001[Music] so [Music] so [Music] so [Music] so [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] begin our school board meeting for the month of november uh at this time we would ask that we would stand uh for a moment of silence and decide to believe that at the same time during this moment of south we're recognizing that today is veterans day and do we have any veterans in the audience just raise your hand so we salute you sir and all the others who are listening to us so this time we will observe our moment of silence let us sit now and have our pledge of allegiance for which it stands one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice for all thank you for that we have some board members who are joining us
002electronically and at this time i will be reading the statement for electronics just according to the amherst county school board policy dvd the school board member may participate from a remote location due to a 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 physically present at the physically present 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 we do uh mrs bird hear us okay at this time she did respond verbally um seeing that we have met both criteria stipulated
003within the policy dvd at this time i asked for a motion from the board that mrs berg will be allowed to participate in this meeting remotely with all the rights of discussion and voting a court afforded to her hello we have a move uh promotion about mrs thompson do we have a second sure case can probably move a second by ms thompson and mr um terry uh unanimously uh do we have a vote of approval always say aye any opposed thank you so much mr here ma'am thank you so much okay here we go and this time more members i would ask at one point two did we have an approval of the agenda or an amendment ms thompson do you have an amendment yes mama do i'd like to add a closed session at
004the end for personal reasons okay we already have a closed session we're adding addition to that for personnel uh do we have a motion for that second [Music] thank you so much with that said we need to prove the agenda again right okay now we'll ask for approval of the agenda with the amended amount i'm sure make a motion that we approve the agenda with the edition digital closed session okay all in favor i mean you need second second all in favor all right all right this time we have something wonderful here 2.01 dr arnold this time i'd like to invite terry bumgarner and family yeah representative so we're here tonight to present a resolution of respect for mr allen lundgarner beloved school board member emeritus for amherst county public schools we are today comforted
005in the knowledge that mr allen mungarner lived a full life in service of others for the sake of not only his family but the students and community of amherst county that he served throughout his service as an amherst county board member whereas mr allen long-marner was appointed by the amherst county school board of supervisors on tuesday august 12 2014 to serve district three of the amherst county school board and whereas mr von gardner's first meeting was held at amherst county high school on thursday august 14 2014 and a joint meeting between the amherst county board of supervisors in the amherst county school board for the presentation of the school efficiency review of amherst county public schools and whereas the leadership and support he provided the amherst county school board during his tenure on the amherst
006county school board is to be acknowledged and applauded whereas mr brown garner served on the amherst county school board from august 12 2014 until june 30th 2016 whereas throughout his service to the board mr bongard contributed to the amherst county community by being a representative and advocate for students therefore be it resolved on this 11th day of november in the year 2021 that we embrace this community in their abbreviate in remembrance of mr allen von barner school board member emeritus okay [Music] [Applause] thank you dr arnold for reading that representing us here at amherst i would just like to say we're going away to the board this old meeting is over miss van gaal we enjoyed working with mr garner and we solely miss him and we love you so much thank you thank you
007all so much at this time we're moving on to uh public comments uh in 3.01 there are comments concerning school matters uh no additional public comments will be available at the end of this meeting i do have a list here and natalie has informed me that she has a little clock over there that will be going off my first speaker on my list is mr bill cox he will come forward sir i'm bill cox 1249 lexington turnpike hammers and i'm here for the everest county school bus drivers association since i spoke to you last month the media has just been full of school bus systems nationwide facing driver shortages one group in the neighboring state was complaining about their low 15 an hour starting pay and i had to chuckle because you have to drive
008with us 13 years here to get 15 an hour and while pay is our primary concern and i think some other drivers are here to talk about it tonight as well i could probably come before you with a different need for the transportation department every month well into 2022. i'm going to speak on one tonight though that i've spoken to you about before that is air conditioning the buses we are 20 years into the 21st century and everything is air conditioned these days we don't even notice it your car your house your place of work also your bus drivers cars and homes but not our place of work i received a new bus this year it's nice no air but there is a thermometer and one day in august sitting at a stoplight at madison
009heights i read 121 degrees on that bus do you honestly think your drivers conditioned as they are to air conditioning these days can be at their best in that kind of heat we are soaking wet from our own sweat when we finish our two to three hour shift on the bus in the afternoons the students aren't there as long as we are but they've got to be miserable if you think it's just artists think about how often you turn your car's ac on even now the day of last month's school board meeting i saw 101 degrees on that thermometer and even this week i've used the air conditioning in my car every day and this is november this is a workplace and safety issue not a luxury we're asking for the students would benefit from
010less dust in the air less noise fewer allergic reactions and passing their sweat to each other can't be healthy and they can't keep their hands off each other especially the little ones there is a reason that air conditioning is required on special needs buses i'll leave you with this i was talking to a neighbor of mine just after school started he's a farmer who has by the way been driving air-conditioned tractors since the 1990s he asked our school was going and i mentioned the new bus and naturally it's lack of ac he looked at me and said the school buses aren't air conditioned i just smiled and said no to which he replied well they don't think much of you folks do they i didn't know how to answer that thank you for listening gail
011martin good evening i'm dan martin i'm live at 11 franklin creek road and i am a bus driver with the county as well my reason for speaking to you tonight is for i need people to know the stress that everyone is building and the reason that department is under so much stress is a lack of enough bus drivers we're human and we're exempt from illnesses and family emergencies on a daily basis we're all stepping up to the plate to help out in each way that we can as drivers we do our own routes and then we have to do somebody else's route as well our mechanics are driving morning and afternoon frequently we even had one of our secretaries who has cdl to also have to step in and drive us our director ms campbell
012has had to jump in the van numerous times to cover the rats that are from people that are absent you may wonder why are we so short of drivers well i'll tell you why it is not an enticing position for bus position unfortunately as mr cox stated we have some days unworkable conditions we have to be at work very early in the morning we are pre-tripping a bus before six o'clock most of us in the dark in the rain in the wind extreme cold [Music] we go home and we come back to work in the afternoon as mr cox has stated some days it's unbearable it's like being inside of a bubble also if you do not park your bus at home you have to drive twice a day not once we have to deal
013with unruly children traffic and angry parents at times these are just a few of the reasons that we of things and duties that we have to do back in the day we could attract and retain a lot of drivers and the reason for that was back then retail businesses and fast food pay the money that they're paying today and that is one of the main reasons why we're so short of drivers is at a low salaries that we hate i realize that you cannot take care of all of our cons of our position but you can help us out by looking at our salaries and considering our condition for your drivers thank you [Music] jeff porter hi i'm jeff porter 478 woody's lake road madison heights virginia um i'm here for a couple of reasons
014one is i have sent to each of you board members a letter and some some documents with it and i sent those also to dr wells as well as dr arnold so you all have that document my concern is for the health and well-being of our children our young people as well as for people in general in regards to um what this vaccine does there is a tool that the cdc set up it's called vares it's the vaccine adverse effects reporting system it is to report and to monitor effects of covid19 it is the only means by which doctors report such cases and the doctors who have reported such cases have not been given feedback from the cdc about their particular case on november on october 8th the number of deaths from from covid vaccine
015was 1676 on november 15th it was 17 128. on october 22nd the number of deaths was 17 619. there are other categories listed in terms of life-threatening events hospitalizations number of office visits etc secondly osha is no longer required or is taking any reports of adverse effects from the coven vaccine this means that the scientific research which is dependent upon data is not being acted upon the vaccine that we have as well as the booster is targeted for the alpha variant not delta because there is a real likelihood that the mandate for children 5 through 11 will be implemented i am concerned for these children 94 children in this age group have died from covered this quarter of time is up i think okay thank you we have this to read though [Applause] john justice
016a copy of the policy for 29 the km policy sorry i'm don justice i live at 125 garland avenue amherst virginia and i appreciate the opportunity to speak tonight dear chairwoman and other school board members i come tonight to challenge the safety of changing our current sex offender registration notification policy can why are we making our policy less safe by removing restrictions and reducing the compass of said restrictions so our old policy said violent sex offenders were not allowed to be present at school or at school functions but if we look at the last page of our new policy it says it makes two exceptions for that um exclusion it says a student who is a violent sex offender may be allowed on campus that brings to my london county and others who got court
017orders to allow them i'm not certain how someone who is a registered sex offender a violent sex offender can get a court order to allow them at school functions why are we shifting the responsibility of notification from the elected school board to one individual the superintendent why are we removing the title sex offender and crimes against minors and just calling it the registry that makes no sense to me why have we deleted from the original policy that we have in place right now procedure established by the virginia department of state police this is our number one authority for enforcing safety in our communities when our schools are having trouble with violence or abuse who would we call would better be our local law enforcement why have we removed the responsibility for each school to request
018the notification of registration or re-registration of sexual registered sex offenders also our current policy asks those schools to check the zip code and contiguous zip codes with our schools why are we creating less accountability we are stronger together please see the current policy can the reason for having a policy on such a subject has been removed in our current policy it starts with this the amherst county school division recognizes the danger registered sex offenders posed to student safety therefore to protect students while they travel to and from school attend school or are at school-related activities this is our reason for having this policy perhaps this is why we are facing this situation maybe we have forgotten the danger sexual offenders pose to children in general especially in schools where there is such a large grouping
019of minors and fewer adults per student is it possible that the leftist agenda promoting behaviors such as advocated and all boys aren't blue or if there's mutual consent is incest okay i'm not making up these titles please vote against this let's keep our kids safe [Applause] that was the end of the name that i have on my list was there anyone else in the audience who need yes sir thank you 362 peters hollow road monroe virginia good evening first let me offer congratulations to our newly elected school board members you have some important work ahead of you and i wish you well also thank you to our veterans for your service and sacrifices elections as you know have consequences our governor elect has pledged to eliminate critical race theory from our schools that means so-called
