001[Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] do [Music] so [Music] do [Music] foreign [Music] do [Music] do [Music] do [Music] do [Music] welcome to cooper still of virginia i'm andrew anderson i'm the plant manager of the facility here we are a structural steel fabricator of building components we bring in the material we cut it we fit it up we weld it we paint it and deliver it we are the skeleton of the building [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] do [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] um i'd like for us to have a moment of silence and stand to say the pledge of allegiance please i pledge allegiance to the flag of the united states of america and to the republic for which it stands one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice
002thank everybody for bearing with us we running just a little bit late so we have one member who is joining us via computer so i have to read the statement of electronic participation in meetings for remote locations according to the amherst county school board policy bdd a school board member may participate from a remote location due to medical condition or personal matter that prevents the members physical attendance with the approval by the majority vote of the members present at the primary meeting location in order to offer this opportunity to the remote board member a quorum of the board must be physically present at the primary location and arrangements have been made for the voice of the remote participant to be heard by all do we have a quorum of the board at this time mr
003greiser are you able to hear us at this time please respond verbally so that we can confirm he's good yes okay seeing that we have both the criteria criteria stipulated by policy bdd at this time i asked for a motion from the board that mr greiser be allowed to participate in the meeting remotely with all the discussion and voting afforded him so moved thank you uh mr justice i have a second second miss liggin thank you uh all in favor aye hi so moved thank you is it agenda okay so we're gonna move on to uh approval of the agenda uh do you have a motion to approve the agenda like to make a motion to approve the agenda thank you miss bird have a second second thank you mr rossi uh all in favor
004all right thank you so moving on to 2.0 so in last month's meeting we were able to recognize ms minter from central elementary and uh ms reichert was unable to make it that night so we want to make sure that we also recognize her we'd like to congratulate jessica reichert third grade teacher at elan elementary for being selected among lynchburg living magazine's top teachers in the region this year ms reichert was among 10 teachers selected from school divisions throughout central virginia jessica serves as a mentor in amherst county public schools dedicating her time to preparing our future generations of educators to effectively serve our students we're so grateful to have miss reichert in amherst county along with all of our amazing educators making a positive impact on the lives of every child every day in
005amherst county public schools we are thankful that they are part of our family and ms reich we would like to once again congratulate you on this very wonderful honor congratulations [Applause] so now we will move on to public comments we have several people who have listed that like to speak tonight so when you come forward please state your name and are we going with address is that what it is or is it we'll decide that at the end gotcha name and address please so first we have laura lauren ballet my name is lauren belt and i live in forest virginia um good evening members of the board my name is lauren ballen and i am an art educator at elon elementary in temperance elementary i am also our southwest regional president of virginia art education
006association and a member of alpha delta kappa i would like to wish you a happy youth art month music in our school month and theater in our schools month i know that many of our amherst art educators share my belief that the arts provide a limitless benefit to all of our students research from the americans for the arts and arts education partnership has also shown impressive benefits of arts education on entire school culture especially student motivation attitudes and attendance numerous reports discuss the ways that increase access and involvement in arts education encourage students to stay in school succeed in life and in work the arts strengthen critical thinking skills encourage student engagement with school in general and fosters creativity research also shows that the arts enhanced writing quality and early reading skills contribute to post-secondary
007success and improved test scores by investing in an arts education from kindergarten through high school we can support student achievement and build a strong foundation for lifelong success i urge our our county to continue funding supporting and providing arts opportunities for all for our students of all ages i have some pens and brochures on the benefits of arts education that i wanted to share with you our local youth art month art show is currently on display across the street at second stage i invite you to go view it before the end of the month i believe that all of our schools are represented with um i think we're able to have up to six students per school um also this evening i sent out an invitation to our region's youth art month virtual art show
008via email all of our elementary schools thank you so much have participated in this art show thank you for giving our students the opportunity to learn to grow and to become more empathetic more understanding and compassionate through an arts education thank you miss ballen next we have mandy mays good evening ladies and gentlemen of the board my name is mandy mays i live at 1238 grandma's hill road in amherst virginia um first of all i'd like to say for giving me the opportunity to speak to you this evening i am the k-2 autism teacher at central elementary school and i wanted to come to you tonight to raise awareness about the individuals that are serving in our adaptive programs but before i express what i feel we should all agree is detrimental i would like
009to explain a normal day in which we teach we serve children in my classroom with varying needs these can include functional academics social skills communication and toileting assistance with these needs we also observe and assist students in decreasing behaviors that can include physical aggression property destruction and self-injurious behaviors just to name a few having said that individuals that work with students within our same population with the same deficits and or challenges outside of a public school system are paid on average 36 000 a year this is based on other companies within virginia servicing those students with autism and other developmental delays currently in amherst county the starting salary for paraprofessionals working anywhere within the school system is twelve dollars and eighty cents per hour which roughly comes out to be 17 900 per year this
010is less than half of the average of what others are making working with our population in virginia and i feel that we can all agree that this is not acceptable while compensation must be addressed i would also like to add that when individuals are hired for my program they're often lacking an existing skill set or training related to the needs of the students in my program while some training is provided and our staff work incredibly hard the needs of our students are so significant that at times we're unable to meet their needs when we are unable to meet these needs they are often referred to private day schools outside of our district and based on my research these schools can cost as much as fifty thousand to seventy thousand dollars per year for one student
011how beneficial would it be to invest that money in providing more training opportunities to our employees so they may learn the skills to help and continue to keep our children within our school system we state that our mission statement is every child every day but without adequate compensation and more training for our employees it will continue to be harder to fulfill that mission please consider looking into our adaptive programs and i would be happy to sit down with you any time to discuss this further thank you so much for your time thank you thank you mrs mace next we have don pool hi good evening my name is dawn poole i'm at 2732 buffalo springs turnpike uh i want to thank you again for your time tonight um i have a lot that i want
012to say not enough time to say it in three minutes and no um no responses to emails that i've been sending phone calls so a little disappointed with that do hope that we can get better at that as a school board i want to try and focus on three issues tonight the first one being the covid policy i'm disappointed that we're still talking about it um i think it's evident in dr arnold's memorandum that we just need to go ahead and consider that we're in the endemic and we need to move forward in that way in regards to the recommendations or the proposals i'm fine with the middle road i prefer that we just stop contact tracing and quarantining like some of the other schools around our area have done but as compromise i see
013no issue with the middle road of continuing to do notifying of contact tracing with no quarantining unless the parent chooses to quarantine their own child i think that we do still have to focus on the things that our kids are still having to go through in school that are still not normal such as eating lunch in classrooms i'd like to see them get back into the cafeterias to have that social interaction with kids outside of their own classroom and i also don't really feel that social distancing is something that we need to continue to force down our kids throats if they want to hug each other if they want to give each other high fives they should be allowed to do so overall for covett i think we have more pressing issues at this point
014within our country and within our county and i think we just need to move past it moving on to the school budget there's a lot uh that the school budget doesn't address in my opinion um we i didn't see anything where we're going to spend any funds to catch students up who have been affected you know the k through 2 students that have been affected with you know being behind because of the mask wearing and not being able to see their teachers and you know the english and the reading and things that are happening in those areas there is an obvious hr resource gap within our county um i wasn't aware of some of the things that the person who before me spoke um but i do think that we are not competitive overall in
015regards to our rates um for our teachers especially our special ed teachers i'm very shocked by what i just heard um as a resource professional as a as a human resource that's what i do for a living you have to be competitive if you want quality teachers um i don't think we're competitive across the board for substitutes for janitors for bus drivers and i think that our budget has room to address these things it doesn't address reading our students for the workforce is that it thank you okay cool thank you again three minutes is not enough guys next is michelle hughes hello i'm michelle hughes i live at 220 briar cliff lane madison heights virginia two four five seven two first of all i want to say love seeing the faces love it you know
016my grandkids going to school loves seeing her friends but going back to the contact tracing it's got to stop guys it's got to stop kids need to be normal are y'all going to start tell us we have to test for the flu how about the stomach virus stomach virus has been going around for eight weeks i didn't get a phone call that my granddaughter was around somebody that had the stomach flu i don't get a phone call my two granddaughters around somebody with the flu it's a virus it's here it's not going anywhere i remember i have a daughter that's 30 a dollar that's 27 and 23 22 excuse me when they were in school all i ever heard was you need to get your kids there don't let them miss school it's important if
017they miss school they're gonna fall behind 45 days is unacceptable of missing school my six-year-old granddaughter 45 days now they're talking about let's hold her back no that's y'all's problem fix it get the teachers in there to catch her up it's not my problem that in 45 days the kid never had covet never tested positive for covet but now you want me to stick a swab upper nose not happening read the directions talk to your pediatricians swab's only supposed to go up somebody's nose every 36 hours our kids are damaged and i'm not blaming it on you you didn't bring covet here it's not your fault but it's a virus it's not going anywhere we've got to live with it and number two in the last six to 12 months how many kids in this
018area has been in the hospital with covet been admitted for covet in this area zero how many children in this area in the last six months to a year has died from covet in this area zero one child dimes too many i agree but we're not worried about the flu flu kills more kids than the covet has our kids have been living for this for three years it's time to stop thank you miss hughes next is william hughes good afternoon board how are y'all that's good uh my name is william hughes i live at 220 brock leaf lane madison heights virginia 24572 my wife stole most of my thunder so um just to let you guys know um my granddaughter is really upset me and it really upset her um to miss 45 days from
019school [Music] and not even have coveted it breaks my heart because we're supposed to be teaching our kids and at this moment with them being segregated also is something that doesn't need to be tolerated period with being vaccinated and unvaccinated that's got to stop i mean tonight stop right now between vaccinated and unvaccinated in california there's a lawsuit going on it is the la chat charter school and that's just going to show you that people are starting to stand up and they're tired of this mess so i'm asking you all as a board because you all are supposed to be looking at the best interest of the parents and their children please let's look at this tonight and let's do something about it that's what you guys are here for to represent the parents and
020the children so please i'm asking again please do something about it thank you thank you sir is there any other is any members from the audience who cares to speak seeing none we will move on 4.0 action items yes sir so at our meeting last thursday or two thursdays ago you were presented with a proposed operational budget last thursday we spent the day here discussing in detail that budget one thing i want to to remind you of is that um we are still going to be waiting quite a bit of time for the general assembly to come to some some compromise over the the senate and the house versions of their budget so i even heard that they were going to leave session and then come back so it might not be until april where
021we're going to get a completed budget from the state but that being said we still can adopt a budget we actually are going to need to adopt a budget because we have to give it to the board of supervisors so they can do their work on the entire county's budget if and when there is a budget produced by the state that requires us to amend our budget then we can do that as well but uh so i wanted you guys to have that information one of the things that was asked in our retreat was about fuel prices mr rossi asked about fuel prices miss um lukanich and i worked on this and i'd like to show you a document this document so it's not up there you'll you'll recognize this as our facilities uh maintenance
022plan yeah i know i see it okay yeah i see it that's not fail let me talk through it first right so you know that we have a facilities maintenance plan in our operational budget that we have we've put funds in for two buses painting a school and putting a roof uh on the transportation building you can see that in the line 2022-23 i believe it's about in that line what we would like to do is to because this is already in our budget that was proposed what we would like to do is to put those items push those items as far back into next year as possible to account for what might happen with our fuel for the court over the course of next year so what i'm saying is is that if fuel
023remains as high as it is and it stays consistently as high as it is that we're obviously going to be required to have a lot more than we currently have budgeted which is about 530 540 000 if we were to push that those items off and move that money into our fuel lines we would have over a million dollars in our fuel line so in essence we would be doubling our fuel line to take care of any i guess extended pay or increases in fuel costs and so we feel like that that would be we don't have to change the budget we would just be deferring that those those items we can we can push them into the following year we can also move them into the cip as well and deal with them in
024our cip uh budget and so we feel like we have a budget if we can do this that can cover the fuel lines for next year does that make sense we're not saying we want to not do buses and not paint schools but what we will know is that sometime january february moving into that to the end of the year we will know whether or not gas prices have come down or they're going to stay up and so if they start to come down then we can start to to purchase those things and start to contract with folks to come in and paint the schools that we need and so we can stay on schedule that's what we want to do but this is this i believe will create a cushion for us that would
025deal with uh the increased fuel prices right now thank you dr arnold what would um i guess what would be the worst case scenario if we had to push things out till next year are we is there anything there that is absolutely crucial well we talked to dr wells earlier today as well about the buses we our fleet is still uh in in a place where the the buses that we have uh can do the job we certainly we put the buses in there every year because we want to stay on schedule we don't want to ever have that that year where we have to buy six to eight buses we don't want to be to do that that's why we continue to do two three every year uh the painting that's aesthetic that's not
026a a need certainly we want to see that and uh mr rooks i think has said that they can they can make do another several months on is that true it doesn't okay yes so those those are the items you know we feel like they're not crucial and especially when you're when you're weighing that against getting students to school every day yeah you know that that that becomes our biggest and most important thing to do okay thank you any other discussion from the board on the budget or on this item either either any of it go ahead thank you madam master chairman whatever dr arnold um in looking at helping our kids with resources to help catch up has there been any discussion about tutoring maybe in the evenings not from our teachers per se
027but maybe from community volunteers doing for reading circles um math drills just assistance in that is that something that can be considered dr norman would you like to speak to remediation programs yes i'd be more than happy to so each year our schools are provided financial support in regards to our before school after school or during the day remediation programs so they get an allotment of funds in regards to that we have all of our schools currently right now have set we've set aside funding for that they've submitted their plans for remediation or interventions supports for students along with that this year we also provided some additional when the school saw some specific drops or needs or a child was in a virtual program last year it was coming back this year and was significantly
028below we've put into place a before program or during their the school day where teachers are actually paid additional um i believe it's for their planning period to come in and actually tutor children during that time frame one-on-one small group so it's a combination we have probably about six or seven different programs going on right now in all of our schools that deal with that and and for volunteers mr gallagher is currently working on a volunteer program each school has been asked to give us what types of things they need from volunteers so each school is going to be a little different because they're all set up a little different and so once we already have those lists and then mr gallagher is working on how to get out the word that we need folks
029to come help and then to then to train those folks because we we just don't want to send people into buildings without any sort of training so it would follow very similar to the student or the uh substitute teacher training as well is that correct yeah that's good that is correct we we've had a limited number of folks already sign up i will admit there's been some delays with the billboard that we purchased going up but that should if not up now then it should be within a few days to garner more support it's been out through social media because we want that community volunteer program honestly most of the tasks and things that they are asked to do are not necessarily primarily instructional they're more supervisory in nature and being able to provide breaks
