001i would like to call this meeting of prince william county school board to order a motion is in order for the approval of the closed session agenda madam madam vice chair i move that the princeton county board school board approved the closed session agenda as recommended is there a second second um yes everybody the vote is five yes three absent late for austin and zargarpur motion passed moving on to the motion to enter closed session emotion is in order madam vice chair mrs williams i move that pursuant to virginia code 2.2-3711 and 2.2-3712 the prince william county school board enter the closed session for the following reasons one to discuss with staff the appointment transfer release assignment and promotion of specific officers and employees under virginia code 2.2-3711a 1 2 to consult with division council
002pertaining to actual or probable litigation involving employment and education matters as provided by virginia code 2.2-37 and 7-3 to consult with staff and legal counsel regarding the legal requirements and procedures for collective bargaining by school board employees which require legal advice and guidance as provided by virginia code 2.2-3711a84 to discuss the qualifications and selections of student representatives for this to the school board for the 2022-2023 school year under virginia code 2.2-3711a one and five to review the grievance appeal of employee t 22-39 under virginia code 2.237111a18 is there a second second the vote is five yes three absent la t for allstate and zagapoor motion passed the prince william county school board will now enter a closed session and return to open session in one hour [Music] the victorian county school boys now we turn
003into open session from closed session emotion is in order madam vice chair experience i move that pursuant to virginia code 2.2-3712 the closed session of the prince william county school board meeting of june 1st 2022 be certified by adopting the following resolution now therefore be it resolved that the prince william county school board hereby certifies that to the best of each member's knowledge one only public business matters lawfully exempted from open meeting requirements were discussed in the closed meeting to which the certification resolution applies and two only such public business matters as were identified in the motion convening the close meeting were heard and discussed or considered by the school board adam chairman uh miss jesse out second the vote is five yes three absent latif ralston and zargaporn motion passed before we move on
004with the meeting i just want to make an announcement that dr chief cannot attend today due to a prior commitment and he's unable to be here but he is sorry he can't be here with no objection from the board i would like to move the closed session action items to after thriving futures are there any objections all right then we will move that all right we will move on to the my favorite part the thriving futures focus so good evening we are pleased to continue our launching thriving future focus to recognize our outstanding students last month we recognized our award-winning robotics teams at the middle and high school level i'm proud to share that several several several elementary school teams are also brought home trophies miss jesse will begin with honorees from the occupying district
005wow [Applause] aquacon let's be on our best behavior it's exciting i would like to um recom i'm sorry i need to look at this the robotic club aquacon elementary's robotic club is the 2022 global innovation project winner in the first lego league okay members of the team include nathan delago nathan nelson lorenzo quintero maxim maximiliano quintero bryson smith miles james isabella filazzo alexandra kaminsky i i was worried about this word aki akiya ab abba ah thank you aquiquan mariah salah [Music] am i good the coaches are vanessa santos kevin wilkins the principal is buddy link lynch and buddy i know you're making that noise out there because i know you the coaches may say a few words good evening i'm mr wilkins thank you uh mrs jesse and the rest of the school board for
006allowing us the honor to be here tonight we would like to thank our parents for all their support throughout the year and our students that could be here tonight and those that couldn't thank you for all your hard work and dedication um just a couple quick words um ms shaddix at our school helped us with videoing our commercial which was one of the keys to winning the trophy and she also helped us with video editing so we'd like to thank her and we would also like to thank ms carroll for her guidance throughout the year um so yes thank you i am also pleased to recognize the lakeridge elementary robotics team 190-19101b [Applause] who qualified for the vex state tournament world championship they are one of the four winners of the vex eye stem iq
007stem research project online challenge team members include shazam james emery schaefer coaches include sean ward and jane parks principal is sarah harrington i saw her here recently coach ward will make a few remarks thank you miss jesse uh we would just like to thank you and the rest of the school board and dr mcdade and mrs harrington our principal for continuing to support the robotics program we would like to thank our parents for all their support and we misses carol of course for her advice and all the hard work she does and we'd like to recognize and we're thankful for these amazing students and how hard they've worked this year how well they've worked as a team their perseverance and all that they've learned this year thank you and we continue with it's my pleasure
008to recognize multiple teams from rock ledge elementary school rock ledge robotics had four teams to compete in fall regional tournaments three of the four teams receive regional awards and trophies let's give a round of applause for that the robotic flight team won that aquapon group they're kind of loud i'm sorry the robotics white team won the first core value trophy for division one robot green team won the first robotic design trophy for division one and the rock ledge gold team won the first place championship champions choke trophy for division one this is the most prestigious award prestigious award that celebrates the teams fully what that fully embodies the first lego league experience by completely embracing the first core values while achieving excellence and innovation and both the robotic robot robot game and the innovation innovation
009project rockledge green and gold teams also advanced to the first lego league champions state championship in december where rockledge green team won the second place in the core value trophies are there any trophies left division one congratulations to these outstanding robotic team from the rock ledge elementary school tonight we have several coaches and students joining us head coach faculty advisor here's heather owen [Applause] ted coach jeremy webster assistant coach tech support is chris supidus sipedas brock ledge robotic white team coach is christy beans students are parker bean shannon buckley eva pereira no noah robleto and anzana shepherd rockledge green team coach is lara lejean students are adam alani parker jen alex knight and coolan legend is that related to the college i think those names i looked at that and jordan jordan nuan matteo rock
010rodriguez okay people we're still rockland we're still rocking so we're still rocking rockledge gold team golden girls coach nero's ring evade coach chris britt students are isma ahmad izzy britt katie oden ramirez remus lilly ryan maddie webster assistant coach is megan evert and the coach is nikki i mean sorry the principal is nikki stephtow coleman broccoli coach oden will say a few words thank you miss jesse and the school board we want to say that you are the highlight of our day and i can't thank my parents and my support from miss everett our assistant principal um i can't thank you parents i can't do this program miss denise carroll you have been the highlight of our year of our decade together everything miss carol is the backbone of everything so thank you all for
011your continued support for robotics [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] thank you all right um that was great thank you um congratulations to aqua quan lakeridge and rockledge elementary schools let's pause briefly to take a picture of these teams and their coaches with the school board members following the pictures these teams and their families are free to go thank you thank [Applause] you everybody we're gonna go this way yes [Music] one two three one two three [Applause] all right [Music] it keeps coming outside there you go hey that was wonderful next it's my privilege to introduce miss williams for miss diane roston who can't attend today at the obstacle district to recognize penn elementary school thank you very much madam vice chair on behalf of diane ralston we'd like to recognize the penn elementary school pennbots team
012i think they're coming in now give them a second to come on in right now you guys all right thank you everyone for your patience we've never had so many robotics awards in one year before so it's historic as i was saying this is the penn elementary school pennbotics team who won the robotics design award in the first lego league remote which was virtual rumble the coaches are kristen burton and kat emmon students on the team are levi thompson tsar nassim emily bales ambrose rolfes samuel uranta the principal is elliott bowles coach burton would you like to say a few words please i just wanted to say thank you for our our penn community who gave us a lot of support and our students who i'm so proud of they've helped us grow our program
013from the few you see here to 40 that are at home right now watching hopefully and we are so proud of what they've accomplished thank you [Applause] thank you miss williams and congratulations to penn elementary school it is now my pleasure to introduce miss wall of gainesville manchester district to recognize tyler and elementary school thank you miss jackson good evening tyler families and students this is the 13th year that the tyler elementary school super tomcats have been involved in fll robotics the team earned a competition spot at the state competition by placing second in the regional tournament so that is awesome congratulations um team members include mia arevalo arevalo okay emma uh sirwinsky nathaniel chung zachary kelly fajar khan hayden martz connor prophet benjamin stanton and coaches are betsy wilco and bonnie brisen high school
014mentor is hannah young which is very cool that you have a high school mentor and principal is jennifer perilla so coach briseno will provide remarks or whoever is going to provide remarks [Laughter] principal parrillo rula will provide remarks no worries good evening all i'm jennifer the proud principal of tyler elementary i am incredibly proud of our robotics team coaches our entire program while earning second place at this competition was very exciting we are most proud of our teams repeatedly earning the gracious professionalism award and spirit award over the previous years their hard work and dedication are inspired by two incredible coaches mrs wilco and mrs preseno mrs wilco has coached our robotics program for the entire time that they've been part of the fll robotics all 13 years and mrs briseno joined forces with her
015six years ago and together they have truly done an outstanding job so thank you for recognizing all of these well-deserving individuals [Applause] thank you mrs wong congratulations tyler elementary school the victory elementary school robotics club owned the first place division one robotic performance award and champions award first place qualifying the team for regional competition team members of this exceptional team are jading corsino rayne corsino um i'm so sorry if i mispronounced anybody's name annali brasswa and the coaches are joy moler and sophie song and principles chadway ms mohler would you like to say a few words sure sure i'll give a shout out to anjali biswas thank you for having us tonight and inviting us here we just had such a great year and i can't thank these kids and their families enough for all
016the hard work they've done they stepped up every single one of them was new this year so they came out of nowhere and they just worked their hearts off and we've had such great support from denise carroll and our principal and the families and we just had a great great time so thank you [Applause] thank you for being here and congratulations to victory elementary school on your victories before we take a quick picture denise carroll robotics and stem initiative specialists will speak briefly good evening and thank you for recognizing our amazing fll and vex iq elementary robotics teams and their coaches representing prince william county public schools as you can see this evening we have a lot of talent in prince william from the eastern western end and everywhere in between our students and coaches
017represent prince william in the highest of level you asked about the number of awards we had 13 out of 33 fll teams from prince william that went to states and more than half of the elementary vex iq came from prince william so we're just talking the littles and the two elementary school teams that won at state both brought home trophies from the world championship so i just want to thank you for recognizing our 1819 students with 38 female this year and our 157 coaches 68 mentors and all together we make the picture of prince william county schools robotics we just look forward to another successful year even better than this year so thank you very much we're proud of you guys thank you miss co i love hearing about all the successes of these wonderful
018students thank you robotics students and coaches please come up front for a picture you may leave after the picture get one stand up ready three and one more big smile one two three congratulations [Applause] cool wow thank you while we wait for the next group of students i want to mention that award-winning teams from marshall and ashland elementary schools will be recognized june 15th due to a scheduling conflict tonight we'll wait for the next group if thank you okay guys we're ready to slide this way a little bit so we get everybody in another few to get on in here thank you for coming into the you scratched him morning we're getting there y'all want to push those chairs i don't think now we would like to recognize our special olympics unified sports physical education
019program dedicated to promotion promoting social inclusion through shared sports training and competition experiences unified sports joins people with and without special needs on the same team it was inspired by a simple principle training together and playing together a quick path to friendship and understanding pwcs offers unified sports at 11 high schools the program is made up of 50 percent student athletes in the general education population and 50 student athletes for special needs competitions are held in basketball track and field kickball boss bocce so sorry and cheerleading as a representative from the brent's film matches cereal district i would like to recognize our unified sports teams in that district highlights from the brunsville high school unified sports program include adding games against several fauquier county schools and traveling to potomac high school and unity lead for
020the first time the team visited the miracle field at hellwig park as a team played in an inclusive softball event here tonight representing brunsville include tess smith kickball kaden norton basketball and please pardon me if i mispronounced anybody's names sage i'm garaz johnson track and field holly trisha teacher and coach principal is kat mites congratulations now sage will say a few words hi everyone we're tess sage and kade and we are all part of the unified program this class has become so much more than a simple class period to us being able to develop relationships and genuine friendships with the kids around us has been the highlight of our school year unified has made such a difference in our lives and changed how we interact with those around us unified has taught us how to
021be more compassionate patient and kind we have not only been able to help those around us but we feel like the kids that we work with also help us they brighten our days and make unified a class that we can look forward to every minute in that class feels important and significant and we can say with surety that it is the thing we will miss most when we leave brunsville thank you bransford high school patriot high school participates in basketball track and field athlete kyle mcdaniel is here tonight along with coaches patricia reed and kathleen kitchen principal is dr michael bishop patricia wheat will say a few words ready unified sports is an opportunity for students typical and atypical to come together as one we at patriot began in 2016 with unified basketball and added
022track and field the following year we introduced and hosted four all-county high school basketball tournaments from 2017 to 2020. we look forward to continuing our program so students with different abilities get their deserved moment to shine [Applause] all right thank you patriot high school unity read high school participates in unified sports and basketball and cheerleading students here include megan cummings kendy uwati yeah and again i'm really really really sorry head coaches are darren snoots and stephanie nash principal is dr richard nichols the students will say a few words i'm not a student but i'm going to say a few words unified basketball and cheerleading has created a positive culture to our school it's not just about the game i want to give out a few shout outs to some of how our whole school brings
023unified together our cosmetology students actually get our cheerleaders all dolled up and get their hair done right before each game our student council also makes the banners for the kids to run out for all teams and this the event the event is also the most populated event there is out of all the sports the whole before covet the whole school comes down for these games and so it just puts a positive culture into our school and sometimes we need those times and we appreciate it and we appreciate you all and we appreciate the parents the parents that come out during the day to see their children participate in these events and for our senior nights when they have our senior day games and we just want to thank also the parents who also come out
024to support us as well thank you [Applause] thank you unity read our new high school greensville high school kicked off its opening with unified sports basketball team playing two games against potomac and patriot high schools for hosting a district tournament student kaden pals is here tonight principal neil beach will provide a few remarks good evening i want to say thank you very much for supporting and recognizing these unified sports programs have been a prominent and positive feature of our school this year caden's here to say a few words also hello i thank you for inviting me thank you to inviting me for the main ufc basketball team was a great experience getting to you know make friends getting to be a part of something really good game be used to a new place getting everybody
025used to it so i know it's okay [Applause] thank you congratulations to these outstanding student athletes it is my pleasure to introduce miss williams ms zagapoor who recognized the schools and the closed messages they ordered thank you madam vice chair unfortunately ms saga park excuse me ms sagaphore couldn't be here this evening it is my pleasure to recognize the unified sports athletes at colgan and hilton high schools colgan high school offers the program in basketball track and field and kickball athletes here tonight from colgan high school include samantha martin and julian coke let's see i might mess this up cocaine lee on ghee did i get close all right um coaches include dr parrish kristen mesnick teachers are nadine bedju and stacy bonnet and the principal of course is dr tim healey hilton high school
026offers unified sports and basketball student austin fletcher is here tonight along with kristin mccurt and lee holland who are here on behalf of coach joe campena and the principal is david cassidy in the interest of time the colgan and high school programs have opted not to provide marks but would like to thank the school board for this recognition thank you so much for coming out [Applause] congratulations billy jesse ocarina magisterial district will recognize the woodbridge high school program woodbridge high school offers unified sports programs and basketball and track representative students include ism basketball lara ash track jaden ozy basketball their coach is alan mulligan and the principal is the educated nominee for principal of the year is heather have me i couldn't help that [Applause] all right well thank you guys for having us i've
027never been at one of these things so this is kind of cool to talk in front of everybody um but the the real point of unified is you know coming together and my favorite part is seeing the smile on their faces after you know a basketball game a track meet what have you and that's just the best part about it i think the world as a whole can take a lesson from the unified program thank you guys thank you um again miss williams it is my pleasure to do miss williams for diane ralston again miss ralston couldn't be with us but i am honored to recognize the garfield high school unified sports program which offers basketball and track and field the representative students include marvin gonzalez kevin frimpong who played basketball and participate in track
028and field their coaches are ginger scott and candace ray principal matt matheson mrs scott will say a few words kevin couldn't be here with us today but we have marvin here and i just wanted to say that the time that i got to be here with the kids it was a great time and to see all their smiles in the gym on the track and field it was great so i just want to thank all the parents and the teachers that were able to help us and get through these events because it was a great time for all of us thank you thank you it's my pleasure to introduce justin welch from the potomac manchester district uh thank you um sorry i'm a little emotional because i am a special needs dad and it is