020equity lessons cultural competency social emotional programming social justice programs anti-racism and so on our attorney general elect has promised to enforce the law and has expressed a particular interest in public school issues when each of you took your oath of office you sort of support the constitution of the united states and the constitution of the commonwealth of virginia and to faithfully and impartially discharge all the duties incumbent upon you employment discrimination based upon race is unlawful blatantly racist and an insult to the multitudes of people who fought to end racial discrimination in this country and in this commonwealth i first called attention three months ago to the hiring of an unqualified teacher at amherst county high school in 2020 based upon skin color hearing no denial or any public acknowledgement i again raised the issue
021at last month's meeting another month of silence from the school board and administration can lead to only one conclusion you broke the law and have conspired to keep it quiet or cover it up hoping that it would go away and assuming that richmond would have your back since the employee in question would not reasonably even consider applying for the position until the following year when she was to graduate it seems probable to me that this began with recruitment by the principal followed by enablement from human resources and the superintendent and consummated by a school board member signing the employment contract on behalf of the board i'm providing i have provided each of you with excerpts of the virginia constitution and statutory law along with your own policy statement on employment discrimination please note on there
022that virginia virginia's attorney general can bring a civil case against those involved in this sort of matter without the need for an aggrieved plaintiff such as the teachers parents and students affected when such matters offend the rule of law in the commonwealth i would humbly suggest that you consult your attorney as to the veracity of what i have stated board members this happened on your watch it would demonstrate integrity and faithfulness to your oath of office if you would bring this matter to a resolution before the current term ends what would that look like a full public disclosure with accountability for each of the individuals involved please do the right thing while that option is still available to you thank you good evening are there any others like to address the border this time seeing
023now we should move we should close our public comments at this time and moving on to 4.01 we have some policy revisions there is that dr wells or doctor make sure my mic is on madam chair members of the board we haven't found you the uh 4.01 which is the policy revisions this is a second read and uh if we had answered questions and if none then we'll ask for this to be put into approval thank you and i think it's important to note that um kn was a first read last time the other sex offender policies were second grade lifestyle so i just want you to know that this one is here because it was not taken off after the first read last meeting so y'all have to do something with that board members
024a conversation i'm sure i think it would be important for us maybe to discuss each one of these individually that would be okay okay and the pleasure of the board ms thompson's here to discuss it individually okay mr burr can you hear us okay all right just checking all right miss thompson we should like to start us off with whatever comments you have we'll go right down the line you start with k n if you have fun well for kn um i was wondering why that one came back up again today um or this week i know that we saw it at first on june 10th and then we pulled them so we could get additional information from the attorney i believe we had a second reading september 9th meeting and i believe it was
025on there and at that time i mean in october we had it presented to us again and i think there was confusion um the subject line of the memo did not include km but when you open the memo and you're reading it did include kn so i know i made the motion last time that we not approve the sex offender changes um the proposed and i know that carried i'm not sure unanimously or not but i do know that it passed the board so in my mind i've already i've already made that motion and i thought the board had already not approved k n for whatever reason um i don't know what everyone else's recollection is i mean we can always vote on it again but i don't understand because the attorney said that kn
026and well the kna go together and they're consolidated so why would we have one and not the other so when i made the motion i believe when we voted we voted on all of them that's my opinion do dr wells would you like to [Music] explain that so as far as the policy itself what we need to realize and we can change this amount we can change the verbiage but the policy from the from the vsba the state has moved away from from the where they represented so we have tier one tier two and tier three offenders so what's in the code of virginia is tier one tier two tier three our policy this the current policy does not have listed is tier one tier two tier three so if we have an offender about
027the state they're listed as a tier one or tier two or tier three our policy does not match with that so our policies is violent sex offender but the state law now says tier one tier two tier three so we need to make sure we are consistent with what the state is coding these people as so we can make sure our policy is consistent with that as far as the verbiage is nothing else because we can't have one one policy of the state saying they were tier three but we're saying there's something else because they're not that does not exist anymore so if somebody gets convicted of a sex offender then they're not they're not we have to make sure we're matching what the state has that'll be my recommendation so whether we ease out
028this policy or you want us to rewrite something and change the verbiage of our policy to match the tier one to current policy to tier one tier two tier three so it is an alignment i would recommend that if you're not in favor of going with kn this is the new policy we're not in the line of what the state has is how they recognize these uh sex offenders well how did we approve kna we didn't you didn't you did not remember well we stuck with that one with the old verge and we're not alignment there either but i didn't i didn't bring that up last month because after i read it after after the meeting that i brought that up so we really need to think about the verbiage to make sure that verbiage
029is in alignment with either tier one tier two tier three so we're in the same thing we can again we can adapt it to do that but i think i would recommend that we are in the same verbiage so that we're consistent with the state and how they're uh identifying people whether we adopted the sba policy sir i understand what he's saying we did not approve it last week two weeks ago i think madam chairman recommendation would be that we do not approve kn tonight we can always table it until january and have a discussion about any rewarding that we may need except the pleasure of the board to bring this back for a read to look at again he said in january not in december january well we could bring that in december but
030i believe that a work session would be helpful if we were to look at verbiage and we won't probably won't be able to have one till january ms berg i'm sorry you said something um yes medicare um i also was honored to believe that um that kn policy was done with last meeting but due to the recent election i would like to recommend that we actually um sorry my throat that we actually did not change any more of our policies until after the administration changed and that would be on january 15th what well i don't know if i'm going that far um you talk about all the policies that we have to look at tonight or just this one i'm talking about all the major policy changes because everything's going to be changing as of
031january 15th and there's there's going to be a lot of changes coming down a lot of these regulations or restrictions are going to be thrown out i believe so i just would like to put a hold on further policy changes until we get recommendations coming out of richmond after january 15th the chair speaks tonight on the occasion of kn and the board here uh mitch berg we're going to uh i'm not necessarily saying that we're going to wait to january 15 to approve all policies understanding your concept on that but at this time i need to see if the board is willing to you want to table kn and have a work session on that dr um wells bring back some new language is that the pleasure of the board i think this time i
032think somebody has to make a motion again well that's what i'm saying is that the pleasure of the board must make that motion i don't know i think you can make the emotions in you you know we well we can table it though right exactly what's going to say we have to make a motion yeah madam chair you can table the motion you can table action on this item or you can delay taking action on the item and the difference is if you table it the person who makes a motion to table has to also be the person who removes it from the table for discussion and for action so a recommendation would be to delay take an action on this policy until after uh until the board chooses okay is that that sounds good
033is that the pleasure of the world where mr said well i think miss someone has time that's correct and if it gets second it gets the second standing code then we can talk about it right before we go i'll make a motion that we table it a second i'm okay hi [Music] i okay until january until [Music] moving on [Music] had time to review the other policies [Music] is there any discussion or can we just approve those second reading i'd like to um discuss gdm all right full of [Music] yes ma'am overall i feel good about the changes that we see here i know one of the reasons that we wanted some updates was so that a third party could be in with the person who's doing agreements and i think that's been included the
034only comment i have well there's two of them one because i know there's supposed to be an abbreviated document that was to be handed out has that been created or attached to this policy yet [Music] so yeah it hasn't been created yes yes it was incredible the others and it is not attached to the policy it certainly can be the revised procedures are attached to the policy and we have a one pager especially front and back that i believe i reviewed with you prior but i did not include it this evening as a part of the policy but be happy to do whatever we so choose we boiled it down into a front and back one pager at the time it was requested and it has been completed okay thank you did nothing speak enough
035[Music] yes i hate to table it because i think that we need that third person in there as soon as we can get it but we're going to delay it but i would like to see that document so i guess if for me if we could approve it tonight that would be fine and then maybe bring the document back work session make sure that we're getting our eyes on that any other question of this particular policy can we look at the um i would say we're going to vote on them one at a time i'm sorry i'm sure i make a motion that we approve policy gpm can we have a vote of approval for that policy do we have a second second we would have probably moved in second all in favor any opposed
036policy has been adopted moving on to ielts the board have any discussion or questions about that policy i do now okay um yes i think we've come a long way and i want to say that i really feel like it's shaping up well i have a couple of comments i'd like for the board to consider um in order and we're going to do this i want to do it right and just cross our keys and dot our eyes so one of the things that i was read as i'm reading it at the beginning it says that there is a like a need you know if you have a need that curriculum will be developed so i don't see any accountability uh in place for identifying that need like who will establish that there is a
037need by what criteria by what process instead for example is determined by needs assessment may be presented to the board for approval pending a public hearing i would just hate for us to just say okay we've got a need to do this to dig in use all of our human resources financial resources to create a curriculum and then we don't have any public review until the end and then i mean we've been through this before we don't want to get to the end in which we had done something at the beginning so i i would like to see us maybe adding something on accountability there at the beginning the second place that i see something that we could do to maybe um just grab this just a little bit is under um community responsibilities it
038says that the norms will be used as guidance for the work so they're looking for shared norms which is something that we've asked and i think that's in there but perhaps we could say that these norms will be shared with the board publicly before work is begun and again just trying to get on the front end if the norms are shared and they're part of the development and then it gets out in the public we to me we want to see what those shared values are before we start the work so i'm just looking at those two things on the front end and then maybe on the back end when we do public review maybe identify how we're going to communicate to the public that it's going to be a public review and not just