030and other support to kind of give teachers other opportunities but they'll free up teachers to to actually do that correct work that sounds good um mr chairman um dr norman and dr arnold what has been the response are you finding those resources or that the parents and students are going it's being used to its fullest extent or finding mediocre response so during the middle of the day we have a little bit more opportunity because we can hand pick those those students that we know need targeted assisted tier three support when we talk about before and after school we truly try to work with the parents because there's transportation concerns or issues that we have i will tell you ms campbell at the transportation department has been phenomenal in making sure that if we have a
031group of students that needs that activity bus to run or something like that they actually do that we have a program that we just implemented at the high school with our athletes or anybody who wants to stay after to actually make sure that they're catching up or that they're not getting behind because they want to stay engaged in either their drama performances or band or any athletic events like that so i i will say that the the students know that it's there the teachers know that they try to get kids in and we're doing everything we can to help parents meet the needs of their kids um yeah and i i think a good example of the the need or people understanding the need is with our summer school program uh last year we had
032the largest number of students attend summer school than i believe ever we've had ever miss lincoln because lincoln can speak to forever and so we had a huge crowd last year in summer school we if you look at the cares budget again for summer school this year we're investing significant amount of money in that as well to to meet those needs because i think what what folks need to understand is that it's taken two years to get to this point it's not going to get fixed in three months it's going to take time and so we're going to need all of the time that we can possibly get including the summers including before school and after school but we also have to be cognizant that we're talking about children and they need breaks and they
033don't you know you just can't they just can't be in school and doing school all the time so we have to understand that as well but um i think the big thing is that understanding that it's going to happen over time instead of in a you know snap at the fingers kind of thing last question mr chairman um how are the what are the different ways that parents are being informed of these resources so we automatically with our remediation program the principals send out information either with a letter the teachers send out information i know that the high school did school messenger just to make sure that everybody knew about it but also our directly school counselors are contacting those that are missing credits for graduation and kind of getting those students in we have
034our case managers who are contacting parents regularly to keep them informed so it it really is and i will give credit where credit is due to our teachers and our administrators it is all hands on deck to make sure parents stay informed and that they're given that opportunity to make the decision on what their child can handle we do have parents who have chosen not to have their children participate even though we strongly suggest any opportunity that they can take to do so um but you know that's that's their choice in that thank you very much any other questions from the board mr rossi um dr arnold have we contacted local university to see if there have been any students interested in volunteering their time and what about senior students are they also in with
035the fight with the rest of us to try to help out the younger ones the students in our schools the the k-12 students are our high school students we have a teachers for tomorrow program which that's a dual enrolled course that they get college credit these are these are students that want to be teachers and part of their their learning opportunities is going to elementary schools and doing that kind of thing i know mr gallagher has worked several over the course of several years working with colleges trying to get more input i think they have limited the amount of time they've come into the building like that that's self-imposed kind of that they're they're staying away from schools um we're if you want to speak to that a little bit more mr gallagher there we
036go that's correct but however we do actually have programs and specifically with liberty university and was in one school and now will be spread to two where we do have field placements they're typically the students come in in certain classes with 10 hours of field placement opportunities and they utilize that for tutoring supports for those schools which is a great idea that was limited in the height of covid when there was limited practicum students coming into our schools but that is back up and running and are we still offering online learning for support where child could use that time at home are you talking outside of the school day right right so so we have several programs that take place um of course our students our parents who have chosen for their students to go
037100 virtual we use virtual virginia we also have two programs where students can it's called the our mentum program lancer academy where our students can participate and take courses that they couldn't fit into their schedule or maybe they did not pass those courses last year and they want to recoup that credit or that experience we have that all the way down through the middle school and then at our elementary all the way k through 12 we have the our learning management program a learning platform system through canvas where they can log in at any time review any of the courses the materials the resources the videos that their teachers have done for them so they can kind of go back and revisit concepts that have already been taught all right and last question say the
038purge the parents didn't have the social media contacts whatever what what is the best way for a parent to get their child enrolled in some of these programs in other words if if i have a child that's slipping in math and science or english and science how do they get involved to make sure their child is getting all opportunity right the first point of contact always should be the classroom teacher they know that child best and they know where they are in their learning spectrum the second is to be in contact with the school principal thank you okay thank you mr rossi any other questions okay you need a motion on the budget is that correct if you're comfortable okay is the board comfortable with me with um making a motion on the budget tonight
039so can i have a motion um okay i was just someone else had something else to say before i made the most okay i i i'm concerned with uh one board member not here and one remotely if that's something that we have to do tonight or can we postpone until the next meeting i don't know what the timeline is for so we we have a we can have a special meeting next week on next thursday the 17th because i have to present it to the board of supervisors on the 22nd which is a tuesday after that mr greiser can you hear us i can i'm and i did talk to miss thompson today as well and and she did not have any further questions about it from that standpoint are you okay with that you
040just happened then um and i agree that we had a wonderful workshop and i think we've had um question and answer session about the proposed budget so at this time mr chair i make a motion if we accept the proposed fy 2022-23 budget as presented by the superintendent thank you miss legging do i have a second thank you mr rossi all in favor hi opposed okay mr arnold dr yes um let's see dr norman are you gonna take this one for me the chantel agreement so um we currently have used shintel as our provider for our internet access services and supports we have had that company with amherst county public schools for i believe we're going on six years now that contract was our contract is up for renegotiations we provided that information to you
041i believe before the board retreat at your last board meeting for you to review uh this is the contract that is that is actually it's it's a better contract that we than we currently have right now uh they have given us a lot of additional items because of we're in the middle of a pandemic and things that we normally would have had to pay for they've put into place and are in and servicing we have had a phenomenal um time with them in pro them providing us service uh customer service and support i've been very very pleased with shintel i know that if you talk to mr goldman who oversees our technology department he would say the same thing and i'm sure dr wells would would make that same statement but i'll answer any questions
042that you may have in regards to it this is something that uh i need a vote on uh in regards to this particular contract so that dr arnold can sign it and we can move forward with our next so we won't have lapse in service and and it do need to know it has been vetted as all of our contracts are vetted by legal counsel so it is an appropriate contract okay any questions or discussions from the board okay mr chairman um i just wanted to clarify um this is for the types of services that we've had it's for our schools and we're not talking about people being concerned about going out into the country to different homes absolutely thank you for clarifying yeah this is to our school okay great thank you and and
043more benefits yay any other okay can i get a motion to approve motion to approve thank you mr rossi and i got a second second thank you miss berg uh all in favor aye aye all opposed okay just make it sure thank you you're welcome moving on now to action items the consent agenda dr arnold yes um as as these are action uh consent agent items uh 5.01 5.02 and 5.03 uh need to be approved as uh presented it's the normal superintendent's personnel the minutes and uh the approval of the special education annual plan that those are the assurances those are those are telling the state that we will in fact follow the special education uh rules and regulations these are all things that happen every single year do you need a motion to approve
044the consensus all three at the same time okay mr chairman yes ma'am um could i make a request that we actually turned it on [Laughter] thank you just warming up we don't have anything to present with this specifically okay for the consent agenda there's no that's all on your board docs i'll move for approval miss kim because thank you mr legging do i have a second thank you mr greiser all discussions move to discussion thank you mr chairman yes in the approvals of the special education annual plan part b flow through application there were a couple items on it that were um that i needed more information on one of them was the surrogate parent and what the roles were defined with that and um then the other had to do with um the direction
045towards homeschool private school or other parent placed programs um question would be can we table this one for next month when miss thompson is here to discuss it as well as mr greiser or can we just approve the other two items and then discuss this one further can i ask mr neighbors what his timeline is yes so the application is at the end of april so we do have a little bit of time to be able to do that but i'd also be happy to answer questions tonight if there are some from the board okay mr chairman i'll ask questions thank you very much so mr neighbors um is it mr doctor it's mister okay thank you mr neighbors um when i was looking at the the sixth bullet point it says surrogate parents will
046be appointed when appropriate to act as advocates um to serve the educational interests of children ages two to twenty one inclusive who are suspected of being or are determined to be disabled um surrogate parents has a lot of associations with it that don't necessarily go with education is it possible to change this to educational advocate so that's actually a regulatory term under the federal law and that only relates to students that are in a non-typical environment in regards to who has custodial or the custodial relationship with them so we have some students for example that are placed in our division in foster care so technically in that situation the dss agency that placed them has guardianship of that student even though it is typically the foster parent that becomes the surrogate parent for that student
047we have to under regulation identify who we have identified as the consent authority for that particular student so they become the surrogate parent and that's an official process that we follow it's a very unusual process we don't have that very often but in those situations we're required to do so okay and then the other question was um in the 10th bullet point it says all children ages 2 to 21 inclusive who have disabilities and need special education and related services and who are parentally placed in a private school or home school that is located within the geographic boundaries of the la are identified located evaluated and provided services in accordance with the results of a timely and meaningful consultation um is this a situation where they're trying are they trying to say that children that
048are in those environments should their parents choose to can have them tested and acquired services yes that avenue is available to them yes ma'am okay wow is it possible for us to change the wording there to be services are made available to so that particular bullet is just speaking about the child find responsibility so ultimately what that means is is that we're in communication with any of our private schools if there's a home school consortium making them aware that there's a process they can follow if they suspect that the student has a disability there's actually another facet called proportionate set-aside that deals with the actual services provided to those students but this is just the child find competitive though so if i'm understanding you correctly this is a assuring that contact will be made to
049those different organizations and informing them of services that are available yes ma'am that's correct okay last question that's fine so on the last bullet of our page here it talks about policies and procedures will be in effect that are designed to prevent the inappropriate over identification under identification or dis disproportionate representation by race and ethnicity of children as children with disabilities including children with disabilities with a particular impairment my only concern with this is the disproportionate word because to me it implies that there's going to be an equal number but sometimes that's not sometimes that's not the case and so i would hate to see um someone lose out on a service because it's deemed that too many in that group have already received services right and i'll i'll have two parts to my answer
050so first and foremost never part of the consideration for eligibility we find it based on the merits of the data in front of us even if we knew and that's not something that i track day to day if we knew that was going to be the case we would still move forward with the data that was in front of us this really talks about proportionate to our community data so looking at the different race and ethnicity codes that we have with our students our population as a whole that's the data they're looking at to ensure that we're not disproportionately representing one particular group of students in one particular disability category another question sir how do we deem that it's this disproportionate um if in a particular area aside from race we can we'll just talk
051about socioeconomic or um maybe family structure we're seeing maybe this group is like 10 of our population but of our children receiving services in this area are from that group is that considered disproportionate so it depends a couple of different factors that go into it and a lot of those calculations come from the bdoe if they do find to be something disproportionate they talk to us first so there's an explanation for that and sometimes there are just factors that are involved in those decisions that might lead to that being the case ultimately if there is any fault or we have practices that for some reason lead to that we would need to correct it but it's more about ensuring that our practices themselves aren't leading the disproportionality or we don't have any policies or procedures
052or even those kind of things that are leading to that disproportionality yeah thank you absolutely any other questions from the board so we have a motion and a second um i'll ask for a boat so all in favor aye aye aye all opposed so caring all right thank you so next we have dr wells and uh solar all right mr chair or vice chair which everyone you want to be called tonight and latest gym of the board uh tonight we have uh administrative action so first we have a presentation for you on solar energy tonight we have mr dave ciccarelli he's the president of kratos renewable energy services and technologies he's going to give you a presentation on some solar information we've been uh working with him on over the past year or so the
053board members that the new board members may not be aware but the previous board about two years ago three years ago asked us to start looking at alternative energy sources and ways to power our schools so we started looking into this and then uh we had the covet 19 virus strike so we had to put things on hold a little bit but now we're getting back back in those conversations so dave's going to talk to you a little bit about where we are in the county with the solar initiative as we speak so a little house cleaning since the tv apparently doesn't work uh he's given out handouts you you've got this work in here you've got the hard copies of the powerpoint and the spreadsheets uh and i've provided hard copies additional for the
054two uh absent board members and obviously the powerpoints coming up on here uh this shouldn't take more than hopefully a half hour less than that if you all have questions want to stop me you know it's kind of a discussion it's not it's not forced fit in this direction so thank you for having me uh my name is dave chicarelli i'm the president of kratos renewable energy uh services and technologies a little background myself i'm uh an 81 graduate of the us naval academy got a background in engineering two kids went to navy oh beat army spent five years in the marine corps and i've been uh i've worked for a variety of companies uh big accounting firms i ran my own business uh for 20 years uh in community association management i've always had
055an interest in this and through a series of events that with classmates from the academy that i won't get into i got into this business my job as kratos uh we are the uh advanced party arms eyes ears for uh what are called epcs engineering procurement and construction companies in the solar industry those are the people that actually design and build the systems we have agreements with a company in mechanicsburg pennsylvania solar renewable energy which we'll be talking about tonight another company in atlanta and a nationwide company and we chase we look for roofs green fields places to put solar we understand what it takes uh once we have a client that that is interested we bring in the engineers uh as dr arnold said we've had a number of discussions over the past year
056with dr wells dr arnold with gary explaining this process what it works kind of educating them on this so i'm going to give you solar 101 and then we'll go into the spreadsheet and i'll briefly cover uh how this thing will essentially be able to to be brought to bear and actually put money in your pocket it's a net positive cash flow to the administration solar renewable energy my teammate has completed over 100 solar projects to date and their specialty is public entities non-profits school systems uh county uh state administration things like that and also uh prisons water treatment facilities you'd be surprised how much power some of these facilities take i'm pushing the middle thing here the next button there we go one hour of sunlight hitting the earth in one hour uh generates
057more energy than the entire world of all power sources uses in a year i thought that was kind of interesting it's a whole lot of stuff now obviously you're not going to get impacted with 10 buildings in amherst county with all of that power but a significant amount of energy that could be translated through the movement of electrons to to create electrical power can be brought to bear renewable just that it doesn't wear out until we're all long dead and gone millions of years from now and the sun burns out we're gonna have sunlight coming here so there will always be power how it works the sun radiates onto a solar panel which has solar cells in it or chemical cells like so many other electrical power sources it causes the movement of electrons which