029so great to see as mr mulligan said something that the entire world could use right now forest park high school has been participating in the unified sports for about six years and includes as italian americans would say bocce track and field basketball kickball and cheerleading in 2019 forest park was recognized as an official special olympics unified champion school and as the number one unified sports program in the commonwealth of virginia by espn students and coaches here tonight include reagan bussinger cheerleading track and field jesse thompson track field kickball james deboer basketball kyle roth basketball valerie ibanez des wadfano general education student in class and sports kelly mccann the amazing kelly mccann coach and teacher at another one ashley tayan amazing coach of course mr martinez who's up for principal of the year uh coach mccann
030uh would like to say and provide a few brief remarks thank you um i just always like to say that justin often comes to all of our track and field events and most of our basketball events and anything that he can come dr mcdade and dr hubenner got to come this year but our biggest supporters has been our administration within our school being able to do this we've held the unified track and field meet all the years we've had it i don't know how many it is it's a lot minus covid but this year was extra special coming back from covit it was a ton of fun and miss reagan what is your favorite favorite part of unified um running and cheering and having fun with friends yes and at our school they also get
031to do unified basketball unified music unified art and unified dance this year so it's been a big thing thank you i have to interject uh and recognize the support from the from the board as well as the superintendent's office where miss mccann is one of the few teachers out there that has a cdl so she is able to get our teams to and to and fro with a special bus so we can get our kids there so many big yeah she said she was had a new bus with all the bells and whistles but i it goes to show the commitment that the teachers have because you know with the shortage we have with drivers and trying to make it happen especially after school schools that have flex periods we take advantage of that time
032and the biggest thing is having the the general population come to the stands and support the kids when they're out there playing basketball during what we call our flex periods so that is something that really motivates them and makes them feel wanted so i gave kudos to any of the teachers or coaches who have taken that extra step to support this program even even more thank you thank you principal martinez potomac high school offers unified sports and basketball track field and kickball the coaches of the potomac high school are and our students are here as well but i want to mention that our coaches shared that the students love the opportunities for friendship and competition that come with being a member of our unified sports program students from potomac high school include cameron hughes uh
033cameron gascue coach is curfew coaches curfew spite principal is brandon bowles in the interest of time a potomac representative will not speak but the team is thankful for the recognition thank you thank you it is now my pleasure to introduce mrs jennifer wall from the gainesville manchester district thank you mrs jackson battlefield high school offers unified sports in basketball track kickball and bocce so here tonight is athlete joshua nisbet and coach krista link principal is ryan ferreira and in the interest of time the team has chosen not to speak but thanks to school board for the recognition and i want to just say a couple words because i think unified sports represents what is best about prince william county schools it brings kids together and i'm so proud of all of you who are involved
034in these programs i know it's not easy logistics can be difficult but what an inspiration you all are in bringing kids together and developing in them the capacity to love and be friends with those who are different from the from themselves and understand that we're so we have so much more in common that we have yeah that is different and um those lessons are life lessons that kids and and and leaders and teachers take with them into other aspects of their life as they grow and as they develop so i just want to say like i think this program is just fantastic i didn't know about it until very recently not i mean within about five years and i think it's wonderful so thank you for all that you do and battlefield go ahead thank
035you battlefield thank you all again for being here tonight and congratulations to our students and coaches who participate in this wonderful inclusionary program thank you dr tanya mcdade will now say a few closing remarks before we take our last photo of the evening thank you so much to the entire school board for recognizing all of our outstanding students and their coaches i also want to thank all of our teachers who support the programs our parents for support supporting the program as well as our principals all of our principals who were named and some who are present here tonight for creating the conditions for these programs to thrive in the school and bringing the opportunity to each of your individual schools thank you all for providing this for all of our students congratulations to our award-winning
036elementary school robotics teams who participated both in person and virtually and were honored here tonight you really represented pwc as well both in your individual schools as well as the entire school division and so we're really proud of all of your accomplishments and i also truly appreciate the inclusionary spirit demonstrated through the unified sports program i sincerely appreciate all the time and effort that goes into the program all of the support from our school staff members who are invested in this crucial program and i had the opportunity to come out and observe and be a part of the festivities this year and it was just phenomenal and the spirit on the field watching the students compete it was fantastic so congratulations to each and every one of you we are so incredibly proud of all
037that you are accomplishing so thank you so much miss jackson yes you do make us very proud at this time i'd like to bring our unified sports groups now up to take a photo with the school board when we're finished maybe thank you athletes and coaches it's all right it's about the kids good picture with the kids it's really nice i do exactly sorry do another ready one two three and the last one good smiles on this one three got it congratulations frank frank right yeah you made it i read your thing for you hoping you would get here all right thank you all right moving to closed session action items 8.01 a motion is an order madam chair i moved that the prince william county school board approved the appointments and releases of specific
038employees as presented in closed session do you have a second miss jesse any discussion please vote circulation the vote is six yes two absent latif and ralston motion passed yes um a motion is an order for the renewal of an annual retainer agreement for legal services provided by james council escrow madam vice chair mr williams i move that the princeton county school board approved the annual annual retainer agreement for the fiscal year 2022-23 for the legislative lobbying and legal services provided by james counsel esquire do you have a second madam chair one second miss sagar for any discussion please vote the vote is six yes two absent latifah and ralston motion passed moving on to 18.01 grievance appeal for employee t22-39 a motion is in order madam chair i move that the prince william county
039school board approved the recommendation of the hearing officer and dismiss employees 7 22-39 from his employment with prince william county public schools and further that the chairman at large is authorized to sign the decision letter prepared by the division council reflecting the grounds for the school board's decision madam chair i wanted to make a correction that was employee number t22-39 okay um is there a second vice chair miss williams second any discussion please vote the vote is six yes two absent latif ralston motion passed i would like to call this meeting of the prince william county school board to order we will start with the pledge of allegiance of the united states of america and to the republic for which it stands one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice for all moving on
040to the approval of the public meeting agenda a motion is in order madam vice chair mr williams i move that the prince william county school board approved the public meeting agenda as recommended do we have a second adam's chair is that before i second any discussion please vote the vote is six yes to absent latif ralston motion passed moving on to the adoption of the consent agenda emotion is in order madam vice chair mrs williams i'm moved at the prince william county school board approve the public meeting consent agenda as recommended any second madam vice chair mr second madam chair i'd like to pull two items off for discussion okay any discussion okay i'm mrs jesse you can start yeah no we're just madam chair instead of pulling the items off they typically yes we're
041going to discuss it yes discussion yeah you can go ahead and we're going to have a discussion now uh generally uh we do not this consent agenda consists of several items but there are two items on the consent agenda that i would personally like to discuss this evening the item is 13.03 dumfries slave cemetery and item 130.04 fannie fitzgerald elementary the courageous four i want to say that this is a night for african americans these items on this agenda are very important to many of us especially in african-american community uh the dunford slave community slave cemeteries at dumfries elementary and others will may speak on us a little bit later but i would like to personally recognize two ladies who have worked on the cemetery for many many years and those ladies are norma field
042and joanne bonneries and they're in the audience tonight please stand they have been so diligent in their work and this memorial being more of the marker is very important the other item is fannie fitzgerald uh the courageous four and the historical marker and you're gonna have to bear with me a little bit because it's very personal and it's very important many of you think that i was a person that named fannie fitzgerald's school but it was denise mcphail who brought the idea to me and we together we named that school but in naming the school we divided up our responsibilities and i was supposed to get the history and denise was going to do the marketing and i had the pleasure of talking to miss fanny fitzgerald and i had no idea what her history
043was first of all when i called her and said fanny i want to talk to you about your role in desegregating the schools in prince william county and she screamed literally for like two or three minutes and she said it's been 40 years i thought nobody cared so i was instrumental in naming that school miss fanny fitzgerald passed away and during that period of illness she lost her memory and many of us would take her to lunch and i was the designated person to take advantage of lunch one day and fannie i had to take her back to the nursing home and they said she's not going to want to get out of the car lily she's going to want to come back and want you to take her to her house so i took
044fannie to the nursing home she got out of the car and although i worked with her for many years on i mean for months on this naming and she knew me and her family knew me she came back and she said roll down she said roll down the woman i did and she said did you know that they named the school after me fannie lost a lot of things but she did not lose that because it meant so very very much to her so when we there was a lot of credit given to fanny fischer there were four women who desegregated prince william county schools they were fannie fanny fitzgerald miss mary porter mrs ella brown and miss maxine coleman and when we were in the briefing and we were talking about this memorial i
045mean this this marker that was going to be at fanny fitzgerald miss laurie williams reminded us that there were four women and she said what about mary porter and i stopped and i thought what about mary porter that we have forgotten not forgotten but we've not given as much i think time and discussion of mary porter and i'm going to let her talk later about that but i followed up on that and i called gwen washington and gwen washington is the daughter of mary porter you know mary porter has a school named after her and so does fanny fitzgerald and she said something that i had not anticipated she said i don't want a memorial at my mother's school i want a memorial for all four of these women because it is a historic time
046and if we're going to put historic markers anywhere i'd like for them to be in the schools that these ladies were overnight moved from an all black school to a white school and so i discussed this with dr mcdade i've discussed it with mrs green at the historical society of historical commission and it's not going to be done right away but she is considering it so this is the idea down the road i want to make sure that i put this on the agenda for discussion not for discussion just to bring it to everyone's attention that mrs porter was moved from washington reed to dumfries and we would like for you to consider putting some type of marker or something at dumfries elementary fanny fitzgerald was moved from antioch macrae which was back off thoroughfare
047road with an all black school to fred lynn zella brown was moved from loch lom from to loch lomond and she is still alive and by the way the board doesn't want to need to worry about her wanted school named after her she's still alive and she said i absolutely do not want anything named after me but we would like to look at a marker for her down the road and zella brown and maxine coleman was moved to westgate and so i want to make this this night to remind the staff that our history of african american history is important on the marker that will be at fanny fitzgerald it talks about the first the first wave of these teachers but i wanted it can't it's not an it's not a correction but i wanted
048the world to know that there were students who indeed segregated prince william county school and that student was george russell she went to garfield before these ladies and her brother and sister went to aquapon and fred lynn and with that i just want the audience to celebrate these black women for what they did for prince william county thank you mrs jesse um mrs bones miss williams thank you madam vice chair um i just want to ask you echo excuse me what with ms jesse was saying and thank the historic prince william county historical commission for bringing this to the school division's attention and for asking us to provide the permission to put these historical markers on our school property i think it is well deserved and i appreciate the effort of the county in helping
049us recognize our school division history with that next up i just want to take distinct pride and pleasure in announcing prince william county schools second resolution to celebrate lgbtq plus pride month last year during covet we weren't able to do that so if you'll bear with me for just one moment um i would also like to thank my fellow school board members for supporting this as well as um the casa brumar foundation for helping this be originated on our agenda two years ago the resolution reads as follows whereas prince william county public schools shares in the belief that diversity equity and inclusion are our greatest strengths whereas the national education association has included pride month in its list of commemorative months since 1995 and whereas prince william county's board of supervisors resolved to proclaim june
050as lgbq lgbtq plus pride month in 2020 and 2021 and whereas prince william county public schools has adopted policies on the non-discrimination and harassment in employment and for students to prohibit the discrimination in employment and educational programming services and activities based on on the basis of race color religion national origin sex gender identity sexual orientation pregnancy childbirth or other related conditions including lactation age marital status veteran status disability genetic information or any other bases prohibited by law whereas recognition of lgbt lgbtq plus pride month acknowledges the efforts of this community in the pursuit of equality and justice for all educates the public about illegal discriminatory practices facing the lbgtq plus community and celebrates their many accomplishments and contribution and whereas our community is better because of the diversity of our population and whereas the prince
051william county schools launching thriving future strategic plan identifies inclusivity as a core value so that we may welcome all students staff and community and celebrate our diversity as strength and now there be therefore be it resolved that the prince william county school board and the superintendent recognized june 2022 to be lgbtq pride month and urges our citizens excuse me to join us in celebrating our students and staff regardless of gender identity gender expression or sexual orientation and i just want to say one last thing to wrap it up this is very special item to me when we first adopted this as a school board not only did the students reach out but for the first time many of our staff members felt comfortable being employed in prince william they were pride they were proud to
052be employed employed by franklin county schools and vocalized it and finally felt accepted for who they were in their own skin in their classrooms and i will never stop celebrating pride month and i'm very thankful for this board's acceptance of this resolution thank you [Applause] mr wealth mr wilk thank you um back to some historical stuff but that's historical as well um i wanted to recognize so tonight is the night of history and this process for this item i'm going to speak about actually began almost a year ago when a number of constituents of mine emailed me uh regarding this possibility of naming a library within a middle school after the honorable hildebargh so i'm gonna do the whereas statement and then give a little bit of background context here about this um since this
053is something miss barg is not aware of um this is a surprise to her so this is exciting um so where is hildebarg served as a member of our prince william county board of supervisors from 1987 until 2007 served as a board member of the arc of greater prince william county served as a board member of the cda for the potomac shorts community worked with the developer to obtain proffers for two school sites which have become now potomac shores middle school and covington harper elementary school in the potomac shorts community whereas hildebarg worked with the developer to obtain two baseball fields and a soccer complex in the potomac shores community now named the ali krieger sports complex whereas hildebarg worked with the vre and developer to profit the train station that will be coming to
054the potomac shores community hildebarg was instrumental in obtaining the zoning approval for the potomac shores community itself she served as the chairperson of the prince william county social services board served on the pwc housing board and advocated for and supported the boys and girls clubs of dumfries in collaboration with the building principal mr joe mergo community members the ptso staff members and the sca i am proud to move forward the recommendation that the potomac shores middle school library be named after hildebarg so going back uh the process here and initially when the constituents were emailing me i said you know okay you know we'll do this i'm getting number constituent emails and then there was some pushback uh just in general from uh the division with a focus on community engagement uh some of the
055board members um and so uh it made me rethink things and coming back and thinking about okay well who do i need to talk to in this community about seeing and honoring ms hildebarg because you know it is one thing to just arbitrarily put a name on a library so the beauty of this is initially being a little bit miffed about the whole thing the beauty of this was as as this process developed and unfolded not only was it telling a story of a historical member of our community but it was actually engaging the constituents um you know back on you know i'm picking a couple dates just to give some emphasis on this so back in um february of 22 this past year principal mergo first discussed this idea with his staff so getting
056staff buying is obviously important you know they work in the building so it's critical to see how staff feels about this then in march of uh 22 i presented at a ptso meeting i think there were over 25-ish parents uh who were at the meeting not only did i talk about the strategic plan and the school budget but i wrapped up and talked a little bit about miss barg her accomplishments i learned a lot about miss barg through this process as well through her advocacy and her work you know potomac shores would not be in existence today had it not been for the advocacy of hildebarg and just an educational opportunity here is when we look at development of land for our schools right now we have to buy it so we're paying millions and
057millions and millions of dollars when we're looking for land for like that 14th high school are looking for future elementary schools it's notable that hildebarg got two proffers which basically was the land free for our school division to build two state-of-the-art buildings in in my district which are covington harper uh named after two honorable individuals themselves and then now um potomac shores middle school which the community voted overwhelmingly for for that name now i will mention the highest name name of that vote was hildebarg in third place behind two names of the community itself and so then finally we did a couple times trying to schedule meetings with the student council one time the sponsor came down with kovid so we had to reschedule but we met with the sca and we worked collectively with