039we didn't we're not staying specific could be just a website but there's people who don't always look at a website so we may want to include the newspaper and just know county policy quite often spells out with the modality in which it would be shared so those are my recommendations so as a matter of procedure we're going to have to vote this down because this is the second read and then instruct us to come back with further changes for our first reading do you know the chairman collision that we do not approve by f or ifr have a second second second oh hi all right and then post i'm opposed because i've read it a couple times and i thought i saw all of those things you just mentioned but the vote the motion carries
040we should bring this back um with re rewriting and the chair make a motion that we um continue work on i f and ifr i think you could just correct i think you could just direct us moving on policy let's adbca at that any comments question or discussion second read if not i'll entertain a motion to adopt this policy as the changes were made [Music] i probably moved in a second to accept this policy is written on a paper all right any opposed policy cares to be adopted is written yes ma'am may i ask that we bring this policy back with us in january when we start doing a work session with the new board adbca a.d thank you diminished reflective comments oh okay i don't know i mean we could probably discuss policies at
041any particular time but in this particular time the board has approved this um and come back to discussion uh we're now looking at uh our consent agenda has the board had time to review this thoroughly and there are no discussion or commander's vendors will ask for approval of consent agenda i'm sure i have one change to the minutes okay ms thompson that needs to be removed from the consent agenda and voted separately so if you'll make a motion to remove it and discuss after the consent agenda okay um from the consent agenda okay do we have a second to remove the minutes at this time i'm sorry okay probably moved in second we shall remove the minutes from the consent agenda at this time all in favor all right any opposed okay so now we
042approve the consent yes now that's same thing take it off right only that we take 5.02 off of the consent agenda for discussion and ms thompson is it about a particular person or i'm going to use numbers okay okay yeah i'm going to say that too it's been emotional employed to remove for discussion 5.02 do we have a second okay okay we probably moved in a second to remove 5.02 from this consent agenda all in favor all right all right any opposed okay so now we shall go back let's pull my screen down here to the minutes is that correct mr thompson um in the minutes in 5.05 um there was a conversation about discipline in our division and during that time i made comments about trying to consider the board's um a discussion with
043the board about character education and shared values i know we had a conversation on that about mental health lessons and social emotional lessons and i made the comment that i wanted to have the board discuss adding character education and developing our own curriculum as opposed to just grabbing hope of the virginia department of education that was not reflected in the minutes you can do this one of two ways you can say that they'll be added and approve the amendments based on that addition i'm trying to move that we approve minutes based on that addition probably um motion on the floor that we made an addendum to the minutes from last time do we have a second second okay all in favor all right and tell me we will take care of that thank you so
044much and we're going down to personnel 5.02 and we shall pull that up mr thompson and your concern there or your thought step um yes i just want to talk about number two um i noticed that there are no printed no credentials listed on that one so i would like to have that one pulled or um at least we could consider moving it until after the closed session okay number two and then number four perhaps a discussion on salary all right anything else on the 5.0 ocean madame chair if you would like to wait until after the special and then come back and you can either approve or not approve the personnel report thank you mrs that okay with the board yes [Music] any other discussions on that particular item 5.02 okay so moving on
0456.01 [Music] yes ma'am madam chair members of the board i will come to you tonight let's first talk about the auditorium and amber county high school renovation the addition of the high school so in the past since the past meeting we've had a community meeting where we had a kickoff meeting where we streamed the plan out to the community we've had two community meetings one at amherst county high school and one of the nelson middle school to allow the public to come in and give input into those design aspects and the the kind of the conceptual plan we met with the committee this past week our committee this past week and to kind of take that information we've received from the community and others and staff and to kind of consolidate that down into a
046conceptual recommendation we have mr josh bauer here with us tonight who's going to discuss those aspects with you and also look at the financial indications of the project so i'll turn it over mr bell thank you matt i approach these guys absolutely [Music] thank you [Music] all right good evening everyone i am uh josh tower with crafty warbler associates architects uh did everybody hear me okay with the masked one okay great um so um as as dr wells said we've had uh several community meetings um along with things with the uh committee so tonight we're going to be doing is discussing uh the uh the current concept um and all this is a concept um and uh the potential phases and then what the cost implications of each one of those phases are okay so
047we're going to talk about so for the agenda perceiving we're going to talk about phases one a through three uh the proposed project cost and then also to kind of give you an update on the master plan schedule okay so phase one eight uh would be the new auditorium edition along with the commons uh for those that are familiar this would be over top of the uh we'll get into a little bit more depth this is over top of the uh driver's side area uh phase 1b is the cafeteria addition renovation for the food court and kitchen phase two is to renovate the existing auditorium space and cte spaces and phase three would be going outside uh to the uh creating possibility of a softball and a baseball field house along with the renovations to
048lancaster stadium okay so looking at the overall facing plan so looking at the overall facing plan uh in red is phase one a uh so so this this would be a auditorium edition um along with a uh main commons um area edition connection to the uh to the gymnasium and this would be located adjacent to your existing main gym and auxiliary gym along with uh well we do not have the costs uh this we also showed the potential for a parking lot i'm an additional expansion parking lot on district owned property phase 1b is in blue that is renovation to the to the existing kitchen phase 2 is in pink um and that is a renovation of your cte space along with your auditorium um and then uh phase three i would be looking at
049potential renovations to lancer stadium and also the uh the possibility of a softball baseball field house okay so as we now get into the phases uh looking at phase one as i said this would be an addition uh so if you uh to try to keep it simple the uh this would be an auditory condition along with main commons so now let's blow blow plane into a larger format so now this is rotated so this is your existing gymnasium and your auxiliary gym and this is your existing kitchen so just keep it relational this is your your current driver's head uh driver's head area um so what we're proposing would be an 1100 seat auditorium um along with the addition of three classrooms um and a storage slash black black box room um so this
050would your auditory visit would be 1100 seats uh we would have a general seating in the main area and then kind of stadium seating in the back to try to get the best line of sight on this stage we would have uh a prop storage prop area along with uh dressing rooms um and uh um and they said we would have the adjacent classrooms uh which would be your uh which would be an instrument instrument room kind of a band room if you uh for which you will uh along with a theater space um a theater room a vocal room for uh for coral and then they said a storage slash black box uh space would also be included in that along with the quarter the other part about this is that we'd be creating
051a lobby with this edition this lobby could function as a after hours refunction as a lobby during hours it could be educational space for large group and small group instruction along with a dining room um depending on what we do with phase 1b if that if that were to move forward so the other part of this is that this connects your existing gym lobby makes your decision lobby larger um so that way i said when you're looking at um you know both during hours and after hours space it really allows you the most amount of freedom for use of those spaces and with the simplicity of closing two doors this separates your uh your theater arts your your gymnasium all those spaces that could be used after hours from your school function uh so that
052way you can have this open for the community um in the evenings and the weekends um and have it and with us simply closing two doors i will be able to separate the rest of the building from from those spaces so uh this is phase 1a this is if you can think of phase 1a as the auditorium and commons edition so here's just some images and again this is a concept here's some images of what the exterior could look like with the auditorium being on the right-hand side we have the ability to create a new secondary entrance uh so this could be the after hours entrance um and uh and along with the uh you can see on the left-hand side it would be the um uh the storefront the glass for the uh for
053the main commons and this so one of the you have several challenges with your current uh dining room uh one is if you've been through it um and we did have a community meeting in that dining room um this is multiple rooms um so you do have some challenges with the line of sight for teachers and needs to be able to kind of monitor what's happening uh you also have no daylight in that current space and the end and room is undersized uh so uh this would help to create a new space that could be used as dining space um this is also for lower just small group construction so uh this would be a shot uh from uh from the uh basically with your stadium to your back uh looking across the street uh
054and uh you can start to see some of the glass lots of daylight into the into the dining space now as we go inside uh this is looking at the uh looking at that entrance you know kind of that secondary entrance of what it would look like on the inside uh dining space and said this could be used for after hours for uh as long as space for your gym um and your auditorium along with uh um interested in the auditorium um as we now go down this this is what the hallway could look like um kind of a you have an opportunity for this to be a hall of fame uh to be able to celebrate the achievements um of the of the high school and that could be everything from uh athletics football
055uh basketball to uh performing arts if really be celebrated through um uh putting trophies and other another uh awards in the space uh what's also nice about this is a space for the you know to for a lobby space for the gymnasium and the auditorium um and this is also where all of your your toilet rooms would be as often as the space toilet rooms concessions ticket sales could all happen in this in this uh um in this corridor between the uh uh the gym and the auditorium so these are some images um of what the auditorium could look like on the inside uh so so we're looking at about 1100 seats uh so uh where this image is taking this from the um from your kind of your state you've seen in the back
056uh your sound booth is actually right here um and then you would have your your main auditorium seating in the kind of in the um in the accessible spaces which would be in front of the auditorium now as we kind of flip the camera around uh this is looking from the stage looking back so you can see that your uh your main seating here your stadium sitting in the back um some functions to try to keep this as flexible as possible is that we would put we would recommend putting floating partitions that would allow the back section of the auditorium to be split off that would allow greater freedom for you to have uh school functions uh so as example if you wanted to have uh testing on one side and you know in the
057seating and still have motions on the stage you would have that freedom to be able to create as much flexibility as possible so classes could be on one side or get multiple classes on both sides of the pulling partition so as we go from phase 1a to phase 1b now we're kind of focusing on uh you're renovating your current uh dining space uh so uh your food service folks have done a fantastic job uh with what they have um and uh so if you've done and you've had dining experience or your children have uh right now the challenge is there's multiple locations for uh for those food court places and what our goal is is try to to join all those together into one space so students would enter into one single room which would
058be a food court grab their different dining options come through one point of sale and be able to go not only will this increase speed for those students to be able to grab their food and sit down and eat but also it really allows your food service folks to be able to um to be more efficient in their in their um design so with this with this option we're looking at is is adjacent to uh the new dining room or your common space uh we would have the food court uh which is currently your kitchen so the idea is that we take your current kitchen renovate that new food court and then renovate some of the existing dining spaces new kitchen what our goal would be is to is to limit the downtime because one