058generates direct current electricity which is then fed into an inverter in the system which converts direct current into alternating current which is what goes into your house that's the kind if you stick your finger in a socket it's going to kill you uh direct won't but that's what you need to actually drive current if you think of it in terms of water water flowing through a pipe that's your amperage that's your current flowing through and that pushes a resistance which could be a light bulb think of a light bulb like a paddle wheel at an old mill as water's flowing by it turns it turns the light on moves the mill that type of thing so this is just another way of creating the movement of those electrons and it doesn't always happen just while
059the sun shines it can go radiate through clouds commercial solar panels the physical panel itself is about six and a half feet tall it's a little over three feet wide it weighs about 50 pounds our installations we really try to stay away from roof penetration we don't want to compromise the water tight integrity of a building so the systems that we would put on a rooftop and in in the 10 buildings in amherst there's only one high school that we're looking at a rooftop because the ground options were not really readily available they're going to be ballasted essentially they'll be tied to what amounts to concrete blocks that are weighted to withstand a certain amount of wind things like that so they don't blow off the roof it translates to about five to eight pounds
060per square foot which all these roofs are are able to withstand uh that much additional weight with no problem at all and since you've got new roofs we don't really have to worry about taking them off later for a roofing project bloomberg has over the years become the source for solar panel rating they have tier 1 tier two and tier three panels tier one is the best uh they're the most robust the most efficient the highest quality that's what we use and it translates into leverage with lending sources and you'll see some loan options here to buy out this system over time and we can get the best rates from solar lenders by using tier one panels so that's what we go with a little quick uh graphs about solar capacity if you look on
061this one commercial and industrial is the dark red sector so obviously not as much as as utility uh you get dominion energy or florida power and light putting in 100 acres of you know 50 100 megawatts of solar that's you take i-10 out of jacksonville heading towards tallahassee and look off to the right there's this sea of solar panels that's what's called a utility scale type thing you fall into the category of cni commercial and industrial as opposed to a residential rooftop or something like that so your systems are going to be bigger than what i put on my house but a lot smaller than what dominion would put into a field somewhere say they're doing a deal with amazon or something like that u.s solar installations again cni's the yellow part they've increased and
062virginia in passing the virginia clean economy act in 2020 became what amounts to a solar friendly state not the most solar friendly state in the country but more than they were the key to solar power any renewable source of energy is what's called net metering typically when when uh appalachian power or central virginia electric cooperative comes to your house they hook up a meter that meter reads power one way with power coming into your house used by you to turn on a light turn on your tv run your computer what have you since you now have on these buildings if you install this you've got a power source essentially if you're putting a power plant on the ground next to the building on the roof power can go the other way excess power can go
063the other way which is good for the utility because the legislature has leveraged a requirement on the utility to produce such and such a percentage of their power from renewable resources or they get penalized and we'll get into how that benefits you as well but this meter is what makes that work and dominion recognized the benefit in this kind of saw the writing on the wall early on appalachian power's a little late to the game james irvin the town manager for rocky mount who was the chair of the virginia counties association of counties and municipalities he was the chair of the apco appalachian power steering committee and historically up until about a year year and a half ago appalachian power did not allow net metering for public rate payers of which your school system is
064a public rate payer they have come around they've renegotiated the tariff on that and as of early last year that's changed they're now in line we saw an opportunity in marketing to uh states and or counties and municipalities in southwest virginia apco people like yourself uh who were kind of the forgotten bastard stepchildren a lot of their solar companies were going after virginia beach northern virginia the dominion territories which were kind of low hanging fruit i thought this is going to come i talked to mr urban and so we've marketed a number of counties i presented to the school board in bland county they were talking to carroll county a couple other ones in kind of initial discussions with them but we feel that this is this is beneficial obviously how do you make money
065there are two revenue sources when you put solar on your buildings around your buildings number one you're not going to pay as much per kilowatt hour of power that you're paying appalachian power number two there's a mechanism by which the state legislature holds their feet to the fire to produce this energy and say they say you've got to produce 10 15 20 of your energy across your entire grid in virginia with renewable resources wind solar what have you there are two ways you can do it appalachian power you can go and get some land and build a utility scale project as opposed to building an oil or coal or nuclear plant or what have you and do it that way or you can purchase what are called renewable energy credits in terms of solar it's
066an s-rec a solar renewable energy credit and the way this works nationwide every megawatt hour that's one million watt hours transfer of power flowing through that stream that you generate that your system generates whoever you are you generate one s-rack and s-rex are like stock shares they're traded on a market across the country and their value varies relatively in proportion to the strength of the solar laws in the state virginia is not the strongest state but it's strong in a lot of other states strongest state right not really a state district of columbia s-rex are trading for about 423 dollars per wreck right now massachusetts new jersey 200-300 virginia right now is still developing their s-rec policy if i'd given this pitch a year ago i would say we use the wholesale rate from the
067pennsylvania new jersey maryland utility wholesale belt kind of trunk lines that a lot of these companies get power that essentially there are big power line systems that run from new jersey down into virginia and that rate which you'll see on the spreadsheet we'll get to is 11 which is an extremely conservative estimate for how much you would get for each megawatt hour that you would quote unquote sell back to uh to appalachian power uh right now we have a high level of confidence that through the course of the 40-year project that we're going to present that number is closer to 18. and that dramatically that actually changes from what you'll see in the spreadsheet it puts another 1.2 1.3 million in your pocket over 40 years so not an insignificant way to make money so
068again savings in power you can be paying less per kilowatt hour and you can sell s-rex that you generate that your systems generate because you own the system you can sell it back two types of uh systems here power purchase agreement where you in general don't own the system but you can buy and then a power service agreement as you look here the utility is in orange you are the host you're in yellow and we are kind of everything else uh the entity that would install the system that you would contract with is not solar renewable energy it would be a special purpose entity probably an llc that we collectively would set up just for the purpose of this project and we do that for tax reasons to get you the most tax benefit possible
069so you can look on here uh you're receiving power from the on-site photovoltaic system um and you're selling stuff back to the utility indirectly through the through the market and uh obviously as the sun shines and and even with some cloud cover you're not buying power from appalachian you're buying you're essentially you're buying power from yourself for free once you own the system if you get to that point it's free power and time to think comes you don't pay anything irs regulations say that you have the option after year six with a power service agreement which we're going to discuss to purchase the system which has definite benefits this is a nominal appalachian power bill there owned by american electric power out of i think cleveland area dr wells dr arnold provided us initially 2019-20
070bills a year's worth of bills for all of your buildings so we could see what's looking at we've zoomed in and looked at where the meters are so that the measurements as far as the distance from the array to the meters that we're feeding we're feeding the big meters on these things is minimized to the extent possible so there's a minimum amount of power loss uh when the power gets to the building uh that uh provision of those bills has been upgraded just about two weeks ago dr arnold's got us the the the bills through 2021 so we've got very current post-covet data when you've got children back in your building so it's a it's a more accurate reflection of the actual power usage whereas the previous bills we had there was a lot of
071downtime where the buildings were dark and cold helioscope is the industry standard software that helps design these systems essentially think of google earth with a whole mess of engineering and sun related calculations where we can zoom on a building we can look at all the roof furniture stuff that we can't build on you've got air conditioning units up there you've got pipes you've got access points this designs the system around there it takes into account how far above the equator you are in terms of average daily hours of sunlight per year obviously we're not as good as say miami-dade county but we're a lot better than boston in here i think we're about 35 degrees north latitude so it takes that into account it takes into account shading from trees mountains things like that and
072it does some excruciatingly detailed calculations you can look through here i'm not gonna explain all these terms the next two slides afterwards uh but you've got iridescence you've got you know kind of angle of impact of the sun all this is taken into account so that we've got a level of confidence when we say this is going this system will be able to provide x number of percent of power for your buildings and this is the cost savings that you'll realize helioscope is the tool for that i'm quickly going to go through your 10 buildings to show where they're going to go most of these you're going to see are ground mount systems ground mounts are cheaper and they're more efficient in general across the board than roof mount systems and as you'll see only
073the high school high school is the only building where we did not have ground mount options primarily do the athletic fields so we're going with a roof mount there but still overall as you'll see in the spreadsheet these arrays we estimate uh will cover 96 plus percent of your power demands in these buildings so essentially it's going to replace almost almost all of your demand across the board from uh appalachian power so with amalon it's up there north east of the building amherst down to the south and again these these arrays ground mounted they'll have chain link fences around them because there's electrical back there you know there's safety regulations that that that we have to adhere to so that people don't go back there and hurt themselves the high school that's a good representation
074of what heliscope can do for us you'll see that we've steered around a lot of the rooftop furniture and maximize the amount of panels that we can put up there and still provide access points not only for the solar panel technicians as you maintain the systems but also for people they're going to maintain other equipment on the roof obviously at such time that the roof needs to be replaced uh you know we move the the system off there but again it's not bolted to the roof it's ballasted system amherst middle again a ground mount central elementary a ground mount you can see the smaller the building the smaller the array that we need because the power usage or power demand is not as much elon madison heights mona lisa i think i pronounced that right
075doctor all right um i blew it again and then temperance temperance is a central virginia electrical cooperative uh a power school as opposed to appalachian we've done the research and there's no issues as far as as as you not being able to do uh solar with cvec as opposed to them so so it's it's kind of a level playing field regardless of the of the power provider the cool stuff if you choose to do this each school will have a meter inside it that the kids can walk by on their way to and from class and they can see how the sun is benefiting their school it's it's really like it's like you know gauges on an airplane or on the dashboard of your car and you can translate that into cars taken off the
076highway trees saved all that type stuff i mean we'll we'll even bring some t-shirts and stuff like that we're i mean we love this stuff we really believe in it we believe uh that it's a good thing uh for the plan a good thing for you and when you see the financials it puts money in your pocket uh i mean my discussion with the bland county school board they're having trouble funding uh replacement pads for the football team and the first thing they said is we we're going to buy a new uniform for the football team because they're kind of they're kind of worn out so little things like that that this can help contribute to our qualifications again sre has been in business uh probably going on 15 years right now they've done more
077than 100 uh projects uh very very well versed we have a local installation team in central virginia uh that has already put up one project in virginia in richmond area apartment complex so there's no issue logistically for getting here there will be a certain amount of permitting and licensing that will deal with the local utility which we have to since ultimately it's going to be connected in some way shape or form with their grid there's a couple of lists of projects they've done there's the commonwealth charter academy they completed up in uh up in pennsylvania with rooftop mount and uh midwest middle school in middlebury pennsylvania and again they're based out of mechanicsburg pennsylvania so used to jump right down route 15 and 29 and they're here and then at the risk of being trite
078i ripped off the beetles here comes the sun we can go to the spreadsheet now what you're looking at here is the cash flow for a power service agreement and we're not going to go through every one of these numbers but i'm going to walk you across it one time so you can see how the addition of subtraction works so starting in year one if you look at that first number in in what we're calling column hey solar electricity generated about 6 million kilowatt hours okay to put that in perspective that's 6 megawatt hours and again you get one s rec generated for each one of those so you get 6 000 of them times uh the value of the yesterday which is the next call we can get a contract right now to last
079five years probably longer but again a conservative projection at thirty dollars and fifty cents in the state of virginia for extract so if you take that six thousand okay not six minute because we're dealing with with mega watt hours whereas that six million numbers kilowatt hours six thousand times thirty dollars in column d that hundred and uh eighty five thousand dollars that's how much money the school system would make by selling those s-rex at thirty dollars cents each and you can follow that down you'll see in year six we've gone back to the very very conservative eleven dollar nsrex value uh wholesale value which again we've got a high level confidence that number is it actually is going to be more like 18 because of what the legislature is doing but if you scroll down
080all the way to the bottom there you'll see over the course of the 40-year project about 3 million that you're making just by selling asterisks back to uh to to uh the system that calculation power ultimately so that they can go hey virginia state legislature we're green the second way you make money is the avoided cost of electricity you're paying such and such amount of pennies or cents usually somewhere between five and 15 cents per kilowatt hour uh depending on what type of entity you are that's what you're paying right now for each kilowatt hour that you purchase of power from appalachian power uh column c is the avoided cost so again you're taking kilowatt hours times that you know 8.1 cents and that's your savings cost so another 495 thousand dollars in avoided cost
081so essentially instead instead of paying this much money over here if you didn't have solar you're paying this much money because you do have solar and that's your second revenue stream so again you fall down that column all the way down from avoiding cost here's another 26 million add the two columns columns d in red and e together to get f it's a shade under 30 million dollars of money in your pocket over 40 years so that's revenue obviously there are expenses again we set up a special purpose entity which is in existence for at least the first five years and this model shows that you it assumes that you option to purchase the system in year six which is the earliest you can do that according to the irs so for the first five
082years you're paying a contract service payment to the special purpose entity which is essentially uh connected to solar renewable energy and those payments to build and operate the system are there about 483 to 522 thousand dollars and i uh widen that column just in here so we get rid of those pound signs at the bottom uh column this one right here where we've got the pounds widen out so they can see the total on that yeah just grab the answer a little bit okay so about two and a half million dollars then you would pay the special purpose entity the assumption again is that you will exercise your option to purchase a system with a solar loan which you'll see the essay loan schedule on the next page and there's your principal link payments your
083interest payments and your maintenance regardless of whether you buy the system or not after the correct five years you're going to need to contract with somebody to maintain the system do all time to time check it clean it fix something that's broken stuff like that sre can perform that service or you could hire a local company your option but it's going to cost about starting about 26 27 000 a year to do that so your principal and interest payments plus your mentor your maintenance payments all total up to column k which is your total cash out so again looking at the total numbers at the bottom over the course of 40 years almost 30 million dollars in total cash out 13 your savings is 16.227 million dollars that's money in your pocket over the course
084of 40 years based on this what we're considering a conservative estimate if you change that 11 number to that 16.2 goes up by about 1.2 million dollars per year i did the calculation while i was back there at 11 it's putting about 405 000 a year in your pocket you change it to 18 that goes up to an average of 436 000 per year and essentially that's that's straight to your bottom line and and i can't emphasize enough i'm in sales so don't hold it against me but these are conservative numbers and we're pretty comfortable with them so net cash you can see in minus out is net and this is cumulative net over the years so these two match down there uh this is your realized electrical cost uh 4.9 cents a kilowatt hour
085that's you'd be hard-pressed to get that from dominion unless you were some really special type of entity if you can click on the psa loan schedule i'll finish with that and scroll up so again this is the loan which we would be looking at a 30-year loan for you at three percent interest which we can still get because we're using bloomberg tier 1 panels and there's your principal your interest total payment of 308 and you'll see that these numbers map back to the other one you don't uh to the other sheet you don't have to buy the system in year six but uh we can do what if drills until the cows come home and you will see that the the best cost savings for you is to exercise that option and own the system