058uh the sponsor with the students and and received and solicited student feedback which was great to hear even you know like you think about it middle school kids but there was some great feedback and they appreciated the educational opportunity of what this uh bestowed on them in some regard so in conclusion i'm excited about this because it does in my opinion reflect uh feedback from the various uh the groups the i guess we'll say interest groups or the constituents not only the adults the teachers within the building having sign off from principal mergo himself who wrote a letter in support of this which is a huge thing um and then also getting sign off from the students um you know i would remiss be remiss if i didn't mention supervisor andre bailey who was influential
059in speaking with some of the board members about the importance of hildebarg who has appointed he'll debart the committees over uh this past couple of years as well i do want to thank miss lucille fry a constituent in the district who did not give up and kept on hammering this and said we need to move forward we need to do this and that advocacy is very appreciated along with the many other people's people excuse me um who supported this including former school board member miss betty covington and such so again i i'm excited about this i'm happy we will be dedicating the library within potomac shores middle school to miss hildebarg i just wanted to add that hilda barge has been around forever she and betty covington who was my mentor on this board were
060buddies and they would go on trips together and she was not from my district but she came to my school and she is just one of those people that just loves her work and loves this community and so miss lucille what was her last name again she called me too and she was adamant about this and it went on and on and so i'm proud to be one of the people to say to justin that i supported this uh naming of this this library and her honor thank you any further discussion if not please vote the vote is five yes two absent latif in ralston one not president vote wall motion passed great thank you [Applause] moving on to citizen comment time those citizens who have signed up in advance of the clerk may address
061the school board this evening when they are called to the podium the citizen comment period for regular school board meetings is limited to one hour with the first half hour reserved for comments on agenda items only and the second half hour for comments on agenda items or other topics germane to the operations and policies of prince warm county schools citizens signed up to speak on agenda items must speak to the agenda item they have identified or they will be asked to step down we have nine speakers on agenda items and ten on non-agenda items speakers will have three minutes to speak please use proper decorum and manners while at the podium or you will be asked to step aside we ask that the audience please be respectful of each speaker and refrain from any clapping
062cheering or jeering to avoid disruption of the meeting if you do not the board will recess and i will ask if the room will be cleared to restore a public order when i call your name please come up to the podium and state your name and address for the record i will now call the first five speakers to the front jennifer mccaskey william deutsch evelyn brumar ken narr carol fox all right good evening vice chairwoman jackson dr mcdade and school board members my name is jennifer rakoski and i reside in the akkaquan district i'm speaking tonight in support of the lgbtq plus pride month proclamation i serve on the virginia education association lgbtq plus ad hoc committee as well as a regional director for the nea lgbtq plus caucus serving with these groups working with
063other organizations i'm very aware of the attacks on lgbtqp plus people especially those in education whether they are students or staff it's not just in states like florida with the don't say gay bill in hanover county virginia they hired an anti-lgbtq plus firm to write its transgender policy in orange county virginia there is a proposal that would require schools to disclose a student's self-identification to their parents without the student's consent what if the home environment isn't safe sometimes school is the only safe place for students i'm grateful that pwcs listen to staff and students regarding regulations 738-5 treatment of transgender and gender non-conforming students by revising the original language that had the same issue orange county is facing with some local school divisions still failing to pass the required no discrimination policies i'm glad pwcs
064has this in place however i feel a training needs to come down to all staff members so they know how to support their students and colleagues i'd also like pwcs to look at adding gender-neutral bathrooms in all schools sending schools to the nurse's bathroom may be convenient however that could imply the student is sick and they are not sick i'd like to encourage students to look into starting gsa clubs in their schools from the gsa network gsas are student-run clubs that bring together lgbtq plus and straight students to support each other provide a safe place to socialize and create a platform to fight for racial gender lgbtq and economic justice know that there's interest but not sure where to start reach out to an organization like casa brumar for help on starting a club like
065this at your school in conclusion i'm sorry to that our school board members and klc staff have been on the receiving end of some hateful and hurtful comments thank you for staying strong and staying vigilant in your support of our underrepresented minority thank you next we have william deutsch thank you madam chair members of the board i come before you right now as this school division school divisions across the county grapple with the largest deficit in learning that's occurred across the country just on may 25th the new york times is talking about the impact that the kovid shutdowns had on students emotional and social well-being a harvard recently issued a study talking about the impact that school shutdowns had on learning loss as we review the school division's own data here we see that prince
066william county had the largest widening of the achievement gap of any school division in northern virginia so while we talk about equity while we talk about celebrating diversity the actions of the prince william county school board hurt the most vulnerable those that we celebrate when we celebrate diversity and right now prince william county schools has to grapple with how do we change that trajectory how do we deal with the consequences of this board's actions and work on the learning laws that happened before and right now the school division is considering a proposal that will continue moving in the wrong direction namely approving collective bargaining with the pwa here in prince william county because we saw during 2020 the largest advocate for shutting down schools and denying student academic future while also having no plan for
067what to do with the academic achievement loss was the pwa constantly emails flooded this board accusing board members of not uh caring about people's lives uh intimating that board members would be killing people if we went ahead with having school and it was pwa that pushed the narrative that we must deny students educational futures and that directly led to the academic achievement loss so this board is serious about the academic achievement that has happened in this county continuing to give a platform to the largest advocate for academic achievement loss in this county is the wrong move secondly this proposal for collective bargaining is going to have incredible uh financial costs and those need to be spelled out i read through the school divisions attorney's uh presentation you're about to receive and there's a slide that
068details all the costs that are associated but somebody needs to go through with finance and actually spell those out into a number and make sure this board understands the costs but if this school board wants to reverse course on what they did to widen the achievement gap in this county don't move forward with collective bargaining thank you mr good evening school board thank you for allowing me to speak to you all my name is evelyn brumar first let me let you know that i am a prisma county human rights commissioner and a few weeks ago we passed a resolution to declare affirm and recognize the month of june of 2022 as lesbian gay bisexual transgender queer or questioning and more pride month also the commonwealth of virginia recognizes lgbtq plus individuals as a protected class
069through the virginia values act of and is our job as princeton county human rights commissioners to help enforce those protections whenever a complaint has been made for us to investigate but what brings me here is also that i sit on the board the newly created board by the governor by the previous governor the lgbtq advisory board it was created under northam and i currently serve yankin governor juncken will be attending next week a pride proclamation celebration at the rotunda in the capital so we have a lot of support for the community from the commonwealth to this local level here but i'm here to represent casa brumar foundation and the work that we do here in princeton county and nova and throughout the whole commonwealth i support this proclamation and i support you all for protecting
070lgbtqia plus students teachers staff and faculty because we know that when we are inclusive we make a better place for our children and for our people that work for us and it makes it a little bit better when the world seems to be crumbling down around us so casa bremer foundation also participates in cit training for first responders law enforcement and other government agencies we understand that crisis intervention when for the least among us is very important to make sure that their safety and our safety is kept intact we also have an education program that runs throughout the whole commonwealth where we help lgbtqia plus students who drop out of high school because of bullying or intimidation or assault and want to finish their high school education get a diploma or go to get a
071ged we help them do that and if they want to do more than that we help them go through a certificate program and go to a trade school this is offered through up for all the kids who identify as lgbtqia who are 18 to 25 and want to continue their education through the commonwealth but let me go on and just say first i have a lot of love for you all thank you for working me a few years ago to get this passed here when i moved here i didn't think this was going to happen when i moved here i was a target of bullying i was intimidated i was harassed i had people show up at my house with guns and i had people chase me out of meetings and it makes me happy
072that i feel safer now coming out in public and discussing this with you all thank you thank you um ken nar ken nar the gainesville district a couple weeks ago i ran into miss jesse at a function and we had a delightful conversation about teacher pay we agreed teachers don't do what they do for pay and that good teachers will do their very best without a massive pay raise previously i've pointed out the extra demands teaching the most diverse student population in the commonwealth and the 10th most diverse county place is on places on our teachers our student demographics also increase the demands on our school's professional development program however tonight i want to come from a different angle what is the prevailing wage for a new teacher in prince william county and actually it
073applies to any resident that we think deserves to own a home first line number four hundred thousand dollar house with a 10 percent down payment and 3.6 interest is 2 318 dollars a month utilities food and entertainment roughly one thousand six hundred and twenty five dollars a month transportation and insurance five hundred dollars a month school loans and professional development for their master's degree 125 a month savings retirement and professional affiliations 520 dollars a month these expenditures equal five thousand eighty eight dollars a month or sixty one thousand fifty six dollars a year this is seven thousand five hundred dollars more than the gross income of a new teacher in this school system total taxes and social security payments two thousand thirty two dollars a month or twenty four thousand three hundred eighty four dollars
074a year therefore the estimated prevailing wage for anyone starting a job in prince william county is seven thousand two hundred and twenty dollars a month or eighty five thousand four hundred and forty dollars a year prince william county teachers have to wait 20 years to make 85 605 dollars according to the fy 23 pay scale if you think these numbers are high red fan average average value of a home in gainesville is six thousand six hundred and seventy five thousand dollars zillow shows that same average at six hundred and ninety one thousand in 2020 the bottom of the last five years in gainesville the home value was 425 dollars so my estimate of a four hundred thousand dollar townhouse is not very high and the estimate on transportation at 500 a month is not very
075high the median gainesville income is 82 627. 61 percent of gainesville's population is between the ages of 25 and 64 the same as our teachers if we want to compete with our six neighboring school systems who are in the top ten wealthiest counties of the country we must do better if we want to recruit retain and retire the best teachers we must do better if we want to enter into collective bargaining with earnest we must do better the only way to come close to this level of pay for our teachers and staff is to significantly increase the county's commercial tax base above the industry target of 35 percent thank you for your time thank you carol fox good evening carol fox gainesville tonight i want to talk to you about teachers unions and collective bargainings
076and they're really good for teachers but they're bad for students and parents the early focus on teachers unions and collective bargaining was in raising teachers pay benefits working conditions and creating tenure for the teachers this was good for the teacher in the 1960s 70s and 80s teachers unions blossomed and all of the pay for all the teachers went up how did it affect students well the s.a.t scores dropped the third grade reading level which is the benchmark for student success in school dropped graduation dropped so does collective bargaining really affect and help school schools well it helps the teacher but it doesn't help the students or the parents terry moore professor at stanford university has found that collective bargaining does not ensure any success for students in schools as a matter of fact it can
077create obstacles for student success the nea spends half of their millions of dollars on collective bargaining and the rest of it it spends on election politics from the vea the virginia education association's website their goal is to have greater school funding better pay for the teachers and elect pro-republic education candidates locally and statewide this is electioneering engineering where is the better pay working conditions and electioneering and the student involved in this they're not where is the parent who fit foots all of these bills who built this room who built all the schools who pays the salaries of you who pays the salaries of the teachers are sitting behind me they have no seat at the table their seat at the table is you the elected officials if you give collective bargaining to the teachers the
078seat at the table for the parents goes away the seat of the table for the students goes away you become a tool of the unions and of because they own you from the money that they put into your reelection or your election to the school board so remember that all of these items as far as unions and money that's put into you is electioneering and you're responsible to the parents you're responsible to the students so that is why i say collective bargaining is not a thing for prince william county and should not be considered by the school board thank you very much thank you the next speakers are able youngblood i met fletcher randy pravenzano and christian way they can please come forward and the first speaker we have is april youngblood hello and good
079evening my name is april yambla and my address is on file i'm here tonight to address you all regarding collective bargaining as you know pwe got 3514 signatures in favor of collective bargaining which means that at least half of your workforce did not sign a petition for it have you considered that the teachers union in our county is optional for your employees and by approving collective bargaining you would be forcing at least half of your workforce into a union situation in 1977 virginia banned collective bargaining are you familiar with article 3 of the labor code of virginia which states no employer shall require any person as a condition of employment to pay any dues of any kind to any labor union so what happens to your workforce who doesn't sign who didn't sign the petition
080pwea is using the slogan a seat at the table the thing is they already have a seat at the table they just won't sit down have you considered what collective bargaining will do to your power and influence as a school board the school board is comprised of elected officials in theory you are supposed to represent your constituents this is supposed to work like a democracy where we collectively have a voice on all these issues we vote for you you represent us we all work together what happens to this democratic process when the teachers union has the biggest seat at the table in the fall of 2021 pwe pushed the school board very hard to not reopen the schools they were very misguided and they influenced all of you and they helped you create and implement
081some very bad policies that hurt our children according to your new strategic plan 72.4 percent of the students in our county are considered a minority did you catch the recent harvard study that shows racial and economic achievement gaps widened during the covet 19 virtual learning lockdowns which were supported by pwea and all the other unions minority children aren't the only ones suffering from these bad policies have you seen the u.s surgeon general's advisory on the youth mental health crisis that advisory states the pandemic added to the pre-existing challenges the america's youth has faced i'm running out of time but i just implore you take a look at the research that's available to you google it bigger unions are not good for education and they're not good for the students the petition for collective bargaining is
082not representative of your workforce it doesn't support the vision the mission and vision laid out in the strategic plan and it doesn't address a problem because the problem isn't a seat at a table that problem doesn't exist i implore you vote no thank you mr emmett fletcher good evening madam chair board members and dr mcdade well i'm here to talk about some good news the um the four courageous women in prince william county and also um the donfries cemetery uh miss norman fields and mrs barnaries was very inspirational inspirational in recognizing there was a need to clean the cemetery for years the cemetery had been elected and these brave two women they they organized the community and they got the fraternities um and the naacp behind them to make sure that this happened and today
083there are divine nine which is made out made up of african-americans fraternities and sororities and i'm proud to say omega sci-fi leads the way as far as the we also have community leaders that come out mr harry wiggins john stanback tony fields all these people show up all during the year and we keep we keep the cemetery clean and we want to thank the school board for your support also mrs bailey has been very instrumental in with the markers for the slate the slave cemetery so we do have some good news tonight it's not all about collective bargain i think you guys are doing a tremendous job we have a ways to go but together we can achieve our goal so again thank you for the support with the dunford slave cemetery and mrs brown
084as mrs jesse indicated she didn't want a school named after her she's 84 years old and she's still very young so thank you so much for your time and your support have a good evening thank you mr fletcher next we have brandi privenzano good evening my name is brandi provenzano and my address is on file last week the tragedy in texas broke our nation's heart it led us to hug our children a little tighter read to them a little longer peek in on them for one last look and say a prayer of both sorrow and gratitude the next morning when we sent them off to school and somehow sol scores and learning loss didn't seem quite so important to us anymore while everyone has their ideas about school reform gun control mental health issues and
085school safety i think we can all agree on one thing there is nothing absolutely nothing more precious or more important than our children and who spends so many hours with them each day we do there wasn't someone from central office or a curriculum developer or a former school board member in the room with those children it was their teachers those teachers could have told you what their students had for dinner the night before or which students had a pet at home or which ones wanted one those teachers could have told you about nana's and pop pops and big brothers that cuss a lot they could have told you so many things but they can't they can't tell when there are no substitutes that they have to combine classes and students don't get instruction they can't