059thing that is a challenge is having a kitchen that is offline for your high school students or any students so what we could do is create the new kitchen uh one that is operational let's go and renovate your your existing kitchen um so that way you always have an operational kitchen to be able to feed your students and then your existing dining room uh what we could do is is renovate that into classroom space i would actually create four great classrooms uh one of the challenges that you currently have is that you have uh so i believe world language classrooms uh they're located down here and they're really tiny um so this would allow you to have some normal size classrooms um and uh and be able to maximize the functionality of your current space
060so phase one one b would be to renovate your kitchen create a new food court and then convert your existing dining room into classrooms okay so here's an image of what as you're standing in the dining room uh now your back is to the front you know to the secondary front door and you can see the food court relocated right here so students are going in they're grabbing their food and they're coming right back up to the point of sale okay so phase two uh would now be looking at um conversion of some existing spaces uh so you uh so as the new auditorium was created your existing auditorium uh which seats about 450 students um and we have an opportunity here to repurpose that space so some options could be a cte space some
061options could be some other uh secondary spaces like black box uh could be some other opportunities for that uh for that the um [Music] the floor is sloped so in order to create this as a cte or other classroom space we would have to plan that but it's not unheard of we've done that in the past and it is something that we absolutely can happen along with renovating of some additional to those four classrooms that we talked about repurposing your your existing dining space uh could be renovated and um and also um some additional safety space so this option phase two would be to repurpose and create additional educational spaces including cte inside of the high school so as we look at phase three uh phase three is now moving outside uh so now this
062would be making improvements to uh uh to landfill stadium which is i continue to say this but i i really do mean it's a beautiful stadium so what can we do to enhance that um and make it make it even more fantastic some improvements could be uh looking at ada upgrades uh making it more friendly for uh for those folks that have some physical challenges have to get from the parking spaces to their seats both on the lower and the upper level um along with being able to make it easier for those folks to be able to get from the the seating um over to the uh to the toilet rooms and also to your concessions uh so we're showing just some accessibility ramps uh to be able to get you and so what our
063goals should be uh just like we talked about the auditorium is making sure that uh we create as much accessibility as possible for students for parents for grandparents um you know as i said i've got the unique opportunity last year to have my my oldest daughter was a senior um i got to see a lot of parents who come who would come out onto the athletic field and grandparents and for some folks it is a challenge so what can we do to make it more friendly for not only athletic events but also for all those other judicial special events that we put in our stadium and then uh the other part of phase three could be looking at the addition of the field house uh between softball and baseball uh right now you do not
064have any any toilet facilities uh located in that area so we would uh in order to do our best for equity you know amongst all the different sports if we could create a facility that has boys and girls toilet rooms for adults for this for your players along with additional space it really would enhance is it both the baseball and softball you know in that in that in that space so i said we've been looking at the addition of a new baseball softball field house uh so as we're looking at um that costs um these are total project costs and and so one of the challenges that we often see in our industry is when you're given numbers you're only given the construction costs oh by the way you've got this cost oh by the
065way you've got that cost what we're showing is a total project cost including our estimates for all of your fees and permitting um and uh you know cost for commissioning and all those all those costs so uh what were uh what we would uh at this point probable cost for the auditory vision which is phase one a is the auditorium and the uh the commons edition is about 11.5 million dollars total project costs let's everything in uh phase one b which would be the cafeteria renovation that is the food court the dining room of those four classrooms uh we have an estimated about 2.2 million um phase two which is a cte classroom renovation uh we have about 3.2 million um and then these phase three which is a stadium and renovation in the new
066field house we have just a little over two million dollars uh so all in with all the faces we have at 19.1 million dollars for everything um you know what what we understand is that there are always limits to any budget uh so uh with working with your administration we came up with uh option for phasing so that way it wasn't all everyone hold it um and so the idea here is that you know to try to map this out and say you know if we're looking at how we can tie things together phase one a and one b have a relationship so if it is possible to do those two faces together it makes sense um but we then we understand that there are budget limitations um phase two and phase three really are
067very independent um and have no relationship to phase one a and one b so those could be done either before or after that phase um if that makes sense i promise i'm almost done um so as we're looking at the master plan um so we've had a lot of fantastic community meetings they've been they've been wonderful folks have been coming out um and sharing both the the things they're excited about and things that they were not excited about um so that we've had at least at least three of those we've had facility committee beans which is a host of whole bunch of different folks um and uh tonight we're presenting in front of you uh kind of with an update on where we stand uh with our concept um and then we'll get after this
068meeting we're going to be going back and talk to the facility committee at least once or twice um and then our goal is to then present present this to the supervisors um with the date to be determined so uh so with all that said i'm uh i'm gonna stop talking for a moment and if anybody has any questions for myself dr elmore dr wells if you have questions for his plan or what what they've done so far remember this is this is not the design phase this is the master plan i'd like to thank you for the work and i did get to come to one of the meetings to see the uh some of the proposed things that would go in it it was uh it was exciting to see what it could be
069um i'd be curious you know several of the things you have several options of things that could go into like the auditorium how do you come up with a that was a pretty accurate number when you looked at what was it 12 point or whatever [Music] it went out to a couple dollars so i mean i i wonder how you stick to something like that when you're not sure what's truly going into it um well the good news is we've done quite a few auditoriums um so we do have a pretty accurate cost of what that could be and right there is there is going to be some contingencies in there because we don't there are things we don't know um so the type of exact type of seating do you want or you know
070do you want uh things that lift off and break those are options um what we expect is that the cost that we provided is very reasonable um so if there were things that um were well that well exceeded that we totally see those as an alternate um and then if you know and if the budget you know we are our estimate is low um then you can always choose those as an option so that if that makes sense it is um it is very early on in the process um but we do have some contingency dollars in there because we know there are going to be things that that move as we as we go forward did you i don't maybe i missed it but did you show uh um [Music] duration of projects how
071long it would take to complete each phase roughly i did that in this presentation um but we're if we were looking at the overall so the um the auditory condition uh we've been looking at anywhere from 12 to 16 months you know is a reasonable time frame uh for construction uh now design-wise we'd have six to eight months and then as the construction is probably between 12 and 16. uh the the cafeteria we are very limited on that um so what we would recommend is that we would do construct a new kitchen um and then maybe that takes three or four months um but it said we would only take the existing kitchen down so that way we always had an operational kitchen so overall we're probably talking five months um you know the uh
072the field house and the work of the state we've probably done over the summer and the same thing with phase two is that those can be done the cte renovations could happen over the summer time uh so we'll probably talk to talking to two to three months thank you so a couple things that we need to be able to do to move forward so bauer was hired to create this master plan and he has fulfilled that portion of his contract without presenting this or to go any further the school board has to decide what you would like to move forward on and when you determine that then you have to decide you have to instruct me to go to the board of supervisors to discuss with them our needs in terms of financial commitment and
073so i think that might be a conversation that we could have right now if you'd like to have that conversation [Music] okay what's up i went to all your presentations so i'm good i mean i'm good with the presentations man we got this nice little here but we need to need to give donald some type of direction yes ma'am um i had one question i was wondering how much money do we actually have right now with um all the grants we've been receiving to actually put towards the project yeah so ms barb we um currently if we are looking at the cares act funds that we have dedicated to this uh the cip funds that we have today and also the there's an hbac grant that is available to us as well which would be
074a part of this because there would be hvac work and then also the dental clinic and if you add all of those things up we currently have eight million nine hundred and sixty seven thousand dollars to go towards this project the school system [Music] so one more time eight million nine hundred and sixty seven thousand dollars just for your purposes if you look at 1a and 1b together that's 13.8 so for example if you were to say we would like to proceed in that direction to do 1a and 1b then we would have to ask the board of supervisors to fund five million dollars to to cover that portion of the project and then of course i'm sorry do you have any idea how much of a tax increase that would mean for the citizens
075that is that's the board of supervisors um that's where well that's what their decisions would have to be um i know i went to one of the meetings that you did and a wonderful presentation and you said you've been to all of them what type of feedback are we getting from the community i know we have some things on our website so um i guess i would ask you what what are some of the number one comments that you're hearing how much participation are we seeing from the citizens um we always want more folks to be able to um send them either in person or um or digitally um so some of the comments we receive most of it was positive um you know a lot of comments for folks were really excited about about
076the expansion the community use of the space you know the i think the comments the one comment was a gentleman wanted to make sure the windows were energy efficient um and we said yes that they would be energy efficient the uh i should have wrote down the comments on them and um so the but then i said most of the folks were really excited about the opportunity for a space um especially to see as many folks because you really don't have any space in the county that would eat what that would equal this so it would really end with the easy ability to um separate this from the school is it could be much better for community use your current upturn has has some challenges with the ability for that to be used uh and
077kind of separate that for uh for evening purposes um but i believe that the majority of the comments have were have been very positive um as we went as went through this plus uh the other exciting part was that the theater arts uh music and quote books were all [Music] some of the changes that we need to the design were reflective of those comments and also the the sr3 grant that we produced august that's been that's been up for three four months now and we have asked community to to comment on that and then at this point no one has commented on the construction part i would add also that most of the comments were more designed more looking at the design features of the auditorium not from a negative standpoint that uh they wanted