086it just works that way and it has to do with uh the investors that fund these projects and fund the special purpose entities how the loan works uh depreciation things like that one other thing i forgot to mention this yellow number right here you remember we've got these things called inverters up there the power generated from the panel is dc that's got to be converted with an inverter inverted into ac we estimate a 20-year lifespan so at the end of 20 years you're going to have to swap them out and that's the cost to swap them out so in that one year you see a negative cash flow of about 41 000 because you've got to buy new inverters uh will they last more than that they could but 20 years we feel it's a
087good conservative estimate so that's what i have the ppa is slightly different it's not as much cost savings it's just it's a different plan that treats things taxed differently you see a lot of schools talking about getting ppas because they don't want to spend any money at all and not exercise if we were to go to the ppa sheet and zero out the purchase option you would see that you would not realize near as much as the 16 million on this projection but it's there and i can provide the actual files for you all to look at so you can what israel we would love to for you all to be the first school system in virginia uh in the appalachian power territory to do solar and we'd love to have all that out with
088you and obviously you'd save some money can you share with them the difference the difference between us owning and this if you don't own the system in general you don't own the s-rex there are nuances of how that can change but in general if you don't own the system you don't own the asterisk so you lose that revenue stream with a psa even the first five years while you literally don't own the system because you haven't taken that loan to purchase it yet for the irs is concerned and as far as the legislature is concerned you effectively on the right and you get that income that's a key component of that there are some other kind of behind the scenes tax and investment type things and depreciation accelerated appreciation uh we can use a certain
089type of labor force where we're not paying rob what was the you guys have to pay a certain labor rate when you contract outside of that i forget the terminology forgive me but but we can get better labor rates for the people that the wrench turner's actually talking about a second about that i i i now then but at any rate what you would have to pay as far as a dollar per hour for somebody up there uh build a system versus what we as a special produce entity would pay we can we can get a better labor rate just because of the way it's set up as a special personality so so you buying the system and having us install it is cheaper than you do in yourself this is what that boils down
090to that i'll open up to questions so what um what time frame how long would it take to do start finish projects if you were to pull the trigger right now day zero it would take probably three to four months to get through permitting uh we'd send a team down they'd do some exact measurements and then there's a process we would have to go through uh with uh appalachian power which in general we've seen it as fast as two months as long as six months so we say three or four as an average then it's a matter of when you would want to uh to build uh summertime is obviously better because the kids aren't there but assuming weather cooperates and and and and the land of the roofs are ready to go uh six
091months ish to get it all done i mean we're looking at 4.1 megawatts worth of installation on 10 10 separate nine separate sites because along with the adult education center is a single array that we kind of split and send power in two different directions but we're estimating the total uh fastest possible eight nine months long into things a year and a half the reason i ask is the school the high school yeah and they we made them aware um what they need from us is is when there's more detail on the specifics of the auditorium the new roof right area but uh yeah they're aware of that as well and we're probably gonna affect some of the roof line that is there now possibly with hot pressure yeah it worked out into the gym
092yeah that area is going to be in the cafeteria a little bit but you're also going to gain about some extra space ten thousand four thousand space any other questions on the board yeah i have a couple um what was the life expectancy of the cells themselves how often do we talk about the inverter and i got a question about those too but the cells themselves how long do they last not only 30 years but we've seen them go as far as as 40 so they do they eventually wear out they they lose effectiveness to the tune on average of about one and a half percent per year and that's that uh power generation loss is factored into that kind of degradation of the solar cells that's factored into that okay so that's a reflection
093of what's in there yeah all right and the inverters the cost you have in here is that for all of the inverters yeah that that number that 461 thousand assumes a wall to wall all all 10 buildings uh uh installation of new replacement of converters all right and in some solar processes they have batteries battery backups is that something that would be in this system or is it just go directly through an inverter in we have not included battery backup in this this is just a straight system of inverters power power straight into the buildings all right so and none of this do i see where our profit back would happen dramatically it would basically almost break even with our power bill is that is that kind of what i'm saying your cash flow again
094this is go back to the psa your cash flow in year one is 198 000 in your pocket right and how much are we paying out in a year one uh you are paying a total outflow of 483 thousand dollars and you're bringing 681 in so 681 minus 483 is 198. all right so again yeah the the numbers you're looking at are that column red f where it says f equals d plus e total cash that's total cash n and you're subtracting from that this call k right here total cash out to get your next which you could call l and then the next column is cumulative so essentially 198 is 188. these two equals that this one plus that is that this one does that and just cycles down to run a cumulative number
095so you're never cash flow negative uh in any year except the inverter replacement gear now the life expectancy of those solar cells now is that we have to replace every cell on every building every 30 years is that we would your maintenance team would assess the degradation and the viability of the panels as as you go and i mean you may get one that burns out after 20 years you may get one that makes 37 or 40 like that but they're going to be individually assessed as as we go so it's not all at once it's a panel by panel analysis and assessment of the of where that panel is in the lifespan that's included in the o m cost and will lightening up those panels if you were to get a direct hit yeah
096it might be it's tough uh you would you would obviously you'd have insurance policy on this but yeah i can't speak to that i'm not an electrical engineer but uh both the lightning is a lot of uh that'll mess them things up now that being said we're not these things don't attract uh that type of electricity any any more than you know a classic structure that might you know a water tower or a church or something like that but from a lay standpoint you know not testifying in court a lightning strike on any any system like this would would not be good that was recent events unfolding materials to make the solar arrays these panels this level one panel you're talking about as far as getting the materials to manufacture these panels would that factor
097into the installation time we are knock on wood we are currently not seeing any supply chain impact uh for the for the jobs we're working on right now right but a year from now i i hesitate to predict the future right we haven't seen an impact on supply chain at this time and if we had a better option to run more cells at one school than another could we still get the same output as far as their cash reward let's say we have a limited space at one school and don't feel comfortable putting up that many solar cells putting them in another school that would produce more power than it would use to put more power back in the grid the systems are designed uh based on a number of factors number one the power
098demands of the building they're closest to the proximity of the meter the type of uh of electrical panels you have is the one phase is phases it's three-phase we can get very kind of technical stuff right but in general uh that array that is on or near that building is going to serve that building below as far as net numbers are concerned i mean you can look at the aggregate across all all systems and we can certainly talk individually about adjusting the size of system that would rule that out what we've proposed here is what we consider optimal based on the information that we got from from dr arnold's team as far as power demand location of meters uh that type of use of stuff yeah we could rule that out we could i mean
099we can play what it feels on this if if if that's uh that's what you would like to do did something happen when we had to relocate the school would the panels be able to be moved to a new school um i would defer to my sre engineers but i don't see any reason why not i mean they are they are ultimately portable and if you need to reread the school you could take them down while it's reroute that type of thing and is there a used market for these systems i have to ask about that i'm not sure that's all i had okay any other questions sure mr chairman um thank you so much for your presentation looking at the the psa power service agreement at what point can we pay it off early
100if i'm looking at profits of 198 thousand and then down in year seven a million 494 879 um uh can we make early payments so instead of paying it for 40 years no penalty for early pay early payment you can avoid interest yeah just like a house through your car you throw an extra 100 or 100 000 or whatever you want yeah absolutely and then on the presentation it said that the ground mound is slightly more efficient than the roof map can you elaborate on that what is the efficiency being how the the amount of average power that the panel produces i don't i can't explain the technical aspect of it it's the same panel but i would imagine that's to do something with with the building envelope stuff that's going around as opposed to
101putting it in a grass field somewhere where the variable is more controllable i can get an answer for you on that as well last question can you simplify what the difference is between a power purchase agreement and a power service agreement it has to do with uh the tax benefits uh it has to do with how the investors behind the scenes treat it it has to do with how depreciation uh whether the seller's appreciation is treated i know they look very similar but those are kind of the three biggies there power purchase dream was the first thing that that was was made popular again with public entities like you because there's not a lot of school systems they have millions and millions of dollars playing around doing nothing in their pockets and so uh school
102system would say i just want to throw some solar up here i don't care if we've done it or not we just want to buy cheap power so whoever you know someone else would own the system and you would just buy power from them that's a classic ppa this most systems that are school systems or entities that get ppas that's what they want to do they don't want to screw with with any of these additional loans and things like that but it's again it's kind of these behind the scenes numbers as far as the irs the accountant's appreciation uh how the investment money is treated depreciation things like that that make the difference so from understanding you correctly power purchase agreement is where you basically you put all the equipment and stuff up and you
103just say okay i'm just going to pay for what i use yeah okay whereas the power service is you're selling your excess basically classic ppa you would you would not own the system you would just allow us to put it on the ground put it up here you just buy power from us and the special purpose entity would stay in fact for as long as you want to do that and it would be let's say you know 25 40 whatever your contract and at the end of that we pack it up and move it away and that's it and who would be responsible for the maintenance say we don't own it so we wouldn't have to pay for inverters or cells or anything like that okay any other questions um do you sell the batteries
104or no uh i i actually i've never been asked any question i should i should have uh i would uh i would have to ask uh like my partners at us very whether they whether they uh the batteries themselves i know we can obtain them you know sources uh i just uh i don't know if they sell them directly or whether that's their part of them out okay and i have a question for dr arnold um for the high school with the addition um i take it we have a generator at the high school is that going to be able to handle the addition also are we going to purchase an additional generator we don't have a generator at the high school at any school we have no backup power our power comes straight from
105the power grid we have no generators we discussed that with the county uh when gary was in his other job before but uh it was a they didn't want to put that into the budget they didn't want to there was so much money for that 20k 20kw or 50kw generator to just to run part of the school could i just make a suggestion and maybe a request that we look into how much at least for the high school uh batteries would be for backup power with you know the natural disasters we've had here in the past i hear horror stories and because we our hospital serves as a shelter yeah it'd be great for the community the community investment because i believe if you don't have the batteries um you can correct me if i'm
106wrong if the power grid goes out we won't have any power even if we have the solar panels up correct you need the battery no oh as long as you're not getting radiation from the sun middle of the night type stuff yeah but it would run during the day even if yes the grid is out it's not it's not reliant on the grid it's connected from the array directly to the building and the inverter the inverters powers that building yeah if you've got sunlight or mild to moderate cloud cover you're generating power i would like to suggest that we look into it just i've got it correct well and one thing we've looked at too would be to have the building wired for a like a 50 kw generator and you could contract with smell
107like cat so they know they got 24 hours to get it to you so you don't have the expense of owning it buying the generator or maintaining it but they could bring a generator on site within 24 hours to operate an emergency shelter okay thank you one quick question um so the srec s rex that is based on the electricity that you produce not the electricity that you send back to the grid that's what you produce that's what the system produces yes okay and uh mr airasi was asking about if let's say a panel panel or 10 or 100 or whatever were to go bad and we replaced them um i would assume that would make our production go back up if they're brand new panels so if it's 20 years later and it's yeah
108they've all degraded you put brand new ones on a brand new system and it's back up to 100 effective you need to start that that wearing out process all over again it spikes up like so this changes the numbers a little bit yes makes them a little better the spreadsheet obviously can't anticipate all right potentialities but yeah that's exactly what would happen you go back to a very efficient branding panel okay okay do you have a question sir no nice job thank you um so on the ppa the power purchase agreement would we if we were to go with that as a district if the board decides that will we the board have to put out money no so we wouldn't have to put out money but we wouldn't get probably even with the psa
109you're i mean you you would write a check uh to start with but but you would be able to pay for that check to fund that written check out of the savings that you're getting so there's no net impact on your budget and that impact on your budget is always positive but but the question i get is would you actually physically have to write a check yes at some point you would you'd write a check to the special purpose entity for a payment you know and and that money would come out but at the same time you're realizing these savings and you're selling s-rex back so you've got money going to the bank account faster than money's going out so both options require writing a check uh yeah okay thank you okay can i see
110yeah what do you guys need from us um we've done a lot of legwork with them and kind of in two two different times but uh we've picked it back up here recently do you need more information do you need i mean we're not asking for any commitment tonight what i'm asking is what do you need to move move this ball forward a little bit i'll just speak for me i mean personally um i'm in favor of whatever it takes to get us to own our own system i i own my system and that's the way i would like to see us go we've give you've given us the information you're not expecting a vote on it or anything tonight so uh any other information anybody would like feel free i'm just curious about the
111batteries there you go okay anything else any other request have we looked at other options as far as there's solar but what about wind is that is that something that's been discussed for wind you need to make wind effective and profitable you need an average wind speed across the board 24 7 365 of six meters per second uh which you don't get in this jurisdiction the the parts of virginia where wind works is either offshore vending beach where they're putting a massive offshore wind farm out there or up actually towards bland county some of those counties approaching west virginia up in hills [Music] effect coming over the appalachian mountains that's where you get some wind down there i've looked at the wind maps on that and unfortunately amber you still put it up but you're
112you're probably it's not going to be one thing for you because you don't you've got a lot of things with lower or no win so we can we can bring you something that's a little bit more formal right this is just a presentation for your your knowledge but i think we could we could work on with you guys to to develop something that's more formal that looks like an agreement just so you can have that um is this the only company in our area that's doing this no we've we've talked to several we've i mean when we first started this we someone presented to you guys and they they kind of stopped talking to us about it so we we've reached back out and found found some other competitors there are lots of them around
113for sure i just was compared for money options yeah all right thank you okay thank you very much thank you appreciate your time thank you and go navy we're trying basketball team took his shorts last night so well they weren't that good anyways to begin with it's the football that matters in the wrestling and the track okay so i moved forward to uh dr wells all right so 6.02 is contact tracing and quarantine information uh on board docs we placed the uh memorandum that kind of hit the three courses of action that we could possibly follow given on the contact tracing and quarantine in general just for the audience the first course of action was to maintain status quo second course of action was to corn was was to contact trace with no quarantine and
114what that would look like would be you would contact trace uh you notified people of that that there was a possibility that somebody was exposed but you would not have students uh be quarantined and have to stay home and the other option would be to basically do no contact tracing or quarantining and so i'll be glad to answer answer any questions you may have regarding those courses of action but we would you know like you ought to have some uh make a decision on which way you want us to go on that this evening board can i ask what um dr wells suggests yes so if you're asking for my opinion yes sir my opinion would be from a my personal opinion is i think we have a moral obligation or ethical obligation to notify
115families in our school community and our staff if someone since the covenant cases are still fairly high in our region that we have a positive case that we would just say there's been a positive case in your child's class and you know that and we will notify them of that either through school messenger through letters home phone calls depending on the size of the case so we could do that we could notify families so so for example if i have a child in a class and their grandparents are medically fragile and they're planning to go through their grandparents next weekend but they go there they don't realize they have they've been exposed to covet or have coveted because it's very symptomatic and they go there and they they meet their grandparents and then god forbid