086tell you that special education students aren't getting service minutes because a teacher quit mid-year last year and hasn't been replaced they can't tell you any of this they never could educators know staff members know bus drivers coaches secretaries food service workers nurses social workers psychologists principals assistant principals they know but it wouldn't make sense to ask them those that know what it it wouldn't make sense to listen to them it would be like asking parents and listening to them tonight you're going to hear scare tactics about the costs associated with collective bargaining these tactics are crafted to turn parents against staff members which is exactly what is happening but these staff members are asking for a voice to advocate for your children parents i leave you with one question tonight who would you want in
087that room with your child a lawyer a former school board member or their teacher who do you trust thank you question where good evening my name is christine ware and my address is on file good evening everyone i'm here tonight to speak in favor of collective bargaining for prince william county teachers and staff i'd like you to stop a minute though and imagine a teacher or maybe a teacher your child had in the past possibly they inspired your passion for a topic or found a way to explain a challenging concept in a way to make it accessible to you collective bargaining is a way to give teachers like that a role in the decisions that impact them and the students they serve and will be an aide in recruiting and retaining quality teachers for our
088county collective bargaining is not a new idea teachers in many other states already have it closer to home and prince william police and fire departments are making progress toward a collective bargaining ordinance and other school districts in virginia including our neighbors in arlington have done the same now it's been a very difficult year for all of us and we've definitely felt that in education also on the national level we see a shortage of employees and that shortage has especially hit education collective bargaining can help attract and retain the teachers that we need at my school or within my network of educator friends i see the impact of these last few years teachers who are close to retirement deciding maybe they're a little closer teachers who are new deciding to take a different path or even
089the veteran teachers you know the backbone of the school the ones that build the programs and train the new teachers what really concerns me is when i see those teachers in tears or questioning um you know what their life choices and one thing that has been a source of hope this year is the idea of collective bargaining the thought that coming out on the other side of all of this we're going to have more of a voice in what happens next so think back to that teacher what if instead of being in your life they had retired or moved to a different district or left education all together before you crossed paths how would your educational experience be different i know for me without ms r my third grade teacher my math knowledge might have
090stalled out at the forest times tables collective bargaining is a way to recruit and retain quality staff and use their expertise and input to improve student learning i encourage the board to take the next steps toward collective bargaining for prince william county teachers and staff thank you thank you we're going to move on to non-agenda items please continue to use popular diploma and manners at the podium i'm going to call the first five names kimberly stewart priscilla hall tammy fick stephanie evers emily cherry first we have kimberly stewart thank you my name is kimberly stewart and my address is on file today as i entered this building to come speak to you as a concerned citizen parent and educator i was greeted at the front door by a very visible police vehicle outside several security
091guards a metal detector a search of my bag and multiple more armed police officers and guards as i came in the room to take a seat as i stand here to speak to you now i can see at least two security guards flanked on either side of me and i know there's one at the back of the room behind me how can this board justify all this security to protect the entire i'm sorry how can this board justify this security but not provide the security at our schools our elementary schools have absolutely no full-time security guard on duty throughout the school day and they have no permanent individual student resource officer and we do not have any program consistent throughout the county that allows retired veterans or officers to support our schools through volunteer positions
092we can afford laptops for every single student in this county but have we thought about affording a bulletproof backpack insert for all of our children this board can find hundreds of thousands of dollars for equity and inclusion but can't provide the proper investments to give all of our children and staff a safer and more secure learning environment our teachers are asked to not only educate our children advise them mentor nurse and protect them but by law we require to ensure that they are fully trained prepared and practiced in the event of an active shooter why do we continue to rely on our educators and staff who should be focused on providing a world-class education to also be asked to provide increased safety and security for our children as trained emergency active shooter responders our elementary
093schools have 500 plus students each day at each school no full-time armed security guard our middle schools welcome over 1500 each daily and our high schools host over 2500 daily and minimal student to security guard and sro ratio this is not an effective strategy to deter the types of threats that prevent risk harm and god forbid death to our students and staff i will reserve the remainder of my time to not only pay tribute to those incredible beautiful children and the teachers whose lives were lost but to allow you as a school board members to quietly reflect on your own security as you sit here tonight compared to the lack of security you invest in our children and our staff you are protected by guns you are protected by guards you are protected by police
094it is time to afford those protections to our children i will remain the last 10 seconds in silence thank you [Applause] no thank you priscilla hall priscilla hall okay tammy fick good evening school board members and dr mcdade my name is tammy fick my address is on file thank you for the opportunity to speak with you this evening as i begin i want you to imagine for a moment that it's morning and you're ready to go to work as usual you have important things to do but alas your ride is running late so you end up being late for work now imagine you've had a long hard day at work you're exhausted and you just want to go home but again your ride is late and you have to stay at work 30 to 45
095minutes longer waiting with co-workers for your ride home doesn't sound very pleasant does it this is the life of our students especially at the elementary school level listen to the string of emails that i received one morning about buses may 6 704 am bus 643 has been substituted with bus 796 for the morning route 753 bus 796 has been substituted with bus 529 for the morning route bus 529 has been substituted with bus 336 for the morning route 8 37 a.m bus 336 has now been substituted with bus 624 for the morning route this is the morning my students arrived to school two hours late they missed two hours of instruction right before sol time one bus driver had this to say this driver shortage is getting two to many drivers including me we have
096so many call outs and people off with not enough drivers we had a driver yesterday that i know of driving six routes in the afternoon we usually have three this job is so stressful the drivers are mentally drained this year dispatch is doing the best they can but guys it's bad to make it worse they don't get bonuses or anything extra on their review it doesn't matter how many extra routes they help and volunteer to do their evaluations still say meeting standards what what incentive do they have to keep working their butts off now the students think of the kindergartners our babies six years old having a long day at school they just want to go home see their family have an after-school snack and play but driver shortages mean sometimes these babies don't get
097home in time for dinner and the teachers oh wait that's right staff members get paid to stay late for buses the other day we had not one not two but four buses that were late that was a hundred and twenty students waiting for their buses only two staff members get paid to stay after that's 120 kids for two students these bus drivers deserve a seat at the table also and to be treated with respect and given the pay that they deserve enough is enough let's bring this to a vote again please use papa de coram and man as well at the podium and we ask the audience please be respectful of each speaker and refrain from clapping cheering or during to avoid disruption at the meeting next we have stephanie evers emily cherry um good
098evening dr mcdade and members of the board my name is emily cherry and my address is on file by today every teacher in prince william county has completed a mandatory training course to help us better understand healing center engaged healing healing centered engagement this training is part of pwcs heels a culture of care the training states for healing to take place participants must feel empowered in making decisions for their lives an entire model of the culture of care training is about agency which the training defines as the individual and collective power to act to create and change personal conditions as well as external systems this module tells us that in order to create a culture of care which is fundamental to the strategic plan and vision of prince william county schools it is key that
099we teachers model how to self-advocate through personal agency i'm here today to put my training into practice and advocate for collective bargaining for prince william county school employees without it we have no agency there is no culture of care for students without a culture of care for employees too as teachers this year we desperately need a culture of care hybrid learning canvas data collection covering for other teachers due to short staffing no planning a pandemic school shootings differentiation a mental health care crisis testing learning loss as teachers our load is heavy and every day it seems like it's getting heavier at my school we work in teams of my four-person team only one teacher will be returning to our school next year another is taking up another position in the county and the other half
100of our team is leaving prince william county schools and education all together when i asked a colleague that is leaving the teaching profession why she had decided to leave she said i started teaching to make a difference and i used to love it but now it seems like no matter how hard i work know how many hours i work no matter what i do it's never enough it doesn't make any difference at all there's just so much and there's more every day and there's just no joy anymore what my colleague described is being burnt out teachers are burnt out and retired but healing can happen the pwcs heals culture of care states for healing to take place participants must feel empowered to make decisions for their own lives let us have the empowerment to make
101decisions for our lives and for our workplace give us agency grant us collective bargaining rights thank you miss cherry next we have the remainder of speakers i'm going to call them to the front chris vonderberg abby veracone amy mccarthy margaret fellay richard jesse first we have chris vonderberg you may approach the podium mr thunderbird thank you i feel like sisyphus sometimes hello my name is chris funderberg my address is on file i have two things i want to address tonight first nichol lewis chairwoman of the safe schools advisory committee slandered me last week as a member of that council she was representing pwcs not removing her for office would show that you're not serious about being a good example to students second the meteoric rise of the number of youth identifying as trans is undeniable
102in the us it has increased four times in just a few years in the uk it has increased four thousand percent in a decade why is this worrying it's worrying because the rate of suicide attempts among the trans youth population is twice the rate of the rest of the population some might say this is why we must affirm gender identity choices but that is a self-licking ice cream cone affirming gender identity children let alone added adolescence will set them up to make choices that they can't come back from taking hormones or having gender affirming surgery will cause permanent changes i and many others believe that what we are seeing is rapid onset gender dysphoria rogd it's a form of social contagion like tick tock challenges or everybody wanted the latest pair of era jordans here's
103a quote from psychology today quote litman raises cautions about encouraging young people's desire to transition in all instances from the cases reviewed in her study she concluded that what she terms rapid onset gender dysphoria appears to be a novel condition that emerges from cohort and contagion effects and novel social pressures from this perspective rogd likely exhibits an etiology and epidemiology that is distinct from the classic cases of gender dysphoria documented in the dsm littmann hypothesizes that rogd can be cast as a maladaptive coping mechanism for other underlying mental health issues such as trauma or social mile adjustment but also for other exceptional traits like high iq and giftedness the peer support prestige and identity leveraged by the youth who proudly come out as trans certainly appears to be protective in their circles end quote adolescence
104is a hard time for many teenagers they don't feel comfortable in the skin or they have other mental health issues but see the pedestal that trans kids are put on and try it out they get all the attention and affirmation they were seeking and unable to previously find they become convinced that they are trans by peers and teachers and to be truly happy they must be their authentic self to put it succinctly we are creating trans youth who then go on to get affirmation surgery and take hormones when this doesn't address the underlying mental health issues or they realize that they aren't trans and have destroyed their body they're in an even worse place we can strive to prevent bullying of everybody lgbt or straight without pushing an ideology on children that is going to
105boomerang with devastating consequences we can help the exceedingly rare trans kids without creating a time bomb thank you thank you aubry virgo good evening my name is aubrey veracone and i'm a fourth year teacher in the county and i live in the brunswell school district i am one of the fortunate employees who are able to live and work here in prince william county due to the dual income of my husband and myself we have two children who are not of school age yet i can only imagine the burden brought on so many of my colleagues and their families living outside of the county with long commutes high inflation and the continued struggle with providing our employees a livable wage the stressors that come with this impact their families lives financially and personally i'm not here
106because i want to be here or even that i feel comfortable speaking tonight because i do not i am here because after two months and 14 days after our educators have organized we still wait for your vote on collective bargaining teachers have to sign their contracts by this friday and they still don't know if they have the support from the school board on collective bargaining teachers and staff in this school district are overworked and underpaid but most of all we are tired we are tired not for doing our jobs but for doing our jobs and picking up the pieces from lack of staffing we feel the consequences of our division's inability to fully staff our schools there's a substitute teacher shortage we are still in the middle of a pandemic teachers are quitting before the
107school year is even over this is all coming at a huge cost our students educators and our families are paying the cost it is costing our students their world-class education what is an administrator supposed to do if their middle school english teacher has had enough and leaves before the school year is over before sols even happen who is going to prepare these students the subs in this county are amazing i was a sub in this county for two years i have a college education and a license to teach but i would have no idea what to do if i was asked to sub a middle school english class if i didn't have plans who makes those plans when the teacher has no intention of coming back i'm here to ask you to do your jobs
108we have done ours it's past time you act vote yes to collective bargaining and utilize this tool to help recruit adequate staffing for next year thank you amy mccarthy good evening dr mcnaid members of the school board my name is amy mccarthy and my address is on file in response to the unprecedented times teachers and school staff have taken part in countless trainings to gain the necessary skills to deal with the trauma and setbacks that families excuse me schools and communities have experienced these past two years ask anyone of my staff i'm a huge fan of trainings and i'm serious when i say that i've taken everyone i've become an sel coach at my school i've thoroughly enjoyed the trainings presented through through that process and in the recent sel trainings we have focused on
109mental health teacher burnout and staff well-being i also attended a two-day conference focused on trauma-informed schools which looked at innovative approaches to discipline restorative practices and once again coincidentally the well-being of staff additionally the most recent training that i completed was on creating school communities based around equity which directly supports the county strategic plan with once again teacher well-being being a prominent focus in every single training all sponsors kaiser permanente healthier generations castle and the prince william county schools stressed that people need to be part of the decision-making process especially when they are affected by the results any teacher knows this they allow their students to buy in to whatever they are teaching and run with those ideas the same is true for staff this was true with wellness and agency wellness and social justice
110and wellness as a scale to create a cultural shift of equity leadership relationships community engagement and agency our educators deserve to be part of the decision-making process if the county believes in their own training and those they provide their employees then our leaders must include teachers in the decision-making to tackle our ambitious strategic plan and numerous vacancies in the agency model module of the heels training our new equity officer dr lucresha brown asks this question how do we transform our day-to-day routine operations so that all staff and students experience respect a sense of belonging and fairness the answer is simple and it starts with collective bargaining the time is now to give our educators the human right of having a voice in the process that defect affects us every day thank you margaret foley all
111right richard jesse my name is richard jesse and my address is on file i want to talk a couple items here we talk about safety at school and i have one suggestion to have considered one of the concerns we had with the shooting this week was how did the person get into the school and a door was either a jar or it didn't lock properly i would recommend that we put on our doors at the schools we have to 100 schools i can guarantee you that somebody left the door open today that is not uncommon they know better but they still do it in a home you can put sensors on doors and windows and the central office will know if a door is open or a window is open so that's one thing the
112other thing that the other speaker spoke about is sro officers yes they can help but they're not a full fruit thing every time you look around at the up in new york the person there was killed if you have a person with ar-15 and you have a pistol if you don't hit the person with that pistol in the head right away you're dead those guns i think guns are the problem in virginia we have taken steps to tighten up our gun laws we are not like texas and some of the other states so i would continue to say guns are something that we really need to look at we have done a lot of good things in the last three or four years in virginia so that guns are not as easily obtained but when
113you are bordered by other states it flows over the last thing i'd like to say is that we're talking about the students for the school board i'd like you to consider this instead of adults selecting the students why don't you have the students run for their seat in all their high schools and let the students select who they would like to be represented then after you get those people elected have then select who that comes and represent them on the school board here on the dice thank you thank you next we have on the agendas 1501 is student representative matters for information yeah may i skip that then okay thank you all right then following we have 1502 appointment and announcement of student representatives for 2023. i need a motion madam vice chair thank you
114miss williams i move that the prince william county school board appoint chance williams and donna sharif as the student representatives to the prince william county school board and appoint christian daniels as the alternate student representative to the prince william county school board for the 2022-23 school year do you have a second second this is jesse any discussion about i just wanted to take this opportunity again to thank the board for their continuous support of this program and to thank all of the students who applied it is my understanding that all but one school had students who applied for this program i look forward to working with the new student representatives next year mrs jesse any further discussion please vote the vote is six yes two absent latif ralston motion passed thank you moving to uh