078didn't want their auditorium but just what can we do to really get input into what the design would look like or where most of the comments were in our needs at least in that conversation one of the questions that i had was that you said for the eight million nine hundred sixty seven thousand dollars that was incorporating uh cares act hvac grant dental clinic as well as our cip funds so that's pretty much going to take away all the flexibility that we have to move forward with some of our cip well this is in our cip this is a piece but some of those things that we need to do at some of the other schools will we still be able to do those not until we get our cip built back up and if
079you remember you had a cip plan that you guys approved a year and a half ago that shows the timeline now we're also not talking about normal operational maintenance and operational because we put that into our operational pleasure if you remember that and the expenses of our buses are in our operational budget now correct correct any other questions for mr bowell first though well we need to relax and then we can decide uh for the direction we want to get superintendent uh what are our choices again what did you do there's no there's no more movement from uh mr power and his company there's a decision made to receive there are other things that you guys need to proceed i need to know that um would like to know before proceeding further how much of
080a tax increase that would mean for our citizens ms berg i know that miss wilkes their finance person has been working with mr rogers to see the type of funding that they could come up with and whether all of it would be a tax increase at this point in time i am not sure what their plan is and we would know more if dr arnold could present to the board of supervisors and then they could come back with yes we can do the five million dollars or no at this point in time we do not feel that we can proceed with the five million but then that would have to be a comment a public comment portion with the board of supervisors so if they were to say they would like to commit to that
081amount of money then they have a process they would go through with the public regarding funding [Music] i'm just i'm curious as we've heard several people mention the school buses tonight um if that was something that could be done uh what cost would it be for air conditioning on buses to be retrofitted or i mean i don't know if it's possible i'm just asking it's roughly eight to twelve thousand per bus per bus and at uh how many buses 70 70 buses 560. half a million i was saying you ever take [Music] i'm just thinking about what i believe was what uh mr terry just did and then also you know we have bus drivers that are in desperate need of a raids and also custodians and cafeteria workers and our teacher mrs berg the
082funding that we are utilizing for this project cannot be used for salary increases uh if the board wanted to do the retrofit of the buses then that could be done out of construction however increasing salaries is cannot be used as a part of these funds i don't know all of them but don't some of them have a horizon on when they need to be used also yes yes whisper anything else i'm just making everything over i apologize okay well i definitely think that we need a new auditorium and i thought that this was a great opportunity for us to have to look at that and i do i don't remember the exact price tag but i wanted to say it was closer to we were looking at about eight nine million when we first started
083this process so that means it's doubled um so if our if our community feels that this is a good project i do think that our community within our schools would benefit from it so don't mind moving forward with it i'm a little cautious of spending all of our funds out of our cip because we have work to do and don't want to just leave that empty i also think that we need to be looking at if we don't air condition all the buses at once at least to start a plan to retrofit them but we're spending this much money and we're going to be looking at some of that and i think that we could maybe even incorporate it so i i would be in favor and at least moving forward and seeing what the
084board of supervisors could do but maybe [Music] you know seeing if we can negotiate how much we would contribute and how much they feel they can contribute i don't know that i would just say i'm going to take every penny that we have at this point [Music] but i've listened to some of the people the other night and if not now it's just auditorium then when i mean if we don't do if we don't begin that now uh and we saw the prices as ms thompson just said the prices have jumped since the last time we even thought about it uh and then we do have the the karazhak cfp hbac democratic and then of course it's still arrested whether the board of supplies will say but i think we have to give it a
085go a try and uh all the comments as i heard those three nights and i agree we didn't have as much participation from the community as we expected but those who did come out [Music] the spouse correct one gentleman was talking about all the glass uh the windows being efficient and we answered that they answered that and then another concern was just a layout of the auditorium they want one but they might want to change where things are in there but no one that came out that i heard i was listening said don't do it which was good so i think just giving a goat and they say step out on faith and see where we are and see what the board of supervisors is willing to do for us and if it can't happen
086then we say we try but do not do it now not to strike a little bit i think would not be good but that's just my thoughts yeah and if we're going to have to go to the board of supervisors and ask for five million dollars um i i don't think this the board of supervisors if they're going to turn us down they're going to turn us down for five million or five and a half million so if we were able to take some of the funds that we had and start putting it towards some of the buses that's half a million that we're going to take up out of the money that we would use here would be another half a million that they would have to get to us from the board of
087supervisors like i said i don't think if you walk in and say i want five million or five and a half million but that half a million is going to be the deciding factor for them they're either going to say yes or no i mean i think we're on the line there that's out of our control i would like to see us proceed but i also like to know that we're taking care of what we truly have going on right now mainly the buses and that kind of dr thing you gave us some big let me just sidetrack a sidebar we we talked about the afternoon buses what about six months ago maybe had that discussion in one of these meetings can you bring back at the next meeting some more details of that in
088the universe yes ma'am i'll have it i think we have it somewhere on my table and because of something we have an information i'll have you update the numbers by december okay the problem probably the price to change on that as well yes it's inflation just look at the aspen so here based on what you're talking about yeah say so there's probably going to be two million dollars in our cip right so if we were to say only use one million of that on the construction project then we we are at 7.9 and then you ask the board of supervisors for six months to get through one and one if they don't want to do that then the very least we can get just the addition and nothing else so that would be 1a and
089that leaves you 1 million in your cip to continue to do other things well yeah i mean i want this auditorium as much as anybody in this room um i think everybody has seen it um serve its purpose do what it needed to do but it definitely needs um upgrades um i'm just i'm just hesitant of doing it without making sure we got everything else taken care of first so um if we have to ask for six i think we have to ask for six yes so i i'm gonna need you all to tell me exactly what you want me to have i have to represent you okay [Music] excuse me i said mr terry but well if um i guess let's start here do you just want to work towards 1a and 1b maybe
090that's the first question you want to answer yeah because otherwise you're asking for 10 million dollars all right yeah yeah um i would say we would stick with the 1a1b for now like he said the other projects are separate and could be done on their own terms so you could you could say we would we would like for you to to take 1a 1am 1b the board of supervisors with the commitment from the school board of eight million dollars [Music] we would contribute yes eight million dollars and then ask them to contribute the remaining uh of the [Music] there's two options there's option one the other option is that you know in the process that they find out that there is a lot of public support for all of this and they wanted to do
091the whole package but that would yeah well that's as well and we'll see that's the reason why mr fowler put it in phases like that because really the only i mean each one of those things can happen on its own um now i will certainly give them the data that says if you want to if you want to continue through the project then it's going to be x more and then they they just have to make that decision if they want to move down that road but we can't get him to even start on 1a until there's a commitment and we can hire him to start the design process that but the the two and the three and all of that can happen at much later times that could happen ten years from now so
092one a one b you had mentioned that you have time constraints on using the money if we set up a project and we dedicate the money to it does that constitute using the money or do you have to have it spent we have to have it spent uh but the auditorium construction itself which i would believe would be the first thing to happen would take all of our cares act that we were committing to the project first right so that would come up that will come off the books well before the deadline and the money in the cip was two million we would contribute one that has no construction right that's ours can i ask one more additional question i know that we've dedicated some of our care back funds to work with supervisors on
093internet access is there any more of our funds that are required to help us move forward that project or is it so to the point that the board's board of supervisors has taken that and it and planned out phases in other words this isn't going to prohibit that uh i believe according to the broadband committee that met i think they have allocated approximately two and a half million dollars toward that project and at this point in time we still have not spent the full hundred thousand that we committed year before last so uh ms wilkes knows that we need i'm sorry ms mcbride uh knows that we need uh bills by december with two hundred thousand and two hundred thousand uh at the next time that they cut deals that's the cares act one monies
094and so we are just waiting on the board the county side to give us the bill so we can pay okay but have they made any gestures that they needed more money from us to help with that no with the broadband right okay and then of course we the fifty thousand dollars came from the gears money so we would have fulfilled a full four hundred fifty thousand dollars well now i feel like you know we can move forward at least present phase um one a and one b to the board of supervisors like mr terry recommended i also think that we need to hold a little bit of that money back um you know so we can work on buses for whatever need we may have is that the consensus that the consensus of the
095board that we would ask give dr arnold's direction to move with one a and one b and and yet hold back um [Music] one million dollars we would be committing eight million is that all right yes okay thank you quick question um so we've we've already said we would put aside a million dollars uh how can we get a plan together to you know how they would handle bus upgrades we could probably have something to you by january okay so i'll have numbers as far as what those uh costs would be cost estimates based off the most updated information from the from sunny merriman and get some ideas there and this gives some rough ideas where to start you need to have ideas where we are on that thank you and i will be meeting
096with four supervisors on tuesday i asked them if i could get on the agenda if i could get commitment now but the school board they allow their agenda if we want to do this we want to get that in front of them as quickly as possible so they can make their decisions so they can have public input as well afternoon i think that's tonight [Music] 6.02 it's been 6.02 we're going to give you a little update on our code numbers um so currently right now we have uh five employees who are positive eight that are currently quarantined we have 19 positive students and 218 that are currently quarantined um so to just give you an idea our numbers are increasing again i think the post halloween little push here as as mayor numbers go up
097a little bit you'll see our community numbers have also increased in just the general community uh so we're you know they're not at a point we can't function but there are they are going up a little bit and this is about the time frame last year we saw them going up a little bit so we are keeping an eye on that and just seeing where we end up um you know we have thanksgiving with a lot of traveling we have the christmas holidays a lot of traveling so it's a matter of just monitoring where we are but we do need to understand that we're not out of the woods yet even with uh stuff that's going on but we we are seeing our numbers creep back up a little bit we did have an outbreak