116the grandparents catch it i would kind of feel me as individually that we didn't do what we should have done and notified that family of that they could have made their decision if they chose to go that's fine that's on them but at least they would have known they'd been exposed so that's kind of where i that's kind of where i feel on that as a from a personal perspective i agree with you which is option two miss justice thank you mr chairman um dr wells uh two questions one um the staff that you use for contact tracers what did they do before covid what duties well some of those were us uh so we did a lot of different things before contact tracing and some of the building administrators and so forth so we
117did hire some individuals under the essa grant for contact tracing they were hired just to help us with contact tracing so they weren't employees of the school system prior to um so if we did not contact trace we would find other obligations for them to do from under the contract period we have and then obviously they renew but if we went with option two they would still be doing the contact tracing um but it would look different you know instead of having to go into a classroom and determine since now we're not masked and where other things are changing our physical distance is kind of closer so in a classroom for example since we're not masked and so forth the person could be anywhere in the classroom walking around so probably we'd have to say
118that whole class could have been exposed so we had to notify that whole class of family the whole fam all the families in that class as opposed to you know the six foot window for masking not masking and so forth because we are relaxing some of our restrictions in the buildings but so the contact tracing aspect would just be everybody in billy's class and and dr wells first period class you may have been exposed we make that phone call home notifying families that may have been exposed and then there'd be the family's choice whether or not that they you know take any different action or not at least they wouldn't know if so yes ma'am second question is that possible with number two to add an opt-in or an opt-out to that information if there
119are families that really are like i am past having this in my face they opt out for that notification can we add that fairly simply from our payment from our school messenger system it would that would opt them out of everything as opposed to just this one notification so if i opted them out they wouldn't get any other notifications because we don't have the we can't set that school messenger system up to do that as far as i know i could ask our school rit folks about that but um again in some cases might be a school messenger some cases it could be the phone call if in some cases it could just be a letter given to the child going home so depending on the size of the exposure for example if we go
120back to having lunches in the cafeteria and i have 300 students in first lunch at amherst county high school and somebody tells positive it's in first lunch i have no way of knowing who that person was around him first lunch so i'd have to know that i'd have to send a school messenger home foreign county household saying anybody who eats first lunch you may have been exposed today at lunch that would be pretty simple that'd be pretty simple okay thank you yes ma'am one more sorry in option number two it talks about quarantine those who test positive and are symptomatic so they're symptomatic and they get a test is that correct well if if they're symptomatic they don't we don't just like if it's a flu stomach bug anything else we don't want them in
121school exactly so they should stay home so they would technically quarantine because they're sick okay so there's no difference between unvaccinated or vaccinated correct if they're sick they're sick okay great okay since we're not quarantining we would just you know if you're sick that's it yeah okay thanks okay can i can i add one thing this is just for for for our purposes if if you were to uh pass option two that you give us a little lead time uh because when we talk about things like the cafeteria um a lot of our schools have used the cafeteria for other purposes because they've been so spread out and so they're gonna have to to change schedules and change things uh so it's gonna take us a little bit of time to to kind of work
122through those details with our schools for go ahead how long do you think our schools would need well i think for the the changing from contact racing and quarantining to just contact tracing we could kind of push that out within a week and give us a chance to push things out to parents we could take parent calls and questions about what it means what it looks like in our staff to have them a chance to kind of go through answer those questions so if you get you know i could do within a week on that as far as opening the cafeterias up they may take longer because they may have to revamp some of their master schedules and things of that nature at the school level because how they have their schedules set up and
123maybe having to change some things around there so the cafeteria aspect of it will be separate from whether we contact trace or go option two or don't go option two as far as getting them back into the cafeteria for meals that may take a little longer because i have to readjust a lot of the school for that but as far as whether you quarantine or or contact traits or don't con you know those things an option too give me a week and i can have it ready to go could you give me a date for that next whatever next friday is what's next friday is the day it's tomorrow's the 11th so the 18th so the following monday would be the 20 21st so how about march 21st okay anybody else have any more questions
124um mr muslin miss berg miss justice mr aurossi any other questions no okay anybody like to make a motion mr chairman i'd like to make a motion that we go with option two and with the start date of march 21st okay do i have a second second okay any other discussion mr greiser can you hear us yes just making sure so hearing no discussion um can i get a vote uh all in favor say aye aye aye all opposed hearing none it's passed thank you uh construction update will be next on the 6.03 construction update so uh as you know the board of supervisors has agreed to fund i had one more quick question should we wait until our next meeting then to discuss the cafeteria we're working we're working working on it we had
125to wait until this happened because we didn't want to just you know well i just wanted to put that out there because i know i'll be getting phone calls as far as the cafeteria if you'll just let us work through that with the schools i don't think we need the board to vote to say use cafeterias or not that's just a health mitigation strategy we put in place so as we're looking through where we are i think we can work through the schools with that as a staff and make sure you get that happening between now and spring great and thank you for everything you have done for us during this whole crowbit thing thank you really appreciate it yes man thank you ready for construction yes sir go ahead all right so construction update
126um as you know the board of supervisors has funded the project at the high school agreed to fund the project at the high school so we've been working uh weekly kind of with uh with josh bauer at cra on the plans we met with the vocational teachers on tuesday and kind of talked through the plans with them as far as what things would look like we met last night with the facilities committee mr grazer was there and it had time martin from the county there and also our team on that and everything was very positive on that so now we're starting next week i will meet with i'm going to schedule a meeting with our fine arts department at the high school to kind of go over the room the classroom size at the auditorium
127and things for that at the auditorium aspect of it and then once we get consensus there and have some conversation there uh we plan on having uh cra's team kind of come in and start doing some of the fine-tuned planning for the project so we can start moving forward with that project you know into the fall with the auditorium project the cte wing the stadium upgrades as well as the baseball softball field house aspects of it so all those things are moving forward and we're starting to get into the finer details of the planning process on that and what i'd like to do probably in the april to may time frame will be probably may would be to give you a bigger overview of that again kind of catch everybody up we'll give us another
128month or so to work through some of the details and then in the may board meeting like to bring the presentation to you on where we are if it if the board so so chooses um one quick question just since we were on the topic of solar earlier has anybody looked into solar lighting for our fields in our parking lot in the high school that's something we kind of discussed but we that's going to be in the design phase with them so i mean i think that's something we could look into all right thank you get ready when we put solar panels on everything is solar powered boom yeah because it's all coming out of our power grid right without batteries it won't happen at nighttime just so you know we pull it back in
129that's why you had that metering yeah right that's why you have the net metering yeah right yeah okay all right so any questions on the construction where we are right now as far as the at the high school again we're moving forward i think we're in a good direction i think we've got a lot of buy-in from the staff they're really looking they're really appreciative of what we're doing there so just a matter of getting it done now i think and getting the finer details worked out thank you dr wells yes sir one one note though uh the next board of supervisors meeting yeah will be a public um public session uh public comment on uh the what you guys voted on for the uh the vpsa to get the loan uh and so they're
130going to have to vote on that uh i believe it's at the next day it's march 15th yes sir they're going to do that at the next meeting so we just you guys have done your part uh they're just there they have to do their theirs on tuesday of next week okay okay also on the construction front um we are scheduled for central elementary this summer to do the bathroom innovations at central elementary and we're that's gone out the bid and we're in the process of that now working with the county on the bid process okay okay thank you all right so next thing you have 6.04 which is first semester discipline and we wanted to bring this to you tonight just one is an overview of where we are but also you need to
131just to make you aware that throughout my whole time in life as a administrator and teacher we use what was called the dcv the discipline trauma violence report and last year the state switched this to what's called the s bar and so we've had to change how we look how we look at discipline and how we record our discipline data so mr crawford's here tonight he's going to speak to you about uh where we are from first semester dad a little background on the s bar and dcv and then where we are on data this is not like ocr the old ocr type data that we did before this is just a snapshot of where we were first semester and then at the end of the year we'll compile the data and desegregate it a
132little bit more detailed into some of the other areas we talked we usually talk about but we want you to be aware of where we are right now and the difference in what we used to do and where we are now and why we can't really compare 2017 to now because it doesn't mesh so mr crawford's going to go into that with you now members of the board first and foremost thank you for having me tonight i want to go over just really quickly providing you with an update on the change in the coding system some of the things some of the effects of those changes as dr wells talked about with not being able to compare certain things to previous years but i do want to give you some cold hard data too just
133some overview numbers from our first semester so that you have an update there as well so the the first part of the s bar versus dcv is the disciplined crime and violence data collection system that was like dr wells said they've been using that for quite a while in the state and in our division so within this year we've decided from the state level that the esbar codes which is the student behavior and administrative response system will be put in place that changes things for us at the county level because of those comparisons that we like to make with certain behaviors from previous years to this year so that we can kind of track where certain things are so we implemented this system in the fall of 2021 and in just a little bit i'll
134talk about some of those steps we took to implement that in our school division and what we're doing ongoing throughout this year as well so the the next part is the the chart this chart represents one page of about three pages worth of dcv codes and those are the previous codes that we used and you can see with the underlying bolden words those are all of the categories that we used to have with the dcv codes there's a lot of categories and if you look at that as one page of three it it becomes a lot more so what the s bar codes are going to do and what you'll see on the next page is that it will it will lessen that those categories into the six categories that you see here the one
135thing that i do want to point out on the previous page is where the circle is around those behaviors those are what we called the d codes under the dcv codes which would be disrespect defiance and disruption and there's two things about those codes number one is is they're very broad the term disrespect could it could mean a lot of different things and it could mean a lot of different things to a lot of different people so what you're going to see with sbar is that it it drills it down to the specific behavior more so than just an abroad disrespect students will will be able to notify them on the referral and with the code that we're using what their specific behavior was instead of just a broad disrespect the other thing about the
136d codes is that they are very subjective and so what that means is that what what might be disrespect to me might not mean the same thing to you and if you think about a student you say we have a student at the high school that goes to four different classes a day they interact with four different teachers they probably interact with the cafeteria personnel a bus driver an administrator instructional assistant so on and so forth and everybody thinks of disrespect as a little bit differently so that's what makes them so subjective so the categories of esbar are broken down into six parts the first one is the behaviors that impede academic progress of other students or bap codes the category b is the bso which is behaviors related to school operations category c is
137the rb codes or relationship behaviors category d would be the bsc codes which are behaviors of a safety concern and then category e is the beso codes or the beso which is behaviors that endanger yourself or others and then the last category there is the pd or potentially dangerous codes i'll provide you with a few examples here in just a second when we look at some of the numbers on the next slide is a snapshot of the relationship behaviors and the reason i put this one on there is because of what i was just saying with the term disrespect disrespect could mean very many things and under the dcv codes we just had the code d1c which was a disrespect with sbar what you see right there are five different codes that we can use
138that previously under the dcv system would have probably been rolled into the disrespect code so when we talk about not being able to compare specifics from previous years to this year that's what we're talking about when we look at the d1c codes from previously in 2019 2020 2018 2019 that's not going to tell the whole story whereas the s bar codes that we have here are more specific so like the first one there rb6 speaking to another in an uncivil discourteous manner i could have been walking down the hallway and just said something that i probably shouldn't have said to another student i would be given an rb6 because i spoke to them in an uncivil discourteous manner that's different than teasing them and so what s bar does is is that drills it down
139so that it's a little more specific in the code that we're using instead of the broad overview of just a disrespect on the next slide it just explains essentially what i just said about the d1c codes not being able to be compared to what we're doing right now so typically at this point in the year and those of you that have served on the board for several years now you know that you get kind of data overload with with a lot of the codes that we have used and you can compare it to previous years and look at certain behaviors and although we can do that with certain things we can't do that with everything and the prime example there would be the d1c the disrespect and simply breaking that down into all of the
140different rb or or the bso codes that it falls under so on the next slide there's some numbers here and these are all of the first semester incidents for amherst county public schools and that would be both elementary and secondary so the b.a.p behaviors that impede academic progress there were 160 of those in our school division and the majority of those would be disruptions or tardies the disruption the disruptive piece that can either be inside the classroom or outside of the classroom so for example those codes would be bap 1 bap2 the bap-1 would be inside the classroom if a student does something that disrupts the classroom there he would be given a bap one if they're walking down the hallway banging on doors or anything like that that would impede academic progress from outside
141of the classroom that would be a bap2 so that was the majority of the the bap referrals that we saw for the bsc referrals there's 261 of those that would include vapes bus referrals and horseplay i can tell you from a from the division standpoint compared to 2019 2020's first semester our bus referrals were way down so you know very proud of our students but very proud of our bus drivers as well for what they're doing to to build those relationships back with those students who may or may not have ridden the bus last year or at least didn't ride it very often so so those numbers are down uh the bezo referrals there were 40 of those and typically those were your fights or or different threats for the bso referrals there were 390
142of those so between the bso and the rb referrals which were 465 a lot of those are going to be typically those d codes that we talked about earlier which would be your disrespect defiance disruption things of that nature for the bso codes you had defiance cell phones are still a big referral especially at the secondary level and then the aup or the acceptable use policy one thing i want to say about the aup violations is that we've we've given students chromebooks now they have access to internet they have access to chromebook and they take them home with them they typically have access to their email their google drive everything around the clock so there's more time there's more accessibility that they have now and so that's why you're going to see a slight uptick
143in those violations and we have seen some of that this year for the relationship behaviors uh the disrespect profanity uh defiance so so typically those are your your decodes as well that fall in there and then you're potentially dangerous uh we had two of those as well and and the potentially dangerous those are the ones that we have to report to you and then we report to the state within 10 days so the acps total there was 1318 incidents first semester and i put the student population of amherst county public schools at the time it was 3987 so if you think about that that's roughly one incident for every three students so on the next slide i explain that a little bit by showing you the number of students in our division that have three
144or more referrals and there are 150 students across the division that have three referrals or more from first semester so when i say there's one incident for every three students that's what the numbers show but that's typically not the case because we do have some repeat offenders in there as well and you can see the numbers there by school i group the elementary schools as one because they're so few on the next slide this is your elementary school suspensions and in-school detentions obviously these numbers are going to look very different than our secondary schools and and there's reasons for that so one of the one of the things is that the consequences that we give for certain behaviors are age-appropriate and so a kindergartner who who says something that they shouldn't say maybe they use