115superintendent's time dr mcdade thank you madam vice chair i want to begin the superintendent's time addressing the most recent school incident in texas we are saddened by the tragic school shooting that occurred on may 24th in uvalde texas our hearts and prayers are extended to the victims and their families there are no words to share to adequately express the sorrow we feel for the lives lost and those forever changed the safety of our students and staff is top of mind as we struggle to process this tragic event pwcs works closely with the prince william county police department on a daily basis and the police department has provided extra special attention on all of our schools within the county through our memorandum of understanding with the prince william county police department middle and high schools have
116school resource officer support the staffing of sros is determined by the police department and funded by the county additionally i meet regularly with police chief peter newsham to ensure collaboration in supporting the needs of prince william county public schools at the elementary school level community safety officers and security patrol provide continuous support our risk management and security services department provides active threat response training at schools with age-appropriate resources to students to ensure safety in a crisis in addition every main school entry is limited by a secure buzzer access system we frequently assess our safety protocols to ensure timely improvement if needed the say something anonymous reporting system is designed especially for students in grades 6 through 12 and for staff to report concerns of potentially unsafe behavior this is the best tool for our students
117to report anything other than reporting an incident directly to a school administrator or security this system is monitored around the clock earlier this spring prince william county public schools hired an external company that specializes in security audits to do a top to bottom review of our security processes and we are in the process of finalizing this audit which will help us to continue to update and improve our school security measures before closing this evening i do want to congratulate our 2022 graduates although i will not be able to attend every graduation ceremony in the county i do look forward to celebrating our outstanding students at ceremonies scheduled in the next several days we are very proud of the accomplishments of all of our graduates and look forward to witnessing the positive impact that they each
118will have on our on their communities on our county on our country and our world madam chair this concludes the superintendent's report thank you dr mcdade next on the agenda is that we have collective bargaining update for information this item is on for information and we will turn it over to division council wade anderson anderson yes madam chair i'd like to introduce um for the collective bargaining update eric paultell who's assisting us and of course dr eagle will also be presenting thank you wade thank you members of the board let me just tell you a little bit about my background and what i'll be talking about tonight so i have been practicing law for 35 years most of my career has been spent up in maryland representing public sector employers primarily cities and counties in
119collective bargaining with labor organizations i have drafted collective bargaining ordinances i have negotiated labor agreements i've handled grievance arbitrations my wife and i are uva grads so in 2020 we ended up relocating from maryland down to virginia i opened a charlottesville office for my law firm i continue to represent public sector employers in collective bargaining both in maryland and now and virginia as well so what i'm going to be doing is explaining the collective bargaining process and kind of where we are with prince william county schools at this stage i can get the slides to work so this is a brief overview of what's on the agenda tonight first off brief definition of what collective bargaining is this is a dictionary definition so to speak in simple terms it's really the process of a labor
120organization and an employer getting together and meeting and working to try to reach agreement on a contract which governs the terms and conditions of employment and those terms and conditions will be specified in whatever enabling ordinance or resolution would be created by the public sector employer so virginia changed dramatically in the 2020 general assembly session as we've heard earlier tonight up to that time virginia was one of a handful of states in the united states that did not permit collective bargaining in the public sector there was 1977 supreme court of virginia authority expressly prohibiting that after it had been granted to some degree i believe in the arlington county schools so in the 2020 general assembly session the law changed and effective may of 2021 localities including school boards were empowered to enact collective bargaining
121legislation and to recognize and bargain with unions representing their employees under the enabling legislation a board can either on its own enact a collective bargaining resolution or ordinance or as has happened here with prince william county schools a group of employees can initiate the process by submitting a certification from a majority of employees in a proposed bargaining unit asking the board to take a vote within 120 days on whether or not to adopt or not adopt a resolution and it's key to keep in mind nothing in the enabling legislation passed by the general assembly requires the board to either enact a resolution or to recognize a labor organization this slide here gives us a brief overview of where we are in the time the various steps in the process that we have been through on
122march 18th of 2022 prince william county schools received a certification for collective bargaining from the prince william education association on behalf of certified employees that march 18th receipt of certification triggered the running of the 120 day deadline on march 24th the school board received a presentation and adopted a collective bargaining certification vote process that process was modified a bit on april the 6th of 2022 and on may 10th of 2022 pwcs verified that the signatures that had been submitted along with that certification were sufficient to indicate that a majority of certified employees had shown their support for collective bargaining tonight june 1st we're here receiving the presentation that dr eagle and i are going to be doing there's a possibility the board can consider whether to allow collective bargaining in its june 15th meeting and
123the deadline for making that decision would be july 16 2022 which is 120 days after the march 18th submission of the certification so with that i'm going to turn it over to dr eagle for a bit and then i will come back to talk a little more about collective bargaining thank you so it's um my purpose tonight to just provide you with an overview of our existing meet and confer process we were discussing today how long um the meet and confer process has been in place here at prince william county public schools and we believe it's actually been in place since 1988 we found records back to the late 1990s but in consultation with a former senior leader he did believe it's been in practice since 1988. the authority for this process is school board
124policy 508 which is communications with employees which directs the superintendent to maintain formal and informal channels of communications with employee organizations but does not dictate a specific procedure so we have developed a procedure and i'll review that with you with our two employee associations which are the prince william education association and the virginia professional educators association so the first step in the process is to actually um develop the meet and confer committee which there are two teams the management team and the employee association team and the each association both the vpe and the pwa has an employee association team the management team is typically chosen with an eye towards knowledge of the impact that the potential proposals would have on the division and with the goal of being able to provide realistic feedback and education
125to the employee organizations regarding the feasibility of the request and typically on the committee is the director human resources the finance director the director of compensation and benefits the director of instruction along with a principal representative from each of the respective levels elementary middle and high school on the employee association team it varies by the association but with the pwa typically the team numbers from six to eight representatives are chosen by the association and in the past it has been led by their vice president with the vpe we deal directly with the state director of the virginia professional educators so once the teams are comprised we actually put out a schedule a meeting scheduled to take place over the course of the school year and typically in the past i've participated in the meet and
126confer process for the past four years and in prior years we limited the process to pro to a fall event this past school year we expanded the process to have several meetings in the fall and then a meeting in winter and early spring we typically the meeting schedule is laid out so that we have a meet and greet kickoff meeting and in that meeting we have a budgetary presentation typically presented by the the finance director which really serves as an important background to set expectations and build a foundation to support messaging to support the rationale to really set the context in terms of resources that we believe are going to be available in order to provide some further education on our ability to actually respond to requests that have a budgetary impact um the each
127team submits their issues in this um initial meeting and they also all team members do sign a confidentiality agreement um and then from that we actually have um a couple of meetings this year we basically received the issues then when the next step is we meet with each association we usually lay this out over a day where we meet with one association in the morning one in the afternoon and we hear firsthand from members of the association team regarding more details about their specific issues and in terms of those issues that are being brought up or concerned or topics there is no defined limit to the topics that can be proposed but associations are not permitted to submit individual concerns for discussion so in our follow-up basically we listen to concerns have follow-up meetings we
128discuss as a management team then the concerns that are brought forward we recommend proposed responses to those concerns and those are submitted to the executive cabinet and ultimately the superintendent for approval after that process then we meet again with the associations and present our responses this year we also included in our meetings members of executive cabinet when we did the listening sessions relevant you know that were for instance if the topic was something concerning transportation which we had some concerns this year mr shiroki attended in order to hear firsthand the concerns that were brought forth so in addition to the management team we also supplemented that with some members of the executive cabinet in terms of the ultimate decision making though it on the list of topics and the concerns brought forward the decisions are
129ultimately approved by the cabinet and the superintendent and then shared with the organizations this process does not result in any kind of written agreement but decisions may be incorporated into regulations guidance or other implementation vehicles so getting back to the enabling legislation passed by the general assembly in 2020 there are certain constraints imposed on the collective bargaining process perhaps first and foremost the enabling legislation expressly provides that no collective bargaining resolution no collective bargaining ordinance may in any way restrict the authority of board of supervisors or any other governmental authority to establish budgets or appropriate funds all plenary authority must be retained by the board additionally independent of that enabling legislation as you all know the school board does not have taxing authority anything that it agrees to with a labor organization must ultimately be
130appropriated by the prince william county board of supervisors so that's another constraint on the ability of the prince william county school board to engage in collective bargaining additionally getting back to the ordinance again what was passed by the general assembly is very uh spartan i think for lack of a better term there's no creation of a statewide labor board or detailed guidance on how to engage in the process if one were to contrast what's been done in virginia with what i'm more familiar with in maryland over my career maryland has a very detailed statewide statute on collective bargaining in it for schools there's no such guidance out of the virginia general assembly another constraint is that the legislation expressly prohibits employees from striking in support of their collective bargaining positions and then finally there is
131an interplay between existing state requirements for example state mandated grievance procedures for teachers that cannot be superseded by a collective bargaining agreement so this slide is kind of a high level overview of what would be in a potential collective bargaining resolution in the event the board were to choose to go in that direction one at the the top row there is a determination of what are the bargaining units that can engage in collective bargaining how many are there and what they are in addition to that there are certain employees or individuals who are excluded from the ability to participate in collective bargaining i'll talk about more of this in a subsequent slide the second row talks about the certification process how would a labor organization come in there's first what's called a showing of interest
132which is something that's submitted to show that the employees in a certain unit wish to have an election once that showing of interest is deemed to be adequate you progress to an actual election process and then you have a similar process for decertifying a labor organization in the event that the bargaining unit ultimately decides they wish to either have no union representation or change to a different collective party representative third row on this slide talks about the collective bargaining process and and the ordinance or the resolution i should say would specify a timetable for the initiation and completion of the collective bargaining process as well as a ratification process both ratification by the bargaining unit and ratification by the school board the next row talks about prohibited unfair labor practices and the resolution would specify
133certain conduct both by a labor organization and by the board that would be deemed to be unfair labor practices or illegal actions by either party the next row is a mechanism for the administration of the collective bargaining provisions and here what happens is a professional neutral could be a labor arbitrator somebody with background in labor relations is brought in to administer the election process to administer uh the interpretation of the collective bargaining resolution to hear and decide unfortunate practice proceedings and this individual can either be someone who is engaged on a contractual basis for a certain period of time by the board or is engaged on a case-by-case basis depending upon whether it's the election or maybe it's a an unfair practice charge that arises so there's a couple options in the way in which
134you would engage that neutral and the last part of this slide is an impasse process and the resolution would likely have some type of mechanism for resolving an impasse in the bargaining process where the the board and the labor organization are unable to come to agreement on the collective bargaining agreement in that case there needs to be a mechanism to resolve that that can be done through mediation which is non-binding and then if mediation is unsuccessful the option would be either binding or non-binding arbitration but all of this again is subject to the caveat that nothing can constrain the authority of the board of supervisors to establish budgets or appropriate funds so digging a little bit deeper into the subject of what's an appropriate bargaining unit the first question would be how many units there
135are what they are then you have the question of which employees are eligible to be in those bargaining units and the obverse of that would be which individuals are excluded from the eligibility to participate in the collective bargaining process and typically it would be elected officials supervisory employees confidential employees which would typically be individuals who work in hr with dr eagle or division counsel's office or other individuals with access to personnel information or fiscal information and then temporary and intermittent employees and finally volunteers who really aren't even employees these are all typically excluded but they're not required to all of these things are options that the board would have in drafting its collective bargaining resolution there's nothing mandated by the virginia code as to what classes of employees or individuals can and cannot participate in
136the bargaining process for the certification process this is the election process where the employees would vote whether they wish to have a labor union come in [Music] this can be this has to be done pursuant to virginia law by a secret ballot election this is mandated by code you can't have what's called a card check the employees actually have to be given a chance to vote in a secret ballot but it can be either in person or by mail ballot that's again an option the board would have to decide uh whether you want to do mail ballot as a preference or in person as a preference the last subject that i want to talk about in in terms of what would be in the resolution would be the determination of what are the subjects that
137the board and employees are required to bargain over again this is something which is for the most part left entirely up to the board to decide what subjects are matters of negotiation it can be narrow in scope or it can be broad in scope so the categories of of subjects that are bargained are broken down into three different subcategories it's mandatory subjects permissive subjects and prohibited subjects so mandatory subjects would be those topics that are put into the ordinance that are specified as matters that the board and the union must bargain over typically what i've seen in my experience in my career in maryland is wages and benefits are almost always mandatory subjects beyond that topics can be either permissive or mandatory and what i've listed here on this slide are examples of the kinds
138of things that could be either permissive or mandatory and that would be hours work schedules vacation leave holidays health and safety there's many more but those are just examples of the kinds of things that could or could not be mandatory subjects and then there are the prohibited subjects of bargaining and these would be topics that either by state law the parties could not bargain over or matters that the the board pull basically reserves to itself and says these are not matters that we would negotiate so in terms of things mandated by law examples would be the virginia retirement system benefits the grievance process and anything else that would restrict the authority of the board to establish or appropriate funds but in addition to those matters governed by state law what we've seen in in the
139other virginia jurisdictions that have enacted collective bargaining ordinances is most of the time the governing authority reserves to itself the exclusive authority to manage certain aspects of the employment relationship and those matters are deemed prohibited subjects of bargaining they are not negotiated with the union so that's something which can be determined by the board in crafting any collective bargaining resolution so finally the question of the resources that might be needed in the event the board were to move forward with collective bargaining the cost for the most part will be driven by what the scope of the collective bargaining resolution is it's if it's very narrow in scope you're going to need less legal staff less human resources staff you're not going to be spending as much time in negotiations and mediations and impasse proceedings or
140labor arbitrations if it's broader in scope then you should expect to see a significant increase in the amount of time and and of course money that would be spent on human resources labor negotiator that might be hired on an in-house basis to negotiate for the board perhaps an in-house attorney brought in to assist division council with labor relations matters possibly the use of outside counsel to assist and then the outside neutral to manage the interpretation of the collective bargaining resolution the election process or to hear and decide unfair practice proceedings so that is uh our high level overview dr eagle and i are are wide open to any questions that any members of the board may have about the process thank you for the presentation um right now we're gonna give an opportunity for board
141members to ask two to three questions each and if needed clarifying question and we'll just go down the line and if you don't have a question you can just say pass and then we'll go back again mr wilker are you okay starting i am good i think the information item and i already asked my questions in a previous meeting thank you one of the questions i i have is you you've worked in maryland and you're aware of how their procedures and things work their employees cannot strike either correct that's correct okay and their school boards cannot appropriate funds that's correct so what do they do with wages and benefits which you said was like kind of the number one thing that we put in collective bargaining agreements so so the agreements typically do require or