098on the b team football team we've had five positive cases related to b team football uh their game was canceled monday night because we had to do the positive student that we had this was their last game uh and it's not been from playing belief since that one student tested we had four others um test positive in relation to that program or not in connection with that individual student who did test positive initially so that's been reported to the states on their it's on their website and information is out there for the general public so make sure you're aware of that so i did miss wright did ask me for some numbers um last after last month's meeting and i want to share with you she has some questions about the number of students we
099have quarantined and the numbers of positives and so forth so we have quarantined one as as of the third so this is uh not including the most recent numbers but as of november 3rd we quarantined 1159 students due to an exposure in school um we had 175 students and staff that were quarantined uh the other that were quarantined test positive so about 15.1 of the people we had quarantined from exposure at school have tested positive as of november 3rd for this year so if we hadn't quarantined them i think we would have had a much higher uh transmission rate in our buildings but getting them quarantined out of the buildings i did keep it from getting it uh spreading to so fast but again we've uh roughly you know 1100 roughly and 175 students and
100staff that were uh that had a closer school did test positive for about 15.1 so any questions on our covet numbers [Music] all right so the other quarantine information also i'm going to talk about the um i kind of combined 6.076.03 together but you know that um the osha mandate um that's coming out the you know release came out saying january 4th we had to be in compliance there's been a stay on that in the fifth circuit so that is there's a stay we've received some information it says need to have our stuff planned to the federal government by december 5th but then we also had information from the doe from the state stating that just to stay and just hold your horses for now and don't have anything prepared so what we're going to
101do just in in the short term is identify ways we need to know how many of our staff or vaccinated versus not vaccinated just because that's a requirement at some point we're going to need to know that information so we're going to start working on a plan to work with our staff on that because if the mandate is pushed through and it is approved then we would have to either if they're not vaccinated they'll have to be tested on a weekly basis um which we you know we're still working on those ideas too but we don't have a plan for that um because we're just waiting to see what the actual requirement is going to be because we don't know what the requirements are going to be other than some type of testing for those
102who are not vaccinated but we do need to get our numbers a good set of numbers on those who are those who are not alright well you're saying the staff hasn't been pulled whether they're vaccinated or not no okay we have not done that we have we know which ones we vaccinated right we don't know outside of that our new staff members etc uh there's been no push or no move requiring students to receive a vaccine um it is optional for students so we're gonna we we have no intention of asking for that so just such so people who are concerned in the community that's a parent choice unless something comes down from the federal government saying something different that's where we're going to be there's a parent choice on that any questions on the
103copy of mitigation thank you for the hard work moving on so again i combine 6.02 and 6.03 under quarantine information so the next is 6.04 which is soon as suspensions and that is at your place if you have any questions i'll be glad to try to answer four's on board dots excuse me rain is it raining right um 7.01 madam chair members of the board you haven't you placed the budget minus rich reports revenue receipts enrollment information uh and the budget summary by object code please note we will continue to monitor the fuel line uh which is object code 6008 currently 78 thousand dollars in the red we believe the shortfall can be covered with the electrical positive 5101 which has approximately two hundred and seven thousand dollars a day based on the information with
104enrollment uh we are down approximately a hundred students and that is based on both private school and religious exemptions i have contacted the department of education to see if they will adjust their enrollment loss when the final numbers come and they have uh they're basically their response was no loss funding for 22 serves as a mechanism to provide stability due to changes and no loss payment adjustments are required based on the march 31st atm so i believe when we submit the march adm they will adjust air enrollment loss we will know more about that when the governor presents his budget in december um also we have a couple of projects in the maintenance department that i asked mr ropes to hold off on in the event that it does not come to place but we
105will continue continue to monitor and i will be glad to answer any questions regarding this what made this project are you looking at pretty often uh one is a dump truck with approximately 66 thousand dollars another one we are scheduled to do the bathrooms at central elementary school this summer and that's approximately 150 000. and then we will just monitor all of the other lines until we get further assistance from the department of education and your enrollment loss what are you expecting to get uh that is well as you know when we did our budget we received approximately 688 thousand dollars in enrollment loss because we lost from 2021 to 2022. i would assume that we probably will get close to that same amount thank you any other questions one quick one do we have
106any statewide figures on enrollment laws no man but i can try to find that out i did talk with some of the areas some schools are finding enrollment loss and some are being stable with what the government proposed last year would be nice if it's not a lot a lot of trouble i will be glad to do that [Music] and based on the september reports that are scheduled to be done now we should be able to sort of see what the state is happening not nationwide but statewide i'll be glad to madam chair may i continue madam chair members of the board you have at your place and this is for information only tonight as required by the sr3 funds we are supposed to get public input every six months on the plan for so3
107tomorrow we will put this document up on our website along with the previous one so that citizens and our stakeholders can comment on it this is another way that people can provide input on whether or not they want the auditorium we will bring this back as well as well as any comments by our citizens that the next board the right time or not but because we're talking about the plan for the other three funds i think on the second page says uh i think it's in the second section e provide two instructional specialists to address individual and small group instruction we know more than two i know we're getting ready to look at some data today and i'm seeing some need for math do you think that two is sufficient or do we need to
108do something in that area maybe it's later on when we talk about that for you but i just had that circled for the esser fund so i didn't know that was the right time to talk about that yes ma'am we have actually two additional grants that are due um one due tomorrow and another grant due on next friday s for two part two and s or three part two that we're applying for additional funds and we are incorporating some of those things in there we also have adjusted to um and i'll go through that in regards to pals data where we're seeing some low numbers there and in math and so we will be utilizing those funds for that more than two we have okay thank you ms thompson we continue to get many opportunities
109to apply for different grants and we try to do as much as we can the majority of the grants do not require a matching good opportunity any other questions on the uh yes of course all right yes ma'am madam chair and members of the board i have brought you a lot of data tonight and i do not expect you to look at all of it tonight what i would like to do is to provide you with the opportunity to review all of it at your own leisure uh ask any questions and then if you would like me to bring back any information to you at your next work session i'll be more than happy to do so i'm going to try to go through as much as i can as quickly as i can because
110this is just a basic overview of what we have done so far at the beginning of the school year um mrs cecil will you pull up the board presentation please thank you so this is our fall data and it has several different components to it it's new um the new growth assessment information as well as our map data we combined everything mr maddox is here as well who is our supervisor of testing and assessments this year he's excited about that so when we talk about assessments these are the assessments that we have completed so far and between september 13th and october 15th we have done 10 700 and i believe that says 86 assessments which i really feel sorry for our students these are the only thing that is not required on this is the
111map testing which one of the things that we have already seen is the moving from where we didn't have any assessments last year to where we needed to figure out what to do with our students and meeting their needs and that has really opened up the door for us to to figure out where those benchmarks are and where those needs are of course the virginia department of education had its new growth assessment that was under legislation hb 2027 and senate bill it went into effect this year in the fall for grades three through eight in reading and in math only it really is for baseline data so they can measure individual academic progress and at some point it may assist students who fail their sol test to be able to shown as showing growth and
112it will assist the schools and the school system in regards to accreditation purposes it is not like the end of the year sol test it is a first test so our teachers do not prepare students for this is what they know when they come through the door and and it allows us to see where we need to take them by the end of the school year in regards to meeting their needs so this is the division if i can go through a little bit of information for you in regards to elementary and secondary they have different thresholds and it is a green yellow and a red and that is a strong foundation for green learning gaps in regards to they're tagged yellow and of course significant learning gaps if they are designated in the red
113remember these are non-prepared coming in first month of school taking the test so we noted that in regards to our math which we also saw this in our map data we're 72 in significant learning gaps and at the secondary level 65 in elementary and then in the area of reading 29 at secondary and 48 in elementary and you can stop me along the way anytime answering and then this is the state assessment what do they compare that to in order to get these significant learning gaps like is it complete other students is it just they take the scores and chunk them yeah i'm going to show you the very next thing but they they haven't really given us a lot of information what they have given us is this vertical scaled score that shows referencing
114points for parents who they can see based on the red line and the blue line or they call it a purple line uh if your child meets in that particular area if you're below the blue purple line then they are in that red area if you're above the red then that means that you're in the green if you're somewhere in the middle you're in the yellow and basically that is the bulk of the information that the state has given us so far so we don't know where those lines come from no ma'am and were these assessments on grade level content yes ma'am actually they from what i understand they did last year's assessment for sols and provided them to the upcoming and i'll let mr maddox answer this the upcoming grade level yes ma'am so
115if a student was sitting in fourth grade math last year this year they would take the fourth grade even though they're in fifth grade they would still take the fourth grade math the assessment was built off for last year's sol's so the two items that you see on this screen are the information that was provided to parents in regards to how they would read the report because each student was received a report the second thing is a an actual student detail by question that kind of laid out exactly what those students got right or got wrong and we have been able to utilize that utilizing that with our teachers to kind of target instructions specific to that child and this is a every student got that report and that is the bulk of our new
116growth assessment you have on board docs a listing not just of the overall division but of this every school level it looks like this wonderful piece that gives you lots of information in regards to every grade level specific to the growth assessments remember they are only grades three through eight they have not informed us how those will be compared at the end of the year to show how they determine growth or not as soon as that comes out from the state i'll provide that information to you the next is our map growth assessment and this is the fall information i do not have the high school data in this presentation we had a tremendous number of students that were quarantined at the beginning towards the beginning of the year at the high school and we're