145profanity it's not expected that a five-year-old or a six-year-old has the same understanding of that word or that terminology as a maybe a 17 or 18 year old senior in high school so the consequences that we give are age-appropriate based on the the development of the age group and we group those by age groups so we have kindergarten to third grade fourth and fifth grade and then middle school and then high school so you had 14 out of school suspensions there and the majority of those suspensions of elementary school students result from some type of reckless behavior or it might be some type of physical contact with adults or other students profanity things of the of that nature but mainly that reckless behavior that kind of leads to that out of school suspension the isd
146that we give typically in elementary school is is your unwanted physical contact so that might be your physical aggression of some sort there i do want to note that the majority of the elementary school referrals result in typically your younger ages they result in warnings or parent contacts administrative conferences and then loss of recess and i can speak to that as the principal at temperance elementary school when you take recess away from a kindergartner sometimes that holds a lot more weight than suspending or giving them in school detention so that's where a lot of your elementary school referrals will come from there as well on the next slide is the suspensions and isd from the secondary schools i do want to start with the bottom right there which is the alternative to suspension center those
147numbers that you see there the days of asc 329 the events 144 and the students contributing to those events there's 104 those numbers are built into the top part for the isd numbers and the reason we do that is because across the state not everybody has an alternative to suspension center and so when we report things in incident management which is in powerschool the the system that we use to report to the state there's not an alternate or alternative to suspension code so we have to use the in-school detention code we do not use the out-of-school suspension code for that because they're not out of school they're still in school so those numbers at the bottom are built into those top numbers when you're comparing data from year to year and you look at our
148isd numbers from right now versus say 2017 2018 our numbers are going to be higher in in school detention because we didn't have an alternative to suspension center there similarly the out-of-school suspension numbers that we have right now are going to be a lot lower than what they were in 17 and 18 even 18 and 19 when we implemented the alternative to suspension center and then your out-of-school suspension is over there on the right as well we had 77 events that led to out-of-school suspensions 67 students that contributed to the to those events so we did have some repeat offenders and then the total number of days is the 437 there and i will remind you that the majority of things that we suspend for now um since we have the alternatives to suspension center
149are going to be your five to ten day suspensions which are your more major offenses a lot of your minor formerly suspendable offenses like tobacco use vapes physical altercations verbal altercations things of that nature we don't we don't suspend for those we send students to the alternative to suspension center now so that's why that number that 437 may seem like it's high for only 67 students but just a reminder that a lot of the suspensions are 5 to 10 days now on the next slide this these are the suspendable offenses that we saw this year during the first semester the first part is fights and assaults we did have 43 incidents that led to fights or assaults we had nine weapons six drugs and alcohol and then that other the 19 we had several that
150had one or two incidents and and a lot of those were threats um inappropriate affection obscene literature vandalism things like that and so there was quite a few of those and so we grouped them into the other category there as well and then finally the the division discipline actions and review we had a bus driver discipline training back in the fall i think bus drivers were very receptive to that we we got a lot of feedback we actually had an exit ticket for them to fill out after we finished with the the training and they provided us with great feedback things that we needed to know too from the buses and so we we took that into account we actually made a few changes in terms of communication with the bus drivers so so i
151think that's helped and i think we see that now with the number of bus referrals being lower this year than they were two years ago the initial administrator training took place in the fall of 2021 all administrators that handle any type of discipline had training in incident management which is a new system for us in power school the administrator incident management training that's ongoing throughout the year this is a new system there so we're still learning this system i can tell you the state is still learning this system and and seeing some of the bumps along the way that that we're seeing as well and some of the changes that are made uh so so it's ongoing in terms of inputting data making sure that data is correct and making sure that when we submit
152it to the state everything is is correct there as well the consistent review of incident management data that's ongoing in incident management every day just about uh and and i know that kevin harrison here at the central office as well he submits reports regularly to the state and and it pops it right back with a number of errors that we might have had that may have been clerical it might be that somebody clicked the wrong button or or put a discipline code in the wrong spot things like that and the state has had a lot of grace with us this year in helping us not just us in amherst county but across the state to try to to make sure that we're learning this system as fast as we can the state review of the
153incident management data that will be in july of 22 that's the report that dr wells was talking to you about at the end of the year we'll put that together and present that to you the proposed review of the 2021-2022 incident management system with administrators during our school leadership conference we've we've discussed doing that next summer to be able to go over data but also to be able to make sure that that administrators and data entry personnel understand some of the hiccups that have come from the incident management system and then finally our vtss teams our vtss teams at all the schools use this data and and they look at disciplined data and they try to see what is causing these repeat offenders these students that have three or more referrals to get these referrals
154what is causing overall in the school certain things uh to happen and so then they put plans in place uh teach lessons and things of that nature so they do use that data as well so i'll be happy to take any questions that you have board any questions very thorough it's a lot of data yes sir that's just the tip of the iceberg well this is one of my projects you know that i really keep up with that and uh pay close attention now we do these other things i'll be watching this more so the suspension center is still proving to do what we said we hoped it would do yes ma'am deter and uh and change the mindsets of people that's that's what's supposed to do yes ma'am forward any other questions okay hearing
155none moving on okay dr wells so the last thing i have of the february suspensions and that is on board docks and about you know we can discuss those but those are individual suspension cases so if you have any questions for that i'll be glad to try to answer all right forward any questions okay enough thank you very much moving on to 7.0 good evening mr chair members of the school board before you deny are your financial reports through february 2022 you have the local revenue received for the month as well as the revenue and opera operating expenses as well as also the child revenue child i got to stop reading this child nutrition revenue and expenditure report we have been monitoring everything their revenue has been coming in as expected our expenditures have been
156within budget with the exception of those items that we continually talk about and we are still looking at the utilities we are starting to see the heating with the weather starting to get better that's going to come down fuel just as we were talking about it for next year we recognize that we still have four more months in this fiscal year and it you make one projection one week and you find out that it wasn't enough but we are actively looking for looking at that we have discussions and we come up with the contingency plans what the what ifs and we always look first to try to cover those overages within the same major categories so when you look at your object code report we are looking at seeing the overages in the fuels but
157you do have under the 8105 you still the replacement motor vehicles you have the 126 000 and that is within the same major categories that is where we would look to cover that if the fuel cost keeps rising we still have the ability if it exceeds that to go into other areas when you look at that report that has other available balances you could go there it's just outside the major categories and we may have to come back to you before budget transfer as well as those reports we've also included the attendance report for february and if you have any questions i'd be happy to ask ford any questions i think we've already talked about you know view which is placeholding [Music] i do have one question um dude i'm having a hard time reading
158it here on the attendance record do we stipulate um which absences are attributable to quarantine do we separate them out from regular absences not on this report i would not have that data on myself we can get that data for you thank you that would be helpful any other questions from the board okay hearing none moving on 8.0 instructions mr chairman and members of the board uh i'm bringing to you tonight the map growth assessment data and for those that have are just currently on our board i'd like to go ahead and review with you just what that specifically is so you can have an understanding of where we are in regards to learning loss and how we're supporting our kids in regards to that so we have we provide a assessment three times a
159year for measure it's called measures of academic progress it is a norm reference which is like a checkup where we kind of see where people are where our students are on their academic growth unlike what the standards of learning are at the end of the year which is we've gone through all of the um instruction we have presented the material the two students have learned it and then they do like this okay this is what we know that you've figured out it's like that autopsy at the you know after all is said and done this is what we find out about things um that's just kind of give you an overview of the difference between what we do with map assessments and what we do what the state requires for state um standards of learning
160so the map is a um it adjusts to our students performance so i can actually create personalized assessments from it i can see where i need to go with that child it helps teachers determine what the child needs as we go throughout the school year the map growth it is scaled on a writ score and i'll explain that in a minute and we take it for a reading and we take it for math and then it provides our teachers documentation and information so they can plan targeted instruction for our kids to kind of close that achievement gap as well as uh prepare and and make up for learning loss easy to use reports that we provide them training on so the ritz scale is what that actually is um developed on and it's a measure
161of performance similar to what you would do when you take your child to the pediatrician and they actually do height and growth chart it kind of tells you where you where that child is on the spectrum of a scale of 180 at the elementary level all the way up to 260 at the high school level and it's on a national norm and it follows the child as they grow through their educational academic performance and and where we want to get them at the end of their educational experience so when i look at what we've done at the beginning of the year we did a fall assessment we provided you that data i'm going to go quickly through those two slides because the next the the third slide after this actually shows it in detail but
162this is some very specific information in regards to map for math and as you can see this is just a visual we actually increased in regards to our map data from fall to winter across the board in all of our math grade levels and content areas at the high school level an overall increase across the division in regards to our reading you can see a very similar growth not as much but very specific and that we did we did not regress in either in in either math or reading across the division uh when we took these assessments from what we did in the fall in september to where we are now and uh when we took them in february the next pretty much shows you specific what we're talking about so those those little charts
163and graphs this is where it it gives you the actual number for the rich score so when i look at this what i'm looking at is my gains or losses in regards to math and reading from fall to winter and what i want to see from fall to spring which we will take that at the end of the school year is a two-point growth in my rich score so if i'm a kindergartner taking math i want to go from a 140.1 where that where that child started at the beginning of the year and i want to make it at least a two-point gain by the time i take that test at the end of the year the assessment at the end of the year as you can see in regards to our not our math
164every single one made over that two-point gain already at mid-year so not only did we meet our goal for the two points for an entire year we've made incredible gains in the first semester and hopefully expect to make that a very similar gain by the end of the school year so i was very excited about about where we have come from the beginning of the year to just mid-year the reading we have seen again gains at our secondary level starting around the eighth grade all the way to our seniors we have not seen the significant growth that we did at the elementary levels in regards to reading or in our math program but we did see growth we did not drop in any of those categories as well we have several already close to that
165two-point gain that we're looking for and we're working with those classroom teachers building administrators in order to beef up what we're doing for those students as well when we look at where we are and what we need to do so some of the takeaways from just this mid-year data because this is just a snapshot for you we of course positive growth k through 12. i'm very excited about what we've done both in math and in reading i would say that at the division level 63 percent of our students showed that increase in their writ score so if i took all the students in the area of fall to winter in reading 63 percent of our students across the board made gains already over the 2 percent the majority of them have made gains but these
166are ones that we're calculating already that have met the goal by the end of the year and they've done it by mid-year when we look at math because that showed our mo our largest increase that was a 74 of our students already who have made that two-point gain which is ex phenomenal actually when we do this we we take this data and we make sure that we don't just use this data so it's it's triangulated with everything else that we bring to the table our sol growth assessments that we did for the very first time this school year that were required by the state we've taken pals data vkrp data common assessments that are created by our teachers in the classroom and we look at all of that as well as our attendance data because
167if children aren't sitting in the class in front of the teacher getting quality instruction how can we help them improve and how can we make up for that learning law so we want our kids here we want our them to be in the classroom with that instructor so they can make those growths one of the things that i want to make sure is that we kind of explain is we strive to be in that average to high average for all of our students right now and when we review our data in mid-year 72 percent of our students in math are already in that average to high average with 28 below so that's our tier three kids those are the ones that we're getting those intensive supports miss justice that you were asking about the resources
168that are going to those we know we've got to make some additional gains with those children so that's where we're targeting that's where our teachers are targeting and kind of focusing in on that that's from math in reading even though we have showed that slump in our secondary 78 of our students right now are average to high average with 22 below so again those intensive supports are going to those children that are in that 22 percent that are below and i will tell you our teachers have worked diligently our instructional specialists have worked very hard our supervisors our administrators to provide teachers students families the opportunities and the resources and supports for this and i will give a shout out to ms jill gwill who compiles all of our map data for us for the
169division and for each of our schools so they have that readily available for teachers to use in their plc's when they're talking about individuals individual students and what they need in onboard docs is also very school specific data i do not present that to you and that is for your information if you want to look at a specific school at a specific grade level to see what they're doing that data is there for you that is what we give our schools so they can have a jumping off point to talk about what needs and supports that they need and i'll answer whatever questions that you may have dr norman can can you put the slide back up with the uh the chart yeah can you scroll down so we can see the chart oh i'm
170sorry so if you're looking at the gain loss for reading uh when you started about fourth grade well fifth third grade i guess it looks like it's just trends i mean um so anything we can take from that well i will tell you the number one thing when you're when you're talking about elementary we have title one reading specialist in every single elementary school we have actually multiples in many of our schools that do pull out and additional if they are if a child is id'd at below reading level they get intensive supports in addition to small group instruction and what the teacher provides so we have that already in place it's been in place for a long time we've tweaked that since the pandemic to to make sure we're providing supports when you get
171to middle school that's where we are we do not have those specific reading specialists attached to each of the schools we have created based on moving people around supports this current school year to help with that in regards to our middle school and our high school but remember it's taken us two years to get here it's going to take us a long time to get out of it and we can't do that in a couple of months so we have things in place to help with that um but that's that's a concern yes sir okay thank you ford mr chairman um dr norman when looking at i believe was the takeaways and we're looking at the 22 that scored in the low average range first of all thank you for all this data you're welcome
172all the people that collect it it's amazing quite a few yeah um and translating it for us so do we have a comparison like at the beginning of the school year what range of our kids were in the low average range was is it staying about steady where we had 22 percent that we're in the low average in fall and it's the same 22 or have we seen less by the end of this meeting i can have you that data i just need to pull up the old presentation from that i gave to the board at the beginning of the school year and i believe i have that same data in there okay that would be great it wasn't a red flag to me so i don't think that it is um you know i
173was reviewing and then the um in relation to mr terry's question as far as the um we don't have the supports and then the middle school and senior it would seem that that would imply that those students are less having to catch up but are dealing with some um long standing impacts yes ma'am and another thing that if i can point out we have specialized reading instructors at the elementary level meaning they went to school have a master's degree to understand the specifics on the science of reading and they use those techniques for that at the middle school i was a i was an eighth grade english teacher so i did not go to school and for my education for secondary english and learn how to teach a child to read i had to actually
