again this has been a really critical tool for us to be able to have good communication back and forth where parents feel fully informed absolutely facebook i will mention um in the next couple of slides facebook has changed their algorithm you'll see before they had hits and now it's web page reach one of the things i haven't mentioned is most of the communications of course we pay for our website but all the social media that we do really is free we're not paying money for any of this we're not running advertising um facebook likes for you to run advertising so
050i think there's been a change in the way that they calculate things as well but we also agreed that we don't have we didn't have as many um pictures of kids and you know as many uh activities going on this past year so you can see our followers have continued to go up but um our facebook went down and just to show you the top five posts on facebook um we're all related to um physicians new administrative positions and also mass um the mass mandate so that's just to give you a little bit of information there on that when we go to school's facebook pages i really don't believe that we went from 6 million to only 1 million um again i think that has to do with the algorithm and the way that they're
051changing things because we've had a lot of great interaction there and you can see the followers of those school pages have continued to go up so um that but that we wanted to share that be transparent that was the way that they were doing that now and share that as well um on twitter we've continued to go up a little bit um we had i i did note here we had um uh 59 new followers um as you may know um there were a lot of people that um left twitter in january and so we saw a lot we did have about 130 new twitter followers but then there were a lot that um left at that point in time so those numbers um have continued to to do well there and i talked tweets
052again more about administrative positions um and code so that was that was not a huge huge surprise there we did this school year at instagram in um in december we started using instagram so that's just another tool that we're using we're sharing the same information that we're sharing on facebook and twitter um and uh linkedin with instagram so that was just another tool for some of our families that that only use that peach jar is uh the flyer that we use for school activities and as we commented we didn't have as many activities this past year so um we don't know if that was right i still think it's a valuable tool but probably didn't see as much use coming off of it because of uh covet and the different setup and activities we had
053in our schools and in the community because that's the way a community reaches out to our families as well that's right that's right youtube um as you can see we saw we doubled our youtube usage this past year um we had twice as many uh videos twice as many times people were watching our videos we had five times as many subscribers this past year and one huge reason why is because we started live streaming the school board meetings this past year um so we actually our first board meeting was in actually made that should be a question for you june 23rd was our first school board meeting that was um and we feel like we you know that was really um kind of rough that first time we've been trying to improve it and make
054it make it better as we've gone there of course we didn't know when we started a year ago that we would still be doing that but we're it's a i think another value added to when you look at um the next slide um how many um one of the the number three most watched video on our youtube channel was the school board meeting from june 14th last year and it's had over 1500 views so think about the idea that that's over 1500 people that aren't sitting here virtually this aren't sitting here in person but number one they've watched it virtually so um dr robinson um has also been extremely popular with the top one being close to 4 500 views so um you know we think we've got a very very strong reach with that
055tool um last couple things we'll talk about linkedin is a professional website um and so we've got a lot of people following our page and watching us there and we are most of the things that we post online we post there as well another service we added this year was the dash report and at the time the priority of that of course was getting the information out there is no counter on there so we don't um i i don't know how many people who viewed it but we know you know a lot of people reviewed it so that's good um the last thing we were just going to show you very very quickly is as we said we had nine school awards and we won 10 district awards i wanted to just show you a
056couple um the golden cheapo awards are awards for overall communications around a certain program or project so um marion byrd won one of those awards and all of the district awards are judged by national judges so we have judges from around the country that judge these um so it's a um a real honor to be able to win some of these awards so um this one was before there was pandemic there was a tornado and it's all the communications that were gathered around the north central tornado incident and so i've actually have links in this too so that you can go and read um our application there because i thought that was excellent another one was for the reopening plans that was our plans to reopen it um and so that was another complete plan
057with all of the communications around that and the third that won ford uh won the award for the best in show out of i think 30 golden achievements that were won um total it was the best one overall was the state of the district program and that was um dr robin's presentation and all the communications and that really was a team effort that you know seems like a lifetime ago it was last school year when we were able to have all of our community come together and celebrate all the things that were going on in that school and i wanted to end with just two quick the two pictures that one because um i think they're just great examples this one was um can't nasa joy and this is a student at camden middle school
058with just a huge grin on her face um enjoying um a conversation with their friend and then the last one was pre-coded and this was birthday friends and this was just a really sweet picture of two girls connecting the um um one of the little girls um did not speak english and came in and was scared and so the other little girl sat down with her and um you know held her hand and made her feel good so that was just a sweet picture of things going on in our school wonderful things that was candid elementary one in our school every day and again our facebook youtube the cover dashboard the welcome video and our website all one of words too so we're very proud of all of those things and we appreciate all your
059support and um and being able to do those and bring this to you so we're glad to answer any questions that you have mr chairman first of all my last uh child graduated first up county this year so i'm excited not to get the phone call anymore i will tell you that you know they went off on every device in the house and so we were always as a parent if you say you don't know what's going on then you clearly don't have your devices connected um two things for you one um the i've used the website frequently looking for stuff and usually i'll tell you this the first time i went there i was just kind of overwhelmed and then it hit me i'm overwhelmed because we have so much information to provide and