117out first additional days more than any other school and so we have extended their window into the first week in december so we'll have those scores and i'll bring that back to you again overall map it really is just creates that personalized assessment for the students provides them with a writ score in both reading and in math we complete that three times a year and it provides teachers that easy to use reports to help determine where kids are the ritz score of course i just want to remind you it's a measure of their performance that you see over time and it makes it possible for the students growth to show from year to year and i'm going to show you a little bit about that later on this is the division for math if you
118will note we saw an increase only at kindergarten as well as our pre-algebra in regards to math all other were grades one through eight we showed a dip but not a dip that was of huge significance the significant piece that we did see was sitting at the middle school in sixth seventh and eighth grade where eighth grade showed the largest drop i would say against the national norms in regards to 12 a 12 point difference and this is division one and in the area of reading kindergarten was the one that was above the national norms all the others were below but not as significant as it was in math so we did see a difference but it was again two or three points in difference between the national norm nothing like we had seen in
119math where there was a 12 point drop the next one is you have this in your packet as well it is really what tells us that we're on the right track this is a comparison and the first portion of the chart is our end of year results on map from last school year so the spring of 2021 if you'll notice in that second column past the growth there is the the growth that we accomplished last year when kids entered our school and then ended out the year they took three of those map assessments we tracked them along the way we did interventions with them in strategies and then by the end of the year that second column shows you the growth that we had um so that's in math in the first column reading in
120the second section underneath that is what we just took the fall results that we i just shared with you overall division what we're trying to make sure i want to make sure that i'm clear on this kindergarteners last year are now the cohort moving to first grade so if you see that first red block up at the top under kindergarten it shows the growth that we make with those kindergarten students last year was 13.1 at 154 as their red score as they moved into first grade the first month of school they took the test at map in the area of math and they came out with a 154.1 so you have to take into consideration that every year you have learning loss over the summer that that summer slide is what we call it what
121we're trying to do is not have a drastic summer slide so our summer school program i'm going to tell you right now it really showed that it worked we did not dip like we would normally have dipped in the summer school in a summer slide what is better is that we actually did not regress and lose those 13 points that we had grown with those children over the course of last year now that is not the case in all of them but that that is the case the majority across the board we did not see anybody dip back down we are struggling at the eighth grade level in regards to our middle school math and in reading which those students right now are in our ninth grade so we're working towards some specific strategies working
122with our middle school and secondary schools in regards to reading both reading and in math we did see our lowest numbers in the area of math [Music] but i will tell you i'm very pleased with the number of tests that our students were given so far this year and that with the struggle of a lot of them being quarantined and teachers actually doing both synchronous and asynchronous learning and in-person learning going on i'm extremely pleased with the results we have a long way to go but i'm happy with those and i'll provide you with some takeaways of course i just want you to remember that this is baseline data we're not trying to make any judgments or anything out of this we want to triangulate this particular data with other assessment data as well as
123attendance information regarding our quorum team whether they are virtual or in person because that definitely makes a difference and then we are fairly comparable across the national average and then the very specific school data is in board docs and you can look at that school by school and it's a lot of information so i'll be more than happy to answer any questions that i can um or you can't we can bring this back and have any discussions at the at your next dr meeting i think the data you gave us is very good um i wish our students didn't have to take this yes i am i really really need to focus on just instruction but in the same way i understand the value of the data i really agree with you on the the
124data from the map i mean it shows that we just really you know we haven't lost a lot over the summer and i think that's good and we're right there at the national norms not very far off at all um but i'm struggling with this one yes so i have to keep her in mind i have to keep reminding myself that this is not something that students prepare for that over and over again i remind this is just a cold test so looking for some correlation between the two and it's giving us two different pictures so um i guess my takeaway is is to pat ourselves on that because it looks like our learning loss is not as much as we thought it was from the spring but maybe this one is telling us that
125we need to work on math yes we need to work in all areas but especially in math yes and maybe some specifically targeted schools but if you get more information on how we can correlate these two that would really be nice for me but thank you very much today it's very helpful you're welcome i have a great staff who pulls all of this together the next thing that you have in regards to accreditation and data is you also have in board docs pals and as i discussed earlier the past data we are showing you have a memo and on that second page of the memo there is a chart that shows what those percentages in the fall of 2020 were id and then it shows the percentages of id students in the fall of 2021
126and we see a significant increase in at every school level in regards to students being id'd for pals and that's where ms thompson i was talking about having that additional support we have reached out mr um gallagher has been reaching out to our retired reading specialist and um trying to persuade them to come back and help us some with some part-time support in many of our elementary schools so we can kind of make up some ground work but that is their school specific data in regards to pals on each one of those and i have miss wheeler here if you have any questions just part of it here can you read this diagonally as far as cohorts yes ma'am oh you need friends yes okay like if i just took the two right columns that
127are in color right in the garden last fall that 22 percent of the student's id so that was that same cohort now we have 46 ids yes ma'am that is showing some significant loss yes but of course there's a higher benchmark though correct but still assessing the same like sight words comprehension spelling but yes ma'am you would read that diagonal as well you have work to do yes ma'am the next item is in regards to vkrp which this is a a pre-k and k assessment that's required by the state and we had 257 students take the assessment this year 19 students have incomplete and all of our kindergartners take this and it's specific to math performance we have a couple of struggling schools that we'll be reaching out to this mrs smith has already talked
128to those administrators and if you'll go to the attendance the next portion of accreditation that i'd like to talk to you about is specific to attendance if we don't have the students here then they don't get the instruction in person and they the information isn't presented to them so in regards to attendance attendance is one of the major things that helps us with our accreditation it kind of encompasses everything so on your attendance data tracker sheet it looks like this there are three different levels for accreditation level one means that students who are zero to fifteen percent in their absent unexcused absences are in what's considered green and we're fully accredited if you're green level two is 16 to 24 that means that they have missed a certain number of days 16 to 24 of
129the days in their attendance and they are in yellow you can only be in yellow for more than four consecutive years before they dump you into a red and you're not accredited and non-accredited is any um that is 25 over so if you look at the numbers of students now if i can couch this with everything and dr wells please feel free to chime in our attendance guidelines from the virginia department of education have so far changed four times already since the very beginning of the school year that is an enormous thing for dr wells and his staff to oversee and it is a it is a difficult task especially with the number of students quarantined or being self-quarantined in regards to parent self-quarantining one of the things that we are going back right now
130is so our last change was that if a parent chooses to self quarantine their child they can do that for a certain amount of time and we would count them present if we as a division provide them the opportunity for instruction which we do [Music] so now we have a team our attendance clerks as well as mr train and um the attendance attendance quotes at each of the schools going back to see if any of the absences that we currently have covered related either quarantined or self-quarantined that we count as a president you got to get that right yes ma'am so so what we're going we have a couple suits that have several students that have been like four or five six days that we know that they were marked used for whatever reason but
131that was due to code that we can now go back the parent kept them out because they were either exposed to a school or they were afraid of something going on in school because somebody tested positive at a building and they kept their students home for a few days um if we can verify that we can now count those students we can give them the same thing for our other quarantine students so that can come against us for attendance so we're going back now and contacting parents but looking at that data and just seeing if we can you know improve some of these numbers a little bit and we think that we feel is going to improve some as we do that um but still we're that's where we are right now and a lot
132of that again is just due to everything else that's going on in the world so i'll just leave it at that um if you'll notice on the chart we have four schools that are if they keep at the rate that they currently are right now that they will fall into a non-accredited state and then if you'll notice though that if you look over to the 2019-20 chronic absenteeism at this point during the school year we're a little bit over on multiple places and i truly believe that is self-quarantining that we haven't tagged correctly one of the things that uh ms patreon we met with her and um we talked about what are some of the things that we can do to assist or to reach out to families we have three attendance officers right now
133and they're supporting all the schools and in reducing the truancy issue they are contacting families us to make sure that the coding is correct as to what changes may have happened throughout the last four changes from the year because that's been very confusing she also has the btss teams at each of the buildings working specifically on engaging students back into the classroom making sure that they have a plan in place for attendance looking at the specific data for their school by grade level by days so they can kind of see that and then she personally ms patron will be meeting with each of the administrators to talk about what that looks like and what their needs are so that we can support them in this effort and i'll answer any questions that you have in
134regards to that [Music] okay i'm almost through i promise the next thing is our grading regulations this is just being brought as an informational piece when we started out in the 2020 2021 school year we came to you in regards to grading regulation changes just to give you an update as we saw um multiple kids out in regards to choosing virtual remote learning we knew we had to make some adjustments so what we did is actually thought that this school year was going to be normal and we have soon found out that it's far from normal in regards to kids and being quarantined and self-quarantining and so we went back and i requested from dr arnold to continue with what we did during the 20 20 2021 school year and that was actually specifically to
135um allow for when a student misses for like for example at the high school when a student missed four absences they would have unexcused absences it would go down during the nine weeks grading period they would earn a 50 it would be the highest that they could earn until they met with the administrator and put a plan in place and it was based on that discussion that's always been in our regulations since actually since i've been here we uh suspended that last year because of the absences and trying to make sure the kids were in the building we need to go ahead and do that again this year because we have had so many students out in regards to numerous things but we have requested for that to continue on again just to make sure