174go back once i got into the classroom and realized i had students reading below grade level and i had to go back and take reading classes so i as a teacher could figure out at the secondary level how to teach those kids who came to me very well below grade level reading how to teach them to read so we have some of our secondary teachers who have never had that experience now are they very capable in helping those children figure out comprehension strategies and moving forward and helping them learn to read yes but at the pace that we would get with a um a teacher who has that um expertise in it um it's a bigger bang when you when you have that it's justice have you have you ever heard the the saying that
175you um you learn to read through the third grade and after the third grade you read to learn right that's a that's a saying that's you and so what schools do is spend an inordinate amount of resource and energy and trying to get students to read by the third grade right and so that's that's where you see those dramatic growths there in those early grades and then what she's talking about is that you don't have those specialists in the further along you go in school now of course we're trying to add those uh especially at the middle school because that's that's seems to be where we have some significant plateauing i think where i was head where i was kind of heading is if they've got those supports in the primary grades and they're overcoming
176those obstacles if they should be doing all right middle school without those supports are we getting is is this significant drop new influxes of students or it's just they're not the supports that were there they needed those supports so for instance um if you have children that have processing issues um they only learn information in one way um maybe they're needing something that's not just reading oh i know you're you're saying shouldn't they have learned to read by the third grade and that's that's not what well no i think by middle school i think yeah meaning if they've come to the system yeah and of course there are lots of students that start so far behind and it takes to middle school to catch them up and um yeah so that that's that's been a
177that's been a historic problem yes thank you any other questions from the board okay thank you dr norman welcome mr gallagher all right mr chairman members of the board you have a memo there with the current vacancies in front of you what's different about this evening's memo is that we are now putting next year's vacancies at the bottom of that list as well as we have begun to post some of those positions that we know will be open one positive update is the number of instructional assistants that need to be filled is now five as we hired two today so that was good as these positions above continue to be vacant as we move toward the conclusion of the current school year they'll begin to be moved down into the 22-23 vacancies but i'll take
178any questions that you have about that board um from sorry from what i um heard on the street is on the street on the street that we're having um our hopefully new bus drivers taking their test or training for their cdls on monday good luck to all of them absolutely i'd reiterate that mr chairman how many do we know how many people we have taking those tests i don't know the answer to that question i don't know yeah i'm not sure i have to check with transportation department to see exactly how many yeah i'll check on that for you i can have it for you tomorrow great thanks maybe tonight if she answers their email hopefully enough to fill those positions um okay yes anything else thank you mr gallagher you're welcome uh so moving
179forward um i just wanted to we i did discuss a little bit last week during the retreat uh some information about our recent career fair as well as well as talking about recruiting and uh the candidate pipeline and and so forth in the pool of candidates i wanted to reflect a little bit more specifically on the data and results from our career fair from february 26th if i could take a chance to do that as we talked about we did have a a meet and greet that was very positive to begin to get a chance to meet some of those candidates we had 13 teacher candidates participate in that and dr arnold and ms smith and dr wells and myself we all participated in that process in total we had 48 total interviews conducted that
180day eight different endorsement areas were represented of the candidates 16 colleges and universities represented in six different states so we had candidates from california georgia nebraska new jersey utah and of course virginia we had many exceptional candidates identified by the interview panels and those panels were all of our principals and other administrators who took their time on that saturday to participate we've hired currently three teachers from the group that we've uh interviewed that day we also have one offer on the table so hopefully by tomorrow we'll have four hired and just to make note there are still several others who were part of those that process who we have highly rated and so as positions become available it's very likely others will end up being hired from that group who participated in that day so
181it's very positive i do want to thank all who participated in that career fair we did have building level administrators who were the the main main part of the interview panels some division level administrators three faculty members who are pursuing pursuing leadership endorsements we do like to grow your own in that respect as well there were four elementary interview panels in total uh with three to four participants in each three middle school interview panels and three high school interview panels and that was on a saturday so i just reiterate my thanks for for those folks for taking that time i do want to thank ms mcnerney in the hr office for the advertising and coordination of the fair as well so as you can see we've already hired several excellent candidates from that group and
182we hope that we'll bring others onto our team here from that process as well i think the career fair that we we promote and run here is very valuable to us just one little piece of the bigger picture of recruiting that we do so i will take any questions if you have any board yes sir thank you looking at the board memo vacancies the people that i believe you said you hired are those out um have they already been basically subtracted from what these positions are they they would have been subtracted from next year's vacancies we've hired three with one pending and they're no longer on that lower level so in other words there was four elementary vacancies there was one special education vacancy they have been filled and there's another elementary position that potentially
183by tomorrow would bring the elementary number down to one so these are not individuals who are able to join our team currently that's great that's quite a quite a hiring success i'd say thank you very positive thank you mr gallagher i have your numbers for cdl if you'd like them mr sure so we have five scheduled take cdl next week uh three are outside new they'll be considered new employees we have one as a van driver who's wanting to get their cdl then we have one of mr rux's maintenance department gentlemen who is getting their cdl so five total four that will become theoretically from full-time bus drivers and then the other one would be a good fill in if needed great great thank you dr wilson and one other piece of information to add
184and that is just to bring a few dates to your awareness so that you can save the date we will be recognizing our teacher of the year and support staff of the year some positions we also like to refer to as toy and soy here that will be on may 12th our representatives there so definitely prepare time on may 12th for that recognition also our retiree recognition that we do annually just to begin to mark your calendars may 19th at the pro throw that will actually be an early evening event as that will be a dinner for retirees and we'll get that coordinated and give you more information about that as we get closer to those dates great thank you sir you're welcome moving on to tenno yes um garrison i believe you have something
185you'd like to discuss tonight it is on yep all right all right good evening everyone um i just want to talk a little bit about so last time i mentioned that there were some national honor society activities that were occurring over the next few months um unfortunately due to like covid trying to get things done too quickly the uh some of them have been canceled but the 100 mile yard sale is happening which i believe is in april and may um and you can look forward to that and more information about that later on uh in regard to extracurricular um trying to get that more available to everyone i've been working with a few central office staff members and we're thinking to try and get some consistent yearly expenses to be funded by the schools
186and perhaps a line in the budget uh later on not for next year because it's a little bit too late for that but in the future to have dedicated funds for extracurricular activities while more district-wide funds can be provided for like one-time equipment costs like the esports team which received their pcs a few months ago uh but i wanted to talk tonight a little bit about something that i've been thinking about for a while and i think one of the issues that not only amherst county but a lot of school systems have been having especially recently is their two school systems in general are too focused on returning to where we were before the pandemic as opposed to taking this opportunity where we've had a lot of change and moving towards whatever's best for example
187like you can either choose to we've had to change a lot over the last two years right you know everyone talks about it it's been crazy and we can either just go back to where we were with the same problems that we had or try something new and stick with what we're doing right now not exactly of course but a similar kind of scheduling or whatever and way classes are done and try and improve it uh in particular i think in the classroom we need to work to do more engaging activities with the students i know a lot of my friends if they're in class all day doing the new equivalent of busy work just canvas all day which is necessary sometimes but canvas or busy work all day isn't good for students that's not
188engaging if you're just trying oh i'm gonna do this so i can play games on my computer what's the point in learning it if you're just gonna do it for the test and then forget it i think it's important that we have engaging activities in all the subjects so that students care about what they're learning and they learn how to apply it to the real world jobs now are requiring more creative thinking skills and you all know this it's essential that we teach these skills and that students understand them so they can use them in their futures and for more jobs later on i think that's probably one of the most important things that schools can do now just try and look forward try out new things see if they work sometimes they might not
189but it's better to try something new and maybe be an improvement then stick with the something that's old and be stuck with the same problems thank you i'd like to attest to that um i may not have anything to provide like regarding my stuff but i think i can attest to that um thankfully i've been able to because my mother and our assets that i can go to cvcc and having that in-person learning all the time and like having like homework online is great having the relationships that i have with those professors now has gotten me a lot further than i think it would i've gotten into eight colleges because of some of the recommendations that they've given me to some of the toughest schools that i know i would probably never get into if
190i didn't have the recommendations and the grades and everything they put on me specifically i'd like to attest to dr lehmann who is my professor this semester in psychology she has really taken on um a really big part of my life right now um she has given us she only prints out notes and she reads it to us which isn't like you know the best way to learn but she always encouraged us to go home and read which i tend to do i've always done that as a kid and so i continue to do so and i think i've retained more this year that i lost last year doing completely virtual notes completely virtual everything and having them printed out for me reading them every night going over them and having to do the work
191she i've literally in conversations now have brought her up i'm like oh i learned this in psychology and that's what that means that's why your kid is this way or this is why i did this when i was six you know like i think having that that value of you need to do this now not later is what we should go forward with as a community as a district as people in general so thank you okay so sporting any comments okay i would like to uh you know thank both of you because um as students you're looking past where you are which is it's kind of rare for students a lot of times they're in the moment thinking about the moment and you're right covet is has been terrible for us but it did make
192us you know advance a few things and so to take that and grow on it um was gonna be much better than just going back to the way we used to do it um we had never thought about doing anything virtual well i'm not going to say we'd never thought about it but we had never really pursued it until covet hit it made us find a new way it didn't work for everybody but it does work for some so having it available for those ones that it does work for is you know expands our growth so like i said i want to thank both of you for looking beyond where you are today so thank you okay moving on so i promise i did not tell them to say any of that but they are
193going that does help my next couple of uh updates that i'm going to give you so i i'd like to tell you the work of the superintendent's advisory committee and the mental health committee that we've met in the last week one of the things that we are really becoming laser focused on is what is happening in the classroom we've spent a lot of time talking about the things that have kind of swirled around logistical types of things whether people are wearing masks not wearing masks but we got to talk about instruction we got to talk about students and we got to talk about the best way to meet their needs and so what we've started to do in those groups is to to really focus on what are the things that we can do in
194our classrooms every single day that are going to make the most difference and so those that were here and have heard about vtss you'll you'll understand this but i'm going to try to kind of explain it every school the the school could be broken up into like a pyramid the largest section of the pyramid we call tier one 85 to 90 percent of the students if you get tier one level support so your classroom instruction 85 percent of your school should be learning with good tier one instruction those that need extra supports then become tier two and tier three and so those are much smaller groups of students what we're dealing with now obviously is that there are more students that tend to be in tier two and three because of some learning loss and
195so what people talk about is we gotta do more remediation we gotta do uh more tutoring those kinds of things which is not wrong but we need to focus a lot of our time and energy on the place where our students spend the most time and that's in that classroom with their teacher they're there all day long and so we have to make sure that that type of instruction in the tier one is powerful right so we can bring those numbers down to much smaller places where we can actually work one-on-one with some of these students that actually need tier two and tier three types of support so they're working right now on what it might look like in a classroom in amherst county whether it's in kindergarten or 12th grade there are there are
196large concepts that every classroom should have right it doesn't matter what grade level you are what school you go to if you go to amherst county you should be expecting this type of instruction in your classroom it starts with the type of relationship that's in the class the next part is the type of instruction that peter was talking about that is engaging that is hands-on that is relevant that you know it there's a reason why i'm learning these kinds of things and then the last part is what we actually expect students to learn the outcome so we're doing that work right now with the uh superintendent's advisory group the mental health group they're working on that mental health plan that we had talked about uh the comprehensive mental health plan to provide supports to our
197students but as they look at this classroom they need to start thinking about how relationships are built so that's how they're supporting that work in the classroom but it's it's you know our administrators are going through this our um our dr norman's staff is going through this and once we get the superintendent's advisory we're going to start working out towards the larger staff obviously this is not a we can get this done right now this year but hopefully by the beginning of next year we can get folks on the same page and start to really talk about and do what peter's talking about is is really getting our students back engaged and involved in the learning so we can get back to where we were in 2019 when we were talking about getting students prepared
198the 5cs the innovations things all of that stuff is still sitting out there it's just we got to get back to it um and i think that um some of the the changes in in the uh covet have helped with that right we're starting to see the ability to move forward and so now that we're doing that we got to focus on the students in the classroom so those are those are the two things that that's what those two groups are working on right now certainly can answer any questions about them okay thank you mr chairman um dr arnold in your superintendent's advisory committee update what would you say are the top three things that you guys are seeing as needing to be implemented as a committee so i think that what they're finding with
199students is getting them back engaged engaged in a couple of ways engaged in coming back into the building right that's that's one of the problems that we have faced is that lots of students have taken advantage of this ability to kind of do online work those kinds of things where they've kind of just disengaged from the process so we have to get them back in school first and dr norman talked about that the second is once they're in the classroom to get them to to to engage in the coursework right when you're when you're disconnected from it it makes it much more difficult to get back into that that pattern that habit and so those are those are a couple of of the things and then um let me think about the third one anybody
200behind me i mean i mean i think those and and clearly then the third i think the third one is it's just that that you have teachers that are teaching a subject or a grade level but they're having to go back and get information from subjects or grade levels that they don't teach right to help kids move forward so if you're in the fourth grade and and you have a bunch of kids that really didn't get all the third grade materials or the second grade materials they need teachers are having to spend a lot of time and energy and resource trying to try to and we call it spiraling you know going back and picking up concepts that might not have been completely learned and so those are all things but i think those are
201all things that are part of really good teaching and so i think i think we're going to get there it's just we have to focus on it is that something where volunteers helping to relieve some of the things um that the teachers don't really need to focus on as much so well i think that was part of right so i think that was part of what the superintendent's advisory group was talking about that's why the idea of the volunteers came up is that there are certain administrative types of tasks that are required to get a school day completed in the best of times that kind of has been spread out across the schools you know teachers do those some of those things and administrators do them but because there's such a premium on the instruction
202now it is going to be important for us to get more people in the building to kind of take some of that those responsibilities off of our teachers so they can really focus on the classroom great thank you now i know um you know that kind of work is not everybody's saying but your video out here with them and playing in the river and yeah learning the stuff the hands-on um i i wish more people could take advantage of that kind of thing uh it not only does it show it teaches them and shows them things but it teaches them what's here in in our community this is not just ever in other places it's it's what's here and uh so i i know playing in the creeks not everybody's thing but uh you know