060it's really easy to find stuff if you just kind of slow down a little bit but with all the tabs and all the moving parts you know i can see where a parent can go how to find something but just a couple of clicks you can find almost almost anything um i do think the 4500 4500 chat watches were dr robin's watching 4 000. um but the website is awesome congratulations i do want to ask last question can you explain canvas versus uh parent portal canvas is a learning management system and so it's a system where students go the teachers post their lessons the students go and look at their schedule get their lessons and their parents can also log in and retrieve um lessons and information um and so but they also can get
061grades now so it's kind of all an all-in all-encompassing program and there is an app for that for canvas too that the parents can use so if they don't want to be in their computer they also have access as well so can you actually tell how many parents have actually logged um the technology department i know that they can do that um i know we have the number of accounts that have been created and it is it is um a system that we're in transition um you may hear from parents to say that they are coming to learn something new and that's true and so we're doing what we can to help make this as smooth as possible um but again um it'll be we're all learning together and we'll be trying to communicate as
062we work through this best ways to help them navigate through we have any short just kind of how-to videos on it we do if you go to our district address canvas oh yes there's there's some videos thank you i just want to say um thank you for what you do you're a great team and um we wouldn't have as good as stories to tell if we didn't have everybody in the schools doing all the great work they're doing today so it really is good evening members dr roberts this evening i would like to bring you an update on our purpose our program our military population is growing quite a bit here and you're going to see in the next upcoming slide this past year was our first full year of implementing the purple star program
063uh the military basically is represented in every school that we have here in terms of and we have representatives for each of the schools every month the schools um they have an opportunity to provide military enrichment engagement opportunities some of the things that they provide each month maybe groups specifically related to military connected children um they are sometimes they may host breakfast to honor the parents to honor the students of other engagement opportunities and celebrations well the next two slides which you'll see is the number of military connected children by school for this school year next slide keep in mind these numbers are for the 21 22 school year and you're probably asking yourself why is there a military connected students and then impact students we receive impact aid grant for active duty military students
064and that's only active reserve after national activity however as a district we take care of all of our military connected families so when i say military connected families it's not just active duty we're talking about reserve soldiers who are on reserve status national guard soldiers who are on national guard status retirees um those students who may have lost a parent or parent was wounded in active duty so when i say military connected that's everyone however when we're completing the impact they bring they're only looking at the active duty students next slide okay this is for the 2020 2021 school year and we had 660 military connected students last year was our first year applying for the impact day grant and i'm happy to say after going through our federal audit we receive 100 of um
065we receive in payday grants for 100 of the students that we submitted for which was 344 students now these numbers that you see in terms of the amounts that's an estimate of what we're expected to receive from the federal government and they will provide that in three installments the first installment will be 50 of that amount and it will come after the fiscal year which is after october federal fiscal year the second installment will be somewhere around march between march and may and then the third installment is actually 18 to 24 months after the initial payment are there any questions and reference to that now we do we have a couple upcoming events that i want to kind of bring to you one is september 14th and 15th we're um hosting our student student program
066we've um connected with insect our military child education coalition and they're going to come in and they're going to train the middle and high school students in the student student program and they'll train me adult at the elementary school and we're kind of we're transitioning as not just ambassadors with student student programs where the students can bring the programs together and host some things in terms of the military connected children and then the next thing is although we honor our military families throughout the year november is the monthly military child and subject to your questions that concludes what i have for you so i want to make a comment before the board asking any questions but um when when i got here and brought miss troy on obviously we both have military background backgrounds we
067started talking about this program and when south carolina came out with the purple start program i definitely wanted to be one of those districts the incredible thing about this is by and it's not been from a lack of work because her and her team have worked really hard to get 100 of these forms to be accepted it's the government so they'll find any reason to say nope we're throwing that one out but that is a quarter of a million dollars of revenue stream that we've never experienced in our school district and each year as more and more families choose to live in kershaw county that number is only going to increase we're seeing several families that are being pcs to shaw air force base they're choosing to live in kershaw county and i think the
068more that we can promote what we're doing and how we're doing it and it's not just beneficial to military connected families and children we're able to use these funds for all of our students and and activities that would support them as well so karen thank you this is this is a nice you know little bump that i'm sure miss boyce is happy to see come in after october another one is there ties to the funds of how they have to be usually used as part of district funding district funding and some of the programs that now we'll we'll try to tie some of it aside so that um as the military community liaison she can plan specific military children type of events but it's really designed to be able to offer opportunities for all your
069students that wouldn't normally exist that military connected children can benefit from one caveat with that is with your children with disabilities and you saw that that number of 40 that's a different set of funds that is not counted in that 222 thousand dollars but those funds have to be used specifically for children with disabilities the other thing i'd say is this for the military families that i work with that come over here uh frequently you know they'll ask me about education and one of the things i've noticed is or i would suggest is if we could partner with a lot of our local builders that we could educate those folks when they come over here about us being in a purple heart district and anything that we're offering for them because when they talk to
070me they see it like today in the discussion but none always apparently nobody's in their hands executive session administration recommendations [Music] yes mr chairman i make a motion to accept administration's recommendations regardless to employee a second second second business concern in the discussion even we thank you for your presence with us this evening you're invited with us and we had a very very successful meeting as we leave here this student but never from your divine presence we ask that you lead us safely back home and fight all his will and we will give you all honor and glory that is to you and it's in your name we pray and it's your name amen