142to they they do govern wages and benefits it of course has to be ultimately approved by the governing for america we would call them commissioners typically or sometimes it's council members but commissioners would essentially receive a draft collective bargaining agreement that's been negotiated by a local school board and its labor organization that is submitted to the commissioners or the council members and then they decide whether or not to appropriate the funds to to allocate the resources for the wages and benefits that were agreed to in that draft agreement and how long have they had collective bargaining in maryland uh it has been i think at least i've been doing this 35 years and it was certainly well established when i got into practice so i'm saying i would guess at least 40 to 50 years
143and um one of the so i i a couple years ago went back and looked at every single school district in maryland and read i read the teacher contract because i am a teacher and i figured that was a good place to start in my study and i noticed that in maryland many of their contracts have very similar language and you know things that they put in there i think montgomery counties was probably the most in-depth and longest um and then there were several maybe smaller districts that had you know basically the same thing do they have like a template that they use that's you know they work they're working from so yes one big difference between maryland and the virginia model is that at least for teachers in maryland you have statewide legislation that
144specifies what the matters covered by collective bargaining are so you have a whole process that's set up in the maryland code that applies to every jurisdiction so that in turn results in most of the collective bargaining agreements looking very similar because they're all working off of the same playbook so to speak virginia has gone a very different direction leaving it to each locality to make that decision so so uh it sounds like our guidance is gonna you know rely on you know knowing what the state code says whether we can or can't do something and then sort of the uh i don't know i don't say limitations but sort of like what what's uh i don't know i don't know what the quite what the right word is maybe here but um if we're looking
145at trying to create a an agreement we're really working from scratch at this point that's correct i mean the general assembly for better or worse gave governing authorities very very little guidance here other than saying you can't do anything to restrict the power of the purse so to speak right localities have very very broad discretion and you could craft something very different from what arlington may do or what nalden may do well and that would also speak to i mean each of these districts are funded differently for example we get about half of our money from the state fairfax county gets only 20 from the state so the funding formulas are different the agreements are going to have to look different because you know many many different things but that i would imagine that would
146be a big consideration as well absolutely all right well um i will uh stop now thank you i just wanted to kind of clarify those couple points just because um you know i did spend the time looking at those agreements and they seemed awfully similar from place to place so thank you you're welcome miss wall thank you miss jackson um i uh my first question is a meet and confer question um how often do management and those association teams the two association teams meet generally then i know you dressed it gener generally but from if would it would it be correct to say a couple meetings in the fall and meeting in the winter in a meeting in the spring or are there more regular meetings with um pwa leadership that occur in the context
147of that meet and confer process within the context of the meet and confer process in the past we had an opening meeting a meet and greet a meeting to discuss issues and then a feedback meeting this year we expanded the process and we had the opening meeting a meeting to discuss the issues and then a feedback meeting and then we had two additional meetings i believe one was in january this year and one was in march the march meeting was brief it was just about setting um schedules up for this coming year so we did expand it in the event that there were additional issues in terms of other meetings routinely and ongoing it's outside of the meet and confer process but we do meet weekly with the uniserv directors for the pwa and the
148state director for vpe on tuesdays and that's the hr leadership team myself director of benefits and compensation and the director of hr okay thank you and in those kinds of meetings i mean obviously you can't tell me what exactly is discussed but those are where issues and concerns can be brought up as well yes we discuss um you know anything we feel like we need feedback on um any kind of um you know um potential initiatives that we might be rolling out that we would like their feedback on we also discuss any concerns that they bring to the table so it's a two-way discussion you know regarding issues or concerns or new initiatives that we're rolling out in division because they share lots of great feedback on things we might want to think about and
149consider in that process okay thank you it sounds like it's actually a really productive process that we have i'm aware that the meet and confer process that pwcs has maintained over the years has been the subject of study and emulation among other school divisions across virginia um and so i think it's a good it's a good process um under this is a negotia this is a collective bargaining question under a typical collective bargaining negotiation having never participated in one i'm trying to get my wrap my head around what it looks like um would it would it be lawyers for management and lawyers for the union who would be seated at the table it is not required and i'm not even sure it's typical um i would say in my anecdotal observation in maryland it's probably
15050 50 split between when lawyers are present and lawyers are not so let me tell you about my experience because obviously a lawyer is always present when when i'm there you're going to have two teams you'll have the the county team or the board team which would have typically myself as an attorney being the lead spokesperson then you'll have maybe three or four other persons representing the county or the board human resources person maybe a finance person uh maybe a couple other folks and then you have the the union team on the other side of the table and oftentimes there is an attorney who's the lead spokesperson there and then you'll have three or four members of the bargaining unit who are typically union officials but not always who participate on behalf of the union
151but there are negotiations that take place that i'm not involved in where there are no lawyers involved at all sometimes i'm involved and the union does not have a lawyer they just have a somebody from the the union international or other union official do the negotiating on behalf of the union so there's really no standard model out there okay thank you which i'll keep my questions for the next go around thank you very much thank you we'll have another round um miss williams thank you madam vice chair so just for my sort of understanding i tend to be the person that kind of frames things in a very simplistic way or ask for a very simplistic framing um what i understand to be now our meat and comfort process representatives from the school division pwa
152unions as such come to meet with the division a team in the division and they are essentially enabled to bring up any issue that they desire as long as it's not an individual issue and conversations are then held back and forth have remained meanings the schedule presents whatever that entails the discussion is had the division side hr the team then we'll respond on what can or cannot be done i'm assuming please correct me if i'm wrong based upon what we forecast our financial availability to be and of course state laws and and such is that kind of how the process works yes okay in terms of the back and forth i just want to be clear and that the issues are presented and then a meeting is held to discuss the topics thank you and
153so and then the management team formulates responses they are ultimately approved by the cabinet and then meets again with the association team and reviews the responses so essentially there's no limitation other than they cannot present individual like person a i have that a problem in xyz school because as as wonderful as this presentation is i don't think the average person looking at this is going to be familiar to be able to digest a lot of this i mean i i know for myself we have been learning about this since it came upon the table there's still a lot of questions so i'm just trying to break it down as digestible as possible while keeping it high level um so i appreciate that um then my understanding then collective bargaining is a process obviously new to
154virginia no one has experience with that the burden of the scope and the entire process essentially rests within the governing body in the state of virginia so we could have a process that is very narrow and limiting in scope and what we're allowed to talk about we could have a process that includes lots of things but of course those all of those things have to be in compliance with state law and other governing [Music] regulations so to speak that sort of what we're what you're saying that's a very good succinct summary of what's been granted to you by the general assembly okay up to the board to decide how narrow or how broad the topics of bargaining are and what i understand to be the key factor is basically that no matter what the board
155permits to disc collective bargaining to be on the table for discussion it can't in any way inhibit our budget so we can't say and i'm just making this up we're going to spend a bazillion dollars on xyz topic if we only have a half a bazillion dollars to work with that's i know that sounds silly but i i think that's a major a major point i mean if if effectively what you were doing was mandating that money be appropriated for something then that would be a violation of the general assembly's enabling legislation because it would be impinging upon the authority of the board of supervisors to establish the budget you can't mandate that that ultimate authority has to stay with the board of supervisors to fund or not fund okay because i think that makes
156a difference and i think there's been a lot of conversation about that but we as a board or a division has not had that conversation so i think it's a very important poor point along with the fact that again we have not done this and there's a difference i think we get compared a lot to the board of county supervisors but they can tax and do things that school divisions cannot do so i don't always believe that it's a fair apples to orange apples to apples comparison um when we look at that now one of the things i saw on the impasse procedures is that arbitration was listed but correct me if i'm wrong we cannot do any not we can't do any binding arbitration according to the statute if i'm so it it could
157be binding so long as it's all subject to the appropriations of the board so it's really not binding if you look at what's been done in some of the other northern virginia jurisdictions they may call it binding but it has this asterisk so to speak that it's subject to the fact that it must be ultimately appropriated by the board of supervisors and if they choose not to appropriate the parties have to go back to the bargaining table so it's really not binding now you could have binding on purely non-monetary issues but determining what is a non-monetary issue is not easy there's many people who believe that everything that is agreed to whether it's a change in schedules or a different pink color on the wall has some fiscal impact but technically if the provisions of
158an agreement have no fiscal impact and therefore don't impact the budget you could have binding arbitration on those non-fiscal matters thank you i only bring that up just as an illustration of one small part of how complex this process is and how everyone has a different understanding i think there's still a lot of learning left to do my last question i'm going to wrap it up is i think a lot of people are wondering is when you enter into collective bargaining as a division does this replace meet and confer and typically in your experience what are we seeing in other divisions or we're not seeing or do you know so my experience in maryland is you're either meet and confer or it's collective bargaining they don't co-exist i've participated in meet and confer models that
159look an awful lot like collective bargaining but they're not but i've never seen it where they both exist side by side okay thank you that's very helpful you're welcome i don't have any questions you are going to be meeting with the board members right you're doing the training for board members i am not an attorney for the board members no yeah no he's he is going to be doing the training though miss jesse yes yes i will be doing the training i'm sorry that caught me off guard but i'll ask my questions then thank you okay um mr walk yeah real round this last round or yes please yeah no and this is more just for my own it maybe you could help direct me versus having to call like individual school districts but we've
160talked about maryland but you know where would i go to learn like why states like north dakota indiana ohio iowa tennessee nebraska oklahoma wyoming kansas south dakota idaho how where would i go to learn why how those states allow their teachers collectively bargain because they do is there like a resource online or does that require individual research or something like that i think it's probably a matter of state statute in most cases i would the typical model i can't promise this is true in every one of those states but typically the state legislature will grant the authority to engage in collective bargaining to localities and then in maryland for example the state went so far as to dictate what that model is for all of the localities and there's some variance variations within jurisdictions but
161not much other states in my experience are more like what's been done in virginia they really leave it up to the individual city or county school board to make those determinations and i think you probably have to look at indiana north dakota south dakota or whatever look at their legislation and see what they've done there thank you you're welcome issac report okay miss wall thank you ms jackson um some people have asked me this question um if collective bargaining were to be adopted what happens with the members of the workforce who are not part of the union are they then going to be subject to every i guess they would be subject to every decision that the union advocates for um and would they be required to be in the union or is that something
162that would be in our a kind of thing that we would negotiate as well so a couple points here in in 2018 the supreme court decided the case called janus versus afscme that specifically says that a public sector employee cannot be compelled to pay union dues and even before that employees could not be required to join but they could be required to pay what was called a service fee or agency fee to the union but since janus no employee can be forced to pay union dues against their will in the public sector that being said when a union is certified to be the representative of the employees in the bargaining unit it's what's called the exclusive representative and it means it represents everybody in that bargaining unit whether they've chosen to be a member of
163the union or not whether they pay dues or not they are all represented by the union now typically in my experience if someone's not a member they do not have the right to vote on union matters they can't vote on ratification of an agreement they can't elect union officials but they're still governed by the terms of that collective bargaining agreement and in the resolution that might be passed by the board you could for example include as an under labor practice the act of a union not fairly representing somebody because they had chosen not to be a member that could be made to be an illegal action if a union did not adequately represent somebody so that's kind of a high level explanation on the rights of non-members okay thank you i appreciate that because that
164is a concern that obviously um i i and others have expressed i mean that people have have that concern so i appreciate that clarification can ask one more question so um i have a question about um if you could just elaborate just a little bit more on the statement of restricting the board's authority to establish budgets or appropriate funds i'm having trouble kind of understanding what that kind of what that might look like what um establishing a budget establishing a budget or preparation funds and i don't know if that's an appropriate question to ask at this point but that that's the language in the statute right and i'm having trouble thinking of a scenario or an example of what that kind of action might be so i think one good example would be i think
165we had a question a little earlier about binding arbitration so let's just take an example that the board chose to move forward with a collective bargaining resolution that includes binding arbitration and it says that if the parties are unable to reach agreement on a collective party agreement then the matter shall be referred to binding arbitration and the arbitrator's decision shall be binding upon the board and derivatively the board of supervisors which must appropriate the funds for that that would be a clear violation of virginia code 40.1 57.2 which says that no provision of any ordinance or resolution can restrict a governing body's authority to establish a budget or appropriate funds so i think that's probably the most clear example i can think of okay thank you so basically i mean if we don't if we
166don't have the money to accomplish a particular action item then we can't be forced to pay for it anyway i guess that's kind of the idea right that's right i mean if you don't have the money or you don't have the money if you don't have the money the board chooses i mean the board can ultimately choose not to appropriate the money nothing can compel it to appropriate that okay okay thank you you're welcome all right thank you miss williams thank you um i i listening to this presentation i hear a lot of like maybes and up in the air um and i appreciate you taking the time to introduce this basically to the members of the public because again we haven't had this discussion um so my um just to sort of wrap it
167up when you have i'm looking at the differences essentially for me and confer and collective bargaining and again to try to simplify it it it appears me and confer there's just a lot of discussion not quite as limiting um a voice or statements and things that could be brought up and there's also but no guarantee no written document that comes out the end of it um and and that's sort of my final sense in that am i missing anything in there at a high level i mean i'll defer to dr eagle i think that's correct i mean we actually prepare written responses that are shared with the association team but unless a particular topic results in you know regulation change or an initiative that we're moving through the division then no there's nothing put in
168writing aside from the response that is prepared and shared with the association team missing a legal legal written agreement basically there is no legal no but on the collective bargaining side depending on whatever the governing body determines it could be a very narrow voice that's heard or a little bit larger scope voice there's a but there is at the end a legally binding agreement that's correct there's it's a labor contract and if a provision of the contract is violated the parties typically have a remedy to go to arbitration before a neutral to decide whether or not there has been a violation of the agreement okay well well that's to be determined in the state of virginia too because we're still trying to figure all that out um but no i do appreciate that because i
169think there's just so much information out there but i think oftentimes what happens is we're we're comparing what virginia is doing to maryland or ohio or pennsylvania and there's only so much comparison that could be done because unfortunately a statue of virginia didn't provide for a lot of guidance or boards or a set resolution that other places have because oftentimes we hear we'll just do this it's very easy look at xyz and that has been something i've personally struggled with a lot because i've spoken to people in other states and um the main thing i get from their commentary is collective bargaining pennsylvania is where i know most people related to teachers collective bargaining is great um but we always have to give up something and most people really don't know what's going on because
170representatives come and speak on our behalf and i say okay well that's great you know what we're learning and i think the issue that most of us has is so much it was left up to a governing body and not put in the statute and that is what you don't see in in states who have other states that have collective bargaining so i think this is a long journey no matter which way it goes but definitely one that we all should take the time to be much more educated and have many more conversations about so thank you very much you're welcome this is the same question are you going to be training us um yes i believe i'm the individual conducting the board training on this i just want to have fun with it i'll