203it should be it really should be in county i would guess that that's probably the material that all of those students will remember yeah exactly on the road yeah uh that would be my belief and and i i wish you know you know that all the students had the chance to take advantage of something similar to that if not that specific thing well it can happen in smaller ways right right in every classroom yeah you know and that's what we're going for yeah good it's that kind of feeling good good thank you okay next item is public comments so there's been discussion uh ms burke brought up the ability because i believe it was three years ago that uh the board decided to take public comment out of the back of the agenda because no
204one was no one was speaking there there is a desire to look at that again so we want to bring it back here tonight we can answer any questions about that y'all can discuss that but i wanted to make sure that and there are several things that we need to talk about with public comment but this is just the first one so i will okay since miss burg you brought it up you might was very good start um yes i just wanted to say that i've had a lot of our community members parents and caregivers and just people concerned about what's been going on with the school and i think that having our school board meeting run one way and then the board of supervisors run a different way is confusing for them and they
205feel like we're taking their voices away where they can't express comment at the end of the meeting after hearing what we discussed you know during the meeting they have to wait another whole month sometimes to actually speak about what already happened before where they would like an opportunity at the end of the meeting i think it would you know they think would be more transparent you'd have more input i just think it's a good idea okay anyone else uh yes mr chairman yes i believe i don't think well at least from what i've heard it hasn't been getting rid of public comment at the front but just adding a small one at the end you know yeah so you'd still have the front part and then those who wish to respond to what they've heard
206can speak at the end yeah and that's what you used to do you know as a board you decided not to do it and so now you're talking about putting it back in so that's completely up to you guys how you want to do it i would suggest though that um because like everything else you want to give time to for folks that and especially with ms thompson not here to to be able to consider this you know this this issue and bring it back and vote on it you know you would want to unless you want to do that tonight but we we don't want to bring things to you and say we want you to vote on it tonight we want to give you time to to consider all the the pieces to
207it okay now i will admit you know if you have somebody who comes and speaks at the beginning of the meeting and then does wait around there three hours just to say the exact same thing again i will be one of the first to tune out i mean i've already heard it once um so i'm i'm not gonna want to sit attentively and listen to the same parading again so that's not always going to be berating though either you know it's anybody who's going to wait around that long is is here to parade not as something happened during the meeting that they wanted a comment about and that's true that's true not everybody but be a little positive chris yeah i'm confident about that so what do you need from us tonight i you know
208this was this was wrong because there was a request okay for you guys so y'all have to it's up to the board i don't know if people are comfortable to vote now on it or if you want to wait until next meeting mr greiser did you right hear right do you have any comment on if uh if you want to wait till miss thompson comes back to the next meeting i don't have an issue with that okay can we do that great we'll table it till next okay um one quick thing on that um for our next meeting when we discuss it again and we hopefully have a vote on that um could i just have some suggestions perhaps before next meeting on how that motion should be worded if we just say bring back
209the old yeah yeah it would it wouldn't be a very difficult motion we can we can get that to you all right thank you so much and i will say you did a good job with the quarantining one yeah i'm getting proud of you guys nobody's going to question promotioning anymore [Laughter] so the second part of public comment was what we discussed in our um our meeting last thursday about a statement prior to public comment i think there was there was a desire that you you would ask ms patterson from vsba to give you an example i took that example and i took out things that i know we don't we we currently don't do and so on board docs i have a draft copy of of that for you to to look at to
210consider to give us feedback if there's anything you want us to do with something like that i think and this is this is once again the desire of the board to make sure that our public understands what is expected at that podium like you know what what we would like for for people to remember when they're there at the podium and then how we can address their concerns right that's also embedded in this statement as well is that the ability for us to contact people especially if they have some sort of grievance or issue that needs to be resolved so i think i think it meets both the decorum piece as well as a how do we how do we then connect back up with the people that might have an issue that needs to
211be resolved i think that's stated in this document should we consider adding maybe a column on here that they can put a phone number or email so well that would be the third part of this conversation we could talk about it at the same time but there's been a lot of discussion recently about people providing their address and the safety concerns around that that people would much rather have their privacy than having you know making statements that might upset others and then having your address out there so what we would offer in terms of of all of this is to say maybe we have some sort of contact information that they give us so that we can then reach back out to them and and talk to them the the board of supervisors has changed
212to to ask for your voting district which is a little bit broader and so those are all things that i know that have been brought to me from the board and i'm just handing them back over to you board any discussion we all know you do i don't know i guess his name was on the chalkboard every day for a long time um there are a few things i like the idea about um maybe putting just putting what district you're in you know and an email and phone number um the statement seems quite expansive so i think i'm reticent to place too many limitations on our public comment because i want to even as it is our public comments some there are many people out there that don't even really understand they can come in
213comment um so um there are several things that i would probably consider taking out so but with with mrs um thompson not here mr geiser i would just suggest that maybe we can table it asks yes over the next couple of weeks if you have things that you would like to suggest you send them to us we can then give you a couple of versions of this and you can choose which one and i want to i want to be clear i didn't create this document uh this was uh what was requested from the school board association and and what what actually they said i i took out the things that i know we don't ask people to do right and so this is as close to what we do as as we possibly can
214get okay so what i would ask is that you come back you provide us some feedback based on on this document and then we can we can create some and so in our um april meeting we can say okay let's talk about the second comment we can talk about do we need to have a statement that's read by the chair prior to the comment and then how we ask people to sign up and i think we can we can get that accomplished next meeting in april the last thing is board norms and i do think that since ms thompson respectfully asked if since she has such a major part in that because most of it is is about her responsibilities as chair uh with the board with superintendent that she could be a part of
215that conversation so i i i respectfully on her behalf ask that we tabled that as well in into april okay with that come with me okay then that is all i have mr chairman thank you dr arnold so now we get to committee reports mr terry i just want to april since april the 14th is during spring break just a reminder that we are april 7th so it's a week earlier because we've spent so much time together we need to work quickly so april 7th just a reminder okay sorry mr chairman no that's completely fine so we get to 12.0 and we're going to do 12.0 and 13.0 together which is committee reports and individual school board members so we will start and go down the line if you have a report or you report
216otherwise just comment so mr arasi would you like to go first please sure uh well i'm not on committee so i don't have a report but um i do see things starting to move toward positive light and that's great um very good uh budget uh work and we're gonna keep moving forward and we're now approved so we can move forward with those spending and money gathering and i guess all the all the stuff that we need to make the school run and everybody else that's out there that has thought through all of this this past year and there's been more downs and ups i think but to keep pushing through there is light at the end of the tunnel and everybody is just it's it's amazing to see this from my perspective is being new
217here and seeing and learning what every individual does it's it's really incredible how you all come together and make everything happen there are so many gears in this in this clock and it's just it's really amazing to see you all work thank you mr rossi miss justice thank you mr chairman um all of you dr arnold thank you for your desire to facilitate and inform us and work with what you perceive as our expectations i really appreciate that and kim all your work and dr wells thank you so much for your three point um options as far as contact tracing and quarantining i really appreciated the positives and the negatives and mr gallagher and mr crawford all of you thank you very much siana and peter thank you so much for coming here and i
218look forward to hearing some suggestions on how to engage the students more as a home educator engagement is so focal we have a lot more flexibility but there are so many options in the larger school setting because you have a lot more people a lot more skills so i look forward to seeing how we come together to do that and even though i know government works slowly i think we've gotten some really good traction here in meeting our communities desires and needs thank you miss justice miss berg um yes i wanted to say a big congratulations to ms riker from elon today when she got her or finally came in to get her award and also to our speakers that came and spoke with us today uh our parents that came in and spoke and
219also to our student reps it's always great to hear them and what they have to say and also a big thank you to our solar guy that happened to go to navy [Laughter] it was really interesting and exciting that we could actually make some money out of this cut our bills down and put some more money into education and set it into the electric bills and thank you everyone for coming and everybody who's watching at home secretary i i told mr grazer i would do his report on the guff school okay all right thank you miss berg you're done yes sir great doc arnold so uh as i'm the superintendent in charge of the gov school i was at that um last meeting that mr grouser attended the big issue for the guff school was
220getting their budget completed they have a budget we school systems in the area pay tuition that is how our students go to the guff school and how they pay their bills and they are not going to raise tuition uh i think that we are probably closing in on three or four years where they haven't done that but warning the possibility uh in the future years uh one of the things that they've been trying to do to keep that down is to bring more students in but when they bring more students in that's more of a burden on the school system to pay more tuition and i know that mr terry is a part of the stem you all have that conversation all the time as well so that that's the main issue there um that
221they're they're working through but they're going to give a budget that's um that's going to not require all the school divisions to increase their tuition and just so you know they the lynchburg city schools is the fiscal agent even though five school divisions are part of the guff school so they follow for example like whatever lynchburg city would do for raises and those kinds of things so that's that's how they make their decisions on their personnel what are our numbers at golf school how many have it peter are you asking about how many people from amherst amherst county yeah i believe it is eighth in the senior class and i would assume it's also eight in the junior class okay eight i think we had one more like sometimes occasionally school systems don't fill their
222slots right they open up plus their mind is like one or gotcha okay thank you mr greiser would you like to uh make any statements tonight i'm good thanks for letting me participate thank you dr you're welcome okay miss liggin okay um as far as my committee reports laurel has not met since we met and things are calm there i think we're due to meet uh one month of this april yeah so we'll meet in april and i'll have more information about our budget and things over there uh as far as um vspa is concerned i did attend the uh southern regional meeting on tuesday night it was very good it was hosted by louie lorenberg we did it two years ago so it kind of goes in place of placement but i did enjoy
223everything that jt kessler had to say they had some good artwork ambers county had some artwork there from elon i believe it was very nice awkward um i appreciate the strawberries i've been smelling mr um teres and i couldn't get mine over so i'm sitting there going i should hate shorts but anyway i want to thank everybody for those uh everything is good we've enjoyed ourselves tonight um as far as the decision about uh contact tracing and quarantined make an analogy that answers that question i took a trip some years ago and i asked the driver why he went so far out of the way to get me where i had to go and he said because i wanted to keep you safe the analogy is that we did a lot that a lot of
224people didn't agree with in the community when we had to do it but i believe that i want to thank central office uh dr allen and his staff all teachers administrators everybody who has worked so hard we're calling people up into the wee hours of the night making sure that we were trying to attempt to keep our children safe and so not just the children but the administrators in the building so we appreciate what has already been done and we are coming out uh this is probably the first time i'd have a mask on here that don't mean you won't see me with one on certain places it's you know how crowded it is and what what degree of people that i'm dealing with i'm still wearing one to work so we still have to
225be careful but as uh the former board members here have said we are coming out and i feel very good about it and for the student reps you you have some great things right there and i want to encourage parents maybe we haven't said this or maybe we have all these changes that we're making we're going to need your help we're going to need your help to keep your children home when they're sick in order for this to work we can't do this by ourselves and we'll have a turn around here that won't be very pleasant so please help us with that and then help us help help us help your child get caught up you know we can do that all over my children's grandchildren's homes or papers and some of that stuff i
226don't even know how to do but you know i'm not supposed to but um and we're doing great things i just want to end by saying we're doing some great things in this county it doesn't get talked about but we're doing great things people are working all day for our children all six of mine i'm happy as i can be one of them got to build a leprechaun trap and i'm like oh go with my head but you know that's what your parents do but things are going on in the school system good things are going on uh ball playing cheer it's not cheerleading um stuff is going on i went to speak at a class last two weeks ago for african-american history i was one of the speakers on wellness i felt pretty good
227about it what was so interesting is my daughter was one of the speakers too isn't that funny i looked over and i'm like oh my goodness what are we doing here but there i just want to end by saying let's let's keep a positive attitude there are some good things going on and um for the public comment you know i try to answer emails when i get them i might just say thank you but we're going to try to do better if it's to me particularly i'll answer if it's to the whole group sometimes i assume the chair will answer but it's not that we're disrespecting anybody by not getting back the emails now with my setup if i don't see it right away it goes up under something you know what i'm saying and
228i'm like way to go so we're going to do the best we can with that and i would encourage parents if uh i think i've heard this twice now about a child being held back or something like that get in touch with teachers and principals just you know just be loud to them get in touch with them and then if they can't help you we'll be glad to pick it up now i'm gonna end on this mr chair doing a great job here anyway i need your strawberries um i will say we're going to vote next time on the public comment but let me just say this i don't mean i'll be i'm not going to be holiday and yell that twice that's all i got to say that's what i'm saying thank you miss
229liggin alrighty so um stem academy has not met um we were we tried to do a zoom meeting and we didn't have a quorum so enough people couldn't attend so we had to postpone it to i guess it'll be coming up at the end of this month uh as far as my comments for the night thanks to the speakers um we do like to hear what you got to say you know not everybody agrees with everybody but we all want to hear what you got to say i did like hearing what miss justice had to say about the possibility of tutoring uh and that that option i think that's a that's a great thing to bring up and you know we will have some students who need to get caught up and caught back up
230so uh i think that's something we definitely should check into as far as the budget you guys do a great job of providing such a you know a detailed description of what's going on and to keep an open mind about knowing the gas budget is probably going to take a huge hit having a backup plan for that you know not going in saying this is where all the money is truly going that we can pull money back to cover those extra expenses that we know are gonna hit um and um and and i agree with miss berg on the uh go solar i'm a big proponent um to be able to see us producing electricity all the electricity that we'll need and providing it to the back to the grid and making a i'm making
231a couple dollars on that is an awesome thing and and i'd like to uh have a shout out for um real synergy we've been working with them to get our um our uh new superintendent application out there and uh they didn't they weren't here tonight but um they came and talked to us recently and they've done a great job providing us the information that came from the community the the teachers parents students everybody who participated it's good seeing a community take so much interest in who will be overseeing the school system and we hope that we can find the candidate that best matches their wants needs desires however you want to put it so i've never been in this process before several people have i hear it's a pretty uh a pretty tough process but
232so far this group has made it a lot easier to swallow than we were expecting so uh hats off to them um student reps thank you guys for coming i like i said keep looking forward um we we need that out of you guys we need that out of the whole school system um that's about it thank you very one more much are we now going to cancel the meeting for this uh 17th that was the 17th that's not necessary that was for the board and for the budget only let's hold it yeah we're not going to do it no see you again in april okay april 7. that's one of those things i just want to make sure that it was there okay yeah you're not invited so all that being said can i
233get a motion to adjourn um mr chairman i'd like to make a motion to adjourn thank you can i get a second second thank you all those in favor aye aye sorry i forgot about this hammer [Music] you