171wait until the training takes place thank you all right board members are able to ask questions continue to ask questions are there any further final questions we can still email okay them thank you for tonight's presentation um to help educate the board and to educate the public um for me the purpose of this conversation tonight was to be transparent and i was wondering if we could please put a copy of this powerpoint on the faqs on a website yes and it's also it's available in board docs in the public section but we can attach it we can attach a link to the to the faqs yeah that makes it easier to navigate thank you mr johnson um so i have further questions i'm sure but i really appreciate the time you took tonight and i
172look forward to the training that mrs jesse mentioned and thank you next on our agenda is moving on to 17.02 this item is on for information dr mcdade thank you madam chair i do have al sharoki and i believe john wallingford will be presenting information for the board on prevailing wage so good evening madam vice chair members of the board dr big dade it is mr wallingford our chief financial offer and myself's pleasure to be able to provide you with an update on the prevailing wage rate topic uh and i'd like to start off with just kind of giving you the background that back in february of this year you did give the superintendent and our staff and council direction to provide some information based upon a prevailing wage law and its impact on prince
173william county schools and to consider any possible resolutions based upon the update that staff is able to provide to you specifically with construction contracts so what i'd like to start off with just introductory remarks and just stating what is the prevailing wage rate and again this is the rate the amount the level of wages or salaries that are corresponding for a class of trades people a class of occupation that works on what we would call immovable properties that are considered public works so immovable properties or is basically anything in facilities management where we build things if you take a school and you turn it upside down everything that falls would not be under this prevailing wage rate but everything that stays in place would be part of that so the bricks the mortar the roof
174the air conditioning the plumbing all the skills all the occupations that are associated with public works projects and for us it would be basically everything within your capital improvement plan would fall under that so for this evening we're going to give you just an overview of the prevailing wage rate briefly i'm going to talk about the recent virginia legislation specifically upon your direction to talk about the prince william school's findings as it relates to impacts to our local vendor community look at our capital improvement projects that are currently in the 10-year approved plan look at some project cost comparisons we did go out and find projects that were publicly advertised where it showed prevailing and non-prevailing rates so we're able to actually see the deltas when it comes to salary gaps that may exist and
175then talk about some action steps for adoption there's options to accommodate if there are changes or there are fine tunings that have to occur if you were to adopt prevailing wage rate and then ultimately we have recommendations for your consideration so the virginia legislation basically gives localities the ability to approve ordinances that would allow prevailing wage rates to occur and with this legislation uh this next slide here really breaks it down to where you see that the implementation occurred uh it was in the 2020 session and it started in may 1st of 2021 there's two pieces or two words that are very specific public works and localities so public works is what it where it defines the type of work and i mentioned immovable properties but everything that's within our capital improvement plan the locality
176piece uh the code of virginia does include school divisions as a locality so it's not just county cities or towns but it is school divisions or other political subdivisions so by by nature of including the word localities in the uh code of virginia it did open the door for public school divisions in virginia to at least consider the topic of prevailing wage rates in doing so i do want to share that you know it is not a mandatory provision for localities no localities are not required to go under prevailing weight rage wage enactments but the same time they did establish some limits the guidance is very limited that the state provided to localities but they are very specific in stating that localities may establish contact limits that are greater than but not less than 250
177000 in project value so again you can go higher than 250 but you can't go below 250 and there's a piece in our findings that we will share with you when we give our recommendations about why we've chosen to set a threshold given the fact that this was designed not to impact vendors that are below 250 000 and again we will reiterate that further but again i do want to state that school boards do not have the ability to adopt an ordinance as the legislation describes though we are considered a locality we don't have that ability however you can adopt a resolution that is very similar to that effect so in our findings uh again a very basic breakdown on the pros and the cons we found out that obviously the pros are that prevailing
178wage rates can preclude businesses from undercutting employers that are committed to paying decent wages and bids and that that's just it stands by itself it does it does force people to all have a level playing field it does prevent what we call the race to the bottom among publicly funded contractors so here in prince william we do low bid so in order to get low bid many times contractors this would prevent them from just cutting the labor costs or telling a subcontractor that you're only going to be able to pay this much so that we can award this project because we have to be the lowest price and also the the pro is that it does support compensation rates above the legislative minimums but when it comes to cons one of the items that we
179have found is that there are increase of cost to projects and potential decrease to the number of projects that can be completed with a cip and in doing so i'm going to show you a slide where it kind of gives you that landscape of where we've seen that delta and looking at our approved cip versus if you were to adopt a prevailing wage that that cip budget numbers may have to be adjusted cost increases may fluctuate due to supply chain issues and inflation so there are two other variables here prevailing weight rages they can increase the cost of a project bid but we also have two other variables that are presently in play and that is supply chain issues and inflation which would be on top of what you're seeing uh in tonight's presentation and
180then implementing this uh could decrease competition and bidding and that's what we're going to start talking a little bit about in future slides about how smaller local vendors there is tasks that are associated with any contractors that have to adopt prevailing wage and we want to talk about what that entails and how that can be a hindrance in some cases so with the impact with the local vendor community you know there is regulatory compliance and the community they have to the vendors they have to certify their compliance meaning if we enact prevailing wage and they go to the charts that are on the u.s department of labor's website they have to basically certify to the virginia department of labor and industry that they are paying the wage that is posted based upon the date of
181the award of the contract by the school board so they have to certify that they are also required to post the prevailing wage rates for each of their crafts meaning the occupations that the skill labor that they're hiring they have to post them on the job site so an electrician knows what that prevailing weight wage rate is as well as any other jobs that are fall under that category they just can't point them to a website they got to have it on site there is record keeping requirements obviously you have to be able to demonstrate that you're compliant with it there is also a legal liability for vendors if they are if their employees are not paid at the prevailing rate wage and in the end there are criminal penalties for willful violations where a
182contractor who agrees to a bid that is awarded by you as an elected board and they agree to do that work and then they choose purposely not to pay the people based upon the the rate that they specified in their bid there are criminal penalties that they are liable for there are additional expenditures uh to hire consultants to purchase software you know this is not something where someone just goes to a book it's very complex given the number of jobs so if you're a small vendor this could be very cumbersome for you but if you're a large vendor that has done a lot of work here in the d.c maryland virginia area obviously to the north of virginia there are union trades so many of our large contractors already engage in prevailing wage primarily in
183d.c and maryland but here in virginia there are fewer just because we are still considered a right to work state but in doing so smaller vendors which may not have the profit margin for the size of the project or they may not have the staffs that could become cumbersome so that's why we put that as a con for some of our smaller vendors that do work that is substantially less than what we would do for a classroom addition or a new school construction or renovation work but if we're talking about replacing um lighting in a school or one or two or a handful of hvac units within a school those are smaller projects and for many of them they may choose not to participate if you off if you require prevailing wage because for them
184it wouldn't be worth it because they'd have to hire people and that would cut into the minimal profit that they're making but for very large scale projects where the profit margins are bigger there there is that ability and the large-scale contractors are very attuned to working with prevailing wages they already have the staff and the software in addition there's training there's education there's administrative efforts not only for the vendors but for our own procurement folks here with prince william county schools so that they are adept and they can answer questions especially if there are contractors that are new to working with us and they're not familiar for whatever reason with prevailing weight wage rate we would have to be able to provide that information to them as well so this next slide just takes a
185look at our capital improvement program uh for the next 10 years which you have already approved for this upcoming fy23 year it's just over 1.2 billion dollars in value in this slide there's two charts here that i just want to walk through with you just a little the first chart that's on the top where you see the blue bars and then the orange line that shows the value the blue bars are the numbers of projects that are within certain values such as projects that are say less than 250 000 or projects that are greater than 250 000 the orange line shows the value of the project so when you look at these two together you see that basically it looks like fifty percent of our projects uh are below two and a half million dollars
186in value and just over fifty percent are greater than two and a half million dollars at the same time you see that value where really the price of our project really goes up at about two and a half to five million dollars and you see that orange line on the right side just kind of move in an upward direction so so in looking at that uh you know what we see is projects that are below say two and a half million those are projects that are generally very small in nature you say two and a half million that's not a small project but when you're replacing hvac equipment that is a small project because the equipment is very expensive so you could have a two and a half million dollar roof replacement or two and
187a half million dollar hvac replacement and close to 75 percent of the cost of that project is for the equipment itself it's not just labor it's the equipment when you get into mechanical type systems so for us we see that there are a good percentage of our projects which you know if you had to break it down roughly 96 percent of our project value is greater than two and a half million and then close to four percent is below two and a half million so again numbers are projects in value the intent of prevailing wage is obviously to impact as many trades people as possible that work on our construction projects so the larger the projects the greater numbers of contractors and subcontractors and employees that you're that you would be impacting in doing so
188so when we look at the local landscape for our projects we looked for projects that have been publicly awarded uh the projects that you see here are all it's all public information we scoured uh working with some of our contractors projects where localities purposely advertise their construction projects where they asked the contractors to show what would be the cost to the locality if you provided prevailing wage rates or you did not and what you see here as i'm showing you this chart if you look at the column on the far left you will see that all but two are general contractors and the bottom two are subcontractors and when you look as you move to the right for the types of projects where we see security vestibules renovations electrical plumbing work energy contracts school construction
189there's an elementary school construction the projects range from howard county maryland to montgomery county maryland and then we found a few that were in culpepper city schools as well as loudoun county public schools and what you see here if you look at the percentage between prevailing and non-prevailing you see a very big differential from you know from about eight percent up to uh close to 33 percent for large-scale projects and what you'll notice is if you if you see this the states that we have here such as maryland the delta is very smaller compared to the delta for the virginia projects part of that reason we would speculate is because the maryland is already unionized so they're already paying those rates for the majority of their projects whereas in culpeper and loudon there are still
190contractors that are not paying the prevailing wage rates so you see a greater delta in virginia because virginia has not adopted prevailing wage more than likely at the level that you see here for the maryland projects but when you get down to the bottom two this is where you see a big delta between what is the prevailing wage minimum and what the subcontractors are actually paying when you see price differences between 61 and close to 98 percent that's a huge delta for mechanical parts or components so when you look at small projects we see that prevailing wage can be very costly for smaller contractors that are doing work that's below two and a half million but there is a lot of sway here so for us looking at this information what we would tell you
191is we don't know what it would actually cost additionally to do prevailing wage but if you just look at the facts here we know that the cost will more than likely go up for our school division but to say how much it's going to go up only time will tell because we have not advertised projects where we have said to show us prevailing and non-prevailing but you kind of get an idea here that there is some cost that will be associated if you were to adopt it so the action steps if we were to adopt this i just want to walk through the process because it's it's very intensive the responsibility of prevailing wage we put that on the general contractors and their subs prince william would not play an active part in monitoring this
192other than receiving the certification from the contractors and subcontractors so how this would work is if we were to adopt this we would advertise our projects just like we do public bids and we would include prevailing wage requirements so all the contractors and subs would know to submit based upon the prevailing wage rate for that geographic area that the school work is being done and that getting that information is on the us department of labor's website the contractors will prepare prepare and submit the project bids based upon those prevailing weight wage rates that's a tongue twister for me we will award the contract uh bring it to you to award publicly the work begins the contractor posts the information on the sites and monthly the subcontractors and the contractors as they submit their payment applications
193as they do already today they're going to have to certify that their payroll and payment is respective of the prevailing wage rate requirements and they'll have to certify that and obviously if the u.s department of labor the virginia department of labor was to audit or to look or if there was a complaint that was arisen they would be responsible in having to correct that and ensure that it is accurate or face fines or even criminal criminal liability so in doing so you know we've talked about how there could be an impact financially if we were to adopt prevailing wage rates and this is true for anything when you have projects that are in your cip budget and let's say the project's coming over budget project comes in over bid you know what are the things
194that we would do in order to be able to continue to move our projects forward well the first one is one that you see here is just to sell more debt now that's easier said than done selling debt is not you know when you sell debt you're just increasing your mortgage your mortgage payment and we kind of put that here on the slide you just can't sell debt to sell debt you have a debt limit and mr wallingford could talk in further detail about that but you you have certain ranges that you can only sell debt to because of the financial requirements you have to continue to maintain your triple a bond rating so we would have to stay in good standing so just selling bond is not the only way that you might overcome
195projects that come in over budget you might have to delay projects you may have five projects in a year you find that you can only afford four and you just have to defer one to the following year you delay it uh you ultimately you're going to still do it you just have to wait a year and we kind of did this when we entered into the pandemic and we held off on a lot of those cash-based projects because we wanted to hold that money but then you made that commitment once that money was solvent to enact that so those projects were still achieved it just took a year later for those to be able to be accomplished you might reduce the number of projects that are in your 10-year cip and again when i say
196reduce i'm not saying eliminate i'm saying you just have to reduce it because you have to do pay it over a greater period of time because your cost has gone up and we know that with inflation you know mr wallingford and i and cip we've spoken to you when we present the cip in january i can imagine that we will be coming back to you later this fall to talk about what the current inflationary costs are based upon the construction market because we will have to make adjustments to our cip take prevailing wage aside inflation is going to cause us to have to adjust our cip but we don't want to make any decisions today because we're in the midst of the inflation and we don't have any projects that are going out immediately we
197have time so that we can use the most current best information possible before we make adjustments to the cip you can reduce scope you can right size projects these are areas that i i generally do not recommend i think as a practice it's better to go in to do a project as it was originally designed and committed to our schools and to hold off on projects rather than going in and only doing 50 of a project and then being required or obligated to have to go back and do something that you couldn't do because you had financial constraints it's a tool in the toolbox but it's one of the last ones that i would recommend even considering so when we look at are the recommendations that we have you know we gave you pretty much
198three options that we considered uh and you know again we we believe that we want to find a balance between providing opportunities to provide a very competitive prevailing weight rage wage to our community and to our our contractors our subcontractors but the same time we don't want to hinder some of our contractors that may be smaller or may not be familiar with prevailing wage so though the law says that you cannot go below 250. we show 250 000 as one of the options we also show two and a half million as being the threshold and five million and our recommendation would to be if you were to adopt this to not establish a threshold that's any less than two and a half million uh you could always go up but we would not recommend going
199below two and a half million because we do believe that that will encompass a lot of the smaller projects that are completed by a lot of local contractors that are within the greater prince william county community and we would want and obviously we can reassess over time looking at the data but that would be our recommendation at this point and by doing projects that are minimum a 202.5 million or greater i do want to remind you that you are accomplishing 96 percent of the value of our project so it's still a very large portion of the total value that you approve as a board so with that being said uh mr wallingford and i we're happy to provide any specific questions that you may have we i understand i provided you something that's very a
200ten thousand foot level it could be very complicated but we could definitely answer any questions that you might have specifically in helping you make the best decision thank you are there any questions from the board miss williams thank you i just had one question it sounds like the recommendation it basically helps to level the playing field for the smaller contractor or smaller companies who may not be able to participate if prevailing wages passed across the board so we're still trying to be equitable and providing workers for lack of a better term excuse me if that's not correct the and companies the ability to pay their workers a fair wage but also striking that balance and allowing smaller companies to still be able to bid on projects and participate on projects and not exclude them because
201they also have to earn a living as well and if we weren't to do that then a larger company basically could just come in and be able to bid on anything and they would be excluded if i'm understanding yes that's a very fair statement thank you further questions miss thank you for the presentation it's very informative i appreciate it um can you tell me roughly or very very broadly high level-ish how close we are to the prevailing wage in our contracts currently yeah um so i'm not able to give you an approximation but what i would tell you is i would think that because we have not advertised projects where we asked contractors to show us both but i think that if you were to look at loudon and culpepper because many of the contractors
202and subcontractors that bid on their work bid on our projects there are we do have some maryland contractors here that have bid on prince william project but they're very large contractors they work pennsylvania maryland virginia so i would say you know could it range between five and fifteen twenty percent absolutely based upon the data that we show here um so we just the best that we can do is provide you with what we can see publicly to give you the most information and make a decision on okay thank you so it sounds like in this if this were to some be something that we would do we would actually possibly end up disadvantaging our local virginia small business kinds of vendors in the competition in the market you know in the vendor market because the
203big you know multi-regional the regional multi-state businesses would have the advantage whereas the small like local businesses startups you know based in warrenton or something like that would have a tougher time competing so so that's part of the reason why uh in providing you with a recommendation we felt it was a good balance to go with not 250 000 which was the minimum that the state enacted but to go with two and a half because we feel as if those those vendors that you're describing those are the ones that will fall into the project categories that are below a minimum of two and a half million okay and then and to kind of clarify and from my understanding the 200 the 2.5 million that's kind of a floor you're saying like that's not the recommendation
204necessary that's like at least that right the floor is 250 000 but we would recommend to start to have that floor at 2.5 2.5 million okay um and can i ask you a question on the sell that sell more debt issue going to the slide 11 um my understanding is that generally selling more debt is is risky um from a financial standpoint but it's also reputationally risky as well right could you elaborate just a little bit more um but on what that impact the impact of that would be on our on our aaa rating and and to our reputational risk i suppose so thank you for the question mrs wallace it's a very good question prince william county and prince william county schools adhere to some rules with regard to debt that have been set
205up by the county and the board of county supervisors on the sale of debt we maintain a 10 percent cap as long as we stay under uh of total revenue and as long as we stay underneath that cap of total revenue uh the rating agencies who currently rate us aaa the highest you can get um are satisfied there there are a lot of other things that go into uh our financial reputation things like the the length of financial management you know the the longevity of the people in place like mr martino miss casiato myself and our team here we've all been around for a long time and and they see that as as a very strong thing so the only thing that we really need to to pay attention to with according to your question
206about debt is that we don't get ourselves up to the 10 cat okay thank you and i can't remember where we are right now eight something we're running around eight and a half percent that number is probably going to go down a little bit for two reasons the first is as you're all aware uh our revenue increased by about 181 million dollars this year so when you do the math problem your your your debt to revenue ratio is actually decreased the other thing that this board did this year is allow the school division to provide more cash to capital because our balance sheet was so strong so we provided an additional 30 million dollars which actually reduced the amount of debt that we sold in our most recent sale so we went the right way
207on each of those numbers so we may be down around eight percent now we haven't done that calculation yet okay thank you um can i ask a question oh um so going back to the pro and con page um i think that's seven maybe slide seven six slide six um what is the advantage i see that there's an advantage for the laborers the trades um and advantage to larger businesses um what is the advantage to us for adopting this or generally is there an advantage or i think the general rule would be if you as a board were adopted you would be taking the premise that you believe that employees who work for prince william county who fall under the criteria prevailing wage would be paid what the u.s department of labor deems as the
208prevailing wage rate for our geographic location about fair assessments what i can share with you okay okay right thank you any further questions all right thank you so much for the information tonight i appreciate it it's very fast and helpful thank you thank you what matters no no i don't have any questions and moving on to board matters um you have three minutes per board member miss jesse would you like to start this evening thank you i just want to say that uh there have been so many phenomenal programs done in this county uh the educators uh awards program was just you guys knocked it out of the park it was just beautiful the talent that was displayed the young speakers and the young emcees and the play there was a play at woodbridge that
209was all over the top and also they had a choral production that was just phenomenal the talent in this county is overwhelming i want to just one item you know when we talk about collective bargaining and all these things about 30 or 40 years ago this lady named jackie werdenberg came to do a workshop for me and i was title one supervisor and she says that she said to me everybody has to have a ta-da you know you can talk about collective bargaining and all these things at the end of the day teachers need to have a tada and i so i was trying to think how i could do this and so kenny bode and i set up what we call a gratitude tour and you can see this we we delivered donuts well
210actually kenny beauty did not because kenny has had a major situation with his knees and so my husband of course had to help me but we have delivered uh we had we delivered ten dozen donuts to high schools eight middle and we're joined five to elementary schools and you can see the it says nothing but gratitude i think at the end of the day we have to realize that when people say they're not happy they're not happy and it's it's interesting because you don't really need to do very much and i i want to make this short because i have to get up tomorrow morning to deliver some more donuts so and i think there's one other slide that we have and these are the people at woodbridge high school you can see the donuts
211and i thought we'd given too many donuts i said to jesse i said i think we gave them ten dozen i don't think they need it but then somebody called me today and said what happened to the donuts a small gesture and i want to thank woodbridge high school and all the schools that participated with me having the doors open in the morning and by the way these funds came from my funds and from kenny's fund they were not from school board funds so thank you teachers for all that you do i realize that you're tired and you're ready to go so i thought maybe a donut would wake you up or fatten you up i'm not sure thank you thank you mrs chelsea mr williams thank you very much um madam vice chair i
212want to start by um doing a congratulations to our governor school students they did graduate on may 20th they graduated a little early because one of our school divisions that participates graduates early as well as their under mason schedule speaking of george mason as a eip alumni myself it was again a tremendous honor to be able to participate well to attend the eip graduate and new initiates for students prince william county schools had several graduates that for this year through the program i can very much attest to how life-changing the early identification program is i know it was instrumental in my success in life and definitely one of the primary reasons that i was able to attend college it is a nationally recognized program and i am forever grateful for prince william county schools for
213their continued participation with the early identification program special thanks to ms kadeem mr kahin kasim davis excuse me and also to rena asenko who is a prince william county schools graduate herself who just ended a 14-year run with eip she is essentially walking eip and one of our very own um i was also able to attend on 5 29 the play matilda at the film performing arts center i was pleased to see prince william county students as well as students from the surrounding area put on an adult award-winning show i took my son who was captivated the entire time which was wonderful to see because that's usually only the case when there's legos or pokemon involved i was able to attend the title one night at marumsko hills elementary and it was wonderfully attended full
214cafeteria staff did a great job also another joy of my heart was the cte signing night i was informed first off i'm so very proud for doug wright and the cte team for the program that they put on and um so very proud to see our students even one of our student in the audience who had to bring his little brother because he was babysitting but the comment that i heard was this was from some for some parents and some students the only time in their academic career where they were recognized and it shouldn't be the only time but i am so thankful that we as a division honor our cte students and what they decide to do when they leave prince william county schools i was able to sell sub in for justin wilke
215at potomac senior high school's freedom of decades presentation always lovely to see students engaged in research projects and with my last 18 seconds i had other things to say but what i will say is i've been hearing a lot from my elementary schools teachers and principals and administrators about how stressed teachers have been with the sol score results and i just want you to know as an elementary school parent how proud i am for all of the work that you put in to make these students ready for their sols no matter the test scores your effort is greatly appreciated and i personally acknowledge it and i'm so thankful that you continue to show up every day thank you thank you miss wall thank you mrs jackson so um i have been to a lot of
216places a lot of activities recently and it's been a real pleasure and there are a couple of reasons why i go to these activities one is to support the students in their efforts to be excellent and two is to increase my exposure in the community so that people one can talk to me and bring issues up directly to me and to so that they know um how to find me and so i've been able to go to some really great things awards night at battlefield high school where students were awarded scholarships a cassette that's that's the specialty program at battlefield they're they held a graduation within their program which was amazing governor school innovation park graduation i helped man the candy station at a bull run 8th grade dance which was crazy and super fun
217and high school career day outstanding educator ceremony band concerts middle school concerts a wellness night and blood drive and all kind and some other good things and i'm looking forward to all the graduations i'm really proud of the graduates i know it is a huge accomplishment for the class of 2022 they've been through a lot their high school especially has been affected by covid and so i encourage them to stay strong and to push forward and i'm really proud of them and i just want to say i look forward to celebrating with them at as many graduations as i can attend um i wanted to share just a couple of thoughts about my thoughts on prevailing wage i know it's not up for vote i just wanted to share things that i'm concerned about i'm
218concerned about the uncertainty in the labor market uncertainty inflation the highly fluctuating costs in the construction materials industries and i'm also concerned because we have overcrowding in our eastern end especially in the elementary schools and i'm worried that this will impact our ability to provide those schools in those classrooms to relieve that overcrowding we have the 14th high school also in the eastern end i know it's a tight market for training obtaining contractors and i'm very i'm very concerned about all that so i would ultimately just advise caution especially in this volatile financial time my concerns about collective bargaining in 30 seconds i know this is a really important decision and the impact will be felt for years to come and we should not make this decision lightly and it should not be something that
219we just do under pressure it will fundamentally change the structure of the relationship between management and workforce here in prince william county my fear is that the impact on kids has been missing from the conversation almost entirely it i also fear that we will have an increase in politics and political influence over education and make it harder for us to protect our workforce from political pressure and political tactics such as retaliation for people who do not join the union costs will be hard to determine could be very very easily escalate the laws of vague and poorly written these are all of my concerns i remain open to listening to people's opinions on this matter and i wish to say good night to everybody and happy graduation to our graduates of 2022. miss aguero thank you
220we've all had um sounds like we've all been very pretty busy this is a very busy time of year with all of the ceremonies and recognitions and things like that um i too went to see matilda it was fantastic and i saw a former student of mine a fairfax student so um i think it's it's really important to realize that our arts programs here in prince william county draw people from outside so that was pretty significant um went to the educator outstanding educator award ceremony it was great to hear about our fantastic educators i'm curious if we ever do um an um um any kind of awards for uh other educational professionals like our drivers and things like that so um the esps as we call it um so that would be something that i'd
221like to be interested in um i went to yorkshire elementary where they were doing a summer reading program they were getting kids set up with book bags and library cards and reading materials so that they can continue through the summer went to visit loch lomond for their science night they had activities for all the parents and the kids to do but they also showed all these really great displays of science projects that the kids worked on the one i would love to be invited in on was the ice cream which milk makes the best ice cream i could be your taste tester i'm just putting that out there also got to go to the automotive programs banquet at hilton high school and we didn't realize this was going to happen we um honored ed stevens
222who's the instructor there one of the things he did during this banquet was he lined up all of his students from i believe it was 1999 to the present time so there were kids kids they're adults now who came back these were wildly successful adults um he's a sounds like an amazing educator but one of them the most i don't know i thought it was really interesting that he asked his current students to stand up who had their resumes ready to pass out to people who could possibly offer them jobs so i thought that was a really a great thing for our students speaking of our students we have i went to colgan's award ceremony last night and there's over 16 million dollars in scholarships being offered to our colgan students hilton high school is
2234 million plus at this point they don't have a final number for me osborne park is on 16 million 685 295 dollars so i think that's amazing that our kids are out there doing great things um colgan baseball has a quarterfinal game tomorrow night 6 p.m uh go sharks and uh everybody enjoy the rest of your week um you're you're i know you're all busy so enjoy your your ceremonies your promotion programs and all of that mr wilk thank you um real quick in the past two weeks i've had the pleasure of doing day trips to triangle grand park ashland dumfries henderson swans creek montclair mary williams paddy potomac middle and potomac high school and made sure i made my presence and visited a lot of classrooms and stuff like that good stuff happening i
224also attended the v case conference that's for special educators down in portsmouth i also attended the forest park spring coral concert potomac shores middle school orchestra concert ashland heritage night and with ms agapor watched the forest park hogan regional uh baseball game um one of the ad you know a couple things that came up tonight um and mentioned that you know i have long advocated for sros because i know the importance our sros play within our school communities not only do our sros provide an increased level security for our schools but they become a part of our respective school communities now to the reality of the situation speaking for myself only i would love to have an sro in every building unfortunately there are not enough officers on our current force or even nationally right
225now similar to the decline of teacher applicants there is a decline in the number of applicants pursuing law enforcement those new classes of hires you see they're filling gaps as a result of attrition taking place across the country due to the national climate and often the demonization of law enforcement i'm not surprised we need more qualified individuals applying to our police department i encourage any of those interested to go online to join pwcpd.org and consider a career in law enforcement now until then we have the fortunate opportunity of being in an area with an immense number of retired military and those who have served in law enforcement many of these individuals have already reached out and expressed the desire to volunteer in our schools we should use these resources and provide opportunities to these individuals
226at the beginning of next school year before not being reappointed to the safe schools advisory council in january the committee was finalizing opportunities for not only a county-wide expansion of the watchdog program but to create programs to address the increased behavioral issues confronting students in our middle and high schools there needs to be more programs in place to address school security concerns as opposed to not having enough sros to staff every school thank you for your time thank you i just want to take a moment and thank haymarket for inviting me to see matilda it was a spectacular and thank you to marcelo middle school for the invitation to listen to the choir it was a beautiful concert thank you to the brunsville district high school for inviting me to the awards ceremony i love
227cheering on the graduating tigers i was also honored to attend the cte signing day and i brought my own kids to watch and celebrate with the students and their families on this day so they could see these motivated role models congratulated congratulations to all those who were nominated to the outstanding educators award including brunsfield's secondary new teacher of the year natalie hackman of gainesville high school some of the criteria's selection of the principal of the year included the ability to demonstrate and encourage creativity and innovation foster cooperation between school and community maintain a continuing dialogue with students and parents and so on congratulations to bristol run elementary school's principal rondo jack also congratulations to those who own the national board certification teacher certification that is an extensive rigorous process just wow and great job as
228an educator i know firsthand the importance of inclusion and acceptance valuing all students prince william county schools offers several programs in addition to unified sports which serve our students with special needs including fun friends at colgan and freedom high school bistros one of these programs is also at patriot high school employ employees started in 2011 with a class of one and now has six blocks and 11 business partners employs a high school cte program that includes both class and community-based learning employees a high school ctel program that also facilitates their entry into suitable occupations in accordance with their individualized educational needs and aptitudes and interests through community-based instruction students develop job skills through the completion of internships and paid employment the strategic plan has a goal to improve this program employee provides students with the
229skills that facilitate their entry into occupations in accordance with their individualized educational needs i support initiatives that promote individualized high expectations last week was heartbreaking thank you to dr mcdade for your words tonight regarding security as a parent last week was hard as an educator last week was hard i appreciate the audit as it is an example of the growth mindset needed during these ever-changing times i hope everyone has a good night and stay safe there being nothing further to come before the sport are and adequately declare this meeting adjourned