136we're doing within the best interests of students working with them to make sure if a kid gets a 30 and a grade in a class because they've been out and they haven't actually got the instruction from the content in person with the teacher that is a hard thing to recover from and so 50 makes that a whole lot easier for them to recover that grade so that is some that is one of the changes well that is the change that we requested and i just wanted to bring that to the board's attention that we're going to go ahead and continue on with that regulation this year dr norman can you share with me where it is that you're referencing and i'm going to walk through that with me again it's page three mr maddox i'm
137going to turn it over to him he led our committee last year on the grading yes ma'am so on page three you see the basically that first where we suspected that regulation that's basically the attendance failure regulation at amherst county high school which was suspended last year and then the next is dude the 19th academic colson student and teacher quarantines a student will receive bill lower than a 50 on the final grade of a grading period and again the committee felt you know whether it's a 59 or a fifth it's it's an f but if you have a student that that gets a 30 it's really hard to recover and and to get that grade back up and students know this and you know that leads to some you know students giving up on in
138class or something like that so the committee just felt that this would be in the best interest of all of our students so the suspension that we did in 2021 was suspended by a committee i know that you talked with us as a board about that because we were in the midst of coveting our students who are at home this is the first time you've asked if to inform us that it was being suspended for this current year i don't have a recollection of it but that does not mean you did not bring it in front of us right this is the first time we went through the grading period for the first nine weeks and um noting that we had a 1 000 and some students quarantined uh giving grace because what we did
139is we actually said if you if they got it's not that they can't give a zero for an assignment we ask that they make sure that that child was there for that instruction this is basically just saying that they can't they should not give the low of 50 for the final grade like if a child gets a 34 on a assignment and they were there for the instruction and they didn't do well on the instruction they get the 39. what we're trying to make sure is that every teacher provides make sure that the kids are there for the instruction before they just slap a 50 or 39 on the grade book put a final grade but this is the first time that we've brought this as an informational item to you [Music] i may want
140more information on this i know that i've seen it in the past that students that don't do work they get a 50 students that are working really hard good 50. that's not the same thing true i do understand that you want to make sure that the students were present you want to make sure they understood it and that they have an opportunity to do their work but also want to make sure that our students are held to a high expectation absolutely so i would have rather have had this presented at the beginning of the year if this was a suspension i do know that i asked for some grading information i appreciate you bringing it to us i don't know how the rest of the board feels but i do think that i would like
141to have some conversations and see teachers and parents and see how that's going and making sure that our practice is supporting our students but also maintaining high expectations yes ma'am i totally agree on on all of that the this did not come as a red flag to me until about three weeks ago when i started reviewing the data it was it was nothing that we were going to continue on with the suspension suspending this but after noting all of those absences after noting everything that we're doing with truancy this is definitely something that is in the best interest of students right now and chair i'd like to at least have a conversation on the grading and maybe look at some of the data [Music] i'm going to bring it back and i'm not bringing it
142back for more discussion would you like something i'll send you um i think at this point you'd send it to me but it probably would be a good discussion at the next board meeting as well for everyone we just keep down the same page yes and i have one more question about the grading on the first page of ipc-r it has a scale on it and it has symbol standard honors in ap and it says 0-59 so you get an f is that the zeros just mean that that's the weighted trade if you're averaging oh yes ma'am so that's right it's on the ikc dash r there's like a scale yes down at the bottom that's our that's our normal grading scale and so these are just weighted like if you're doing gpas it's not
143a classroom grade correct okay just want to make sure you said that indexing and if no more questions on grading i'm going to turn it over to mr maddox to talk about program of studies [Music] uh madam chairman of the board you have a memo with our changes that were given to us by departments and and the administration at the high school [Music] and remember that this is the expectation that we will continue with an a b block schedule next year and i'm not going to go through and read every single one you see that in math we want to remove visual basic computer programming we have not had a lot of students sign up for that we want to replace it with the python computer programming which that's one of the programs that's used
144out of the workforce if you look at science ap biology changes grade levels 11 and 12 and prerequisites on biology and honors biology i believe that the prerequisite was only honors biology before under general electives ap seminar changed the grade level to 10th and 11th grades and then ap research to 11th and 12th grades trying to get more students into those two programs are they typically just 12 yes and then career and technical education we have a couple of electives we would like to offer you know due to block scheduling you need more electives in the high school for students to take so back in 2014 we had family and consumer science we had a program at the high school the instructor retired and the board at that time decided not to fill that position
145so we lost that program so talking with the counselors and administration at the high school we would really like to get that program back and offer these three courses nutrition and wellness introduction to early childhood education which that would support our teachers for tomorrow [Music] and then offer childhood education and services one the next year all three of those classes will uh students would be a complete sequence completer for cte there's tons of work based learning opportunities for our students that are in the early childhood courses out there to work in maybe some child care facilities or even maybe we start our home for like summer school for our teachers and folks that come in and teach in summer school to dean child care so just think that that these courses would would really benefit
146our students again especially i mean they cross a lot of different pathways and you know really to go with our teachers for tomorrow i think it would be beneficial to have those sending approval and also i have to do an application to bdmv and get those approved as well i'll be glad to answer any questions don't they just have these courses already approved and you can implement them no ma'am i have about an eight-page application that i have to do and after correlated with workforce needs in our region for every cte class we want to add every news every new cte we've offered it before we do not have to file for the application again but if it's a new course every new course you have to put an application [Music] well i would say
147that i know that students do need additional opportunities to make that cte requirement towards graduation so i would be in favor of adding those for that reason giving kids more opportunities [Music] thank you very much um i have asked miss there are no more questions in regards to program studies i've asked miss smith to provide you with the regular this is done every two years gifted program update um she's going to go through the division information but she has also provided you with school information as well for you to review at your own leisure ms smith yes thank you there you go guessing um no what we do is we provide the additional we have meetings it is information for you now if the way that you impact the program of studies is when you
148talk about what you want your big picture as to where you want to go in expanding programs at the cte level or expanding programs with fine arts or you know anything like that these are our options that we are suggesting none of it is actually set in stone until we take care of the actual not just the application but the person so if you have a position so we already have a certain number of positions ftes at the high school based on whether or not if these are proof of the state if you decide you want to move forward then an ft a full-time equivalent position would be something that you would place into the budget so these are the first year that we place new things into the program of studies it really is
149just getting a good idea of how many students would be interested it's for our interest and that's how we determine from year to year what would be added or what isn't showing interest please wonder because it said pending school board and big deal approval and i said i liked it but then nobody did anything so i just wanted to make sure okay that board approval means you're going to give me a teacher thank you miss smith thank you good evening chair members of the board what you see on the screen in front of you is the annual data that is shared in regards to the numbers for the advanced programs from k-12 it includes the demographic breakdowns of all our division students and by school as well and as you scroll down you'll see stem
150academy's governor's school early college dual enrollment honors graduates from the previous graduate graduating classes gifted ap courses and those students are middle schools enrolled in algebra 1. part of this data is going to be used to see how are we representing our students are being represented in our gifted program overall i was asked to break down the gifted data by the diversity council so that they can see how the numbers are correlated in each individual school which is the next document that you have in your folder the first page pretty much breaks down what it is as a division how i think the population is represented at the division level based on the larger groups of tumor races black hispanic and white and then the smaller graph at the bottom does the same information because
151the council also wanted to know how we are represented by male and female population within the gifted program i feel an exemplary program would be a balanced representation of your actual student demographics and when you look at our data when you think that 18 of our school our division population is african-american but they're only represented as six percent of our gifted student population it's not really balanced and represented and and that's what we want to be better about we want to try to work on that and our comprehensive in the acps comprehensive plan specific goals were put in place under objective 2 to provide all students with access to the resources they need to maximize their academic growth and potential specifically by increasing the minority access to advanced courses and programs so that's where we're
152kind of taking up the mantle to start looking at what are the processes as far as how we're identifying students in the gifted program how we inform the students of the pathways setting themselves sending them up for success and for informed decisions about the pathways they choose before they arrive at that sixth seventh eighth grade level because a lot of decisions are made before they start their secondary coursework so one of the the two goals that we have for this year first is looking at our screening tool that we're using for gifted screenings we've been using the coget for a number of years and we just want to see what else is out there so our gifted specialists are gathering those other screening tools seeing what other divisions are using um just to make sure
153that we're using the best screening tool possible to represent our student population and to be fair the second thing we're doing is increasing the knowledge base of our stakeholders and conversations i've been having with parents counselors students high school students even former students it's a lot about i wish i had done this i wish i was more informed about that and that that seems to be the the crux that our community is they want to know more about what's available for their students what do they need to do now to prepare to be open to those opportunities for their students and that requires us to be informing them on a regular basis about the opportunities and what they need to do so that's going to start at our elementary level and we hope to start
154doing that in december and january visiting our schools and giving parents information at school events that are already occurring so that they can ask questions the gifted specialists are very much involved in this process and they are helping to make sure that the goals that we're working on they are well in hand and informing our decisions because they're the ones with the core knowledge base about this if you have any questions at this time and i'm also open if there's anything that you would like me to dive into further in regards to our gifted population and advanced programs i would appreciate your feedback in regards to that as well thank you ms smith [Music] presentation thank you um you know you've talked about the percentages of our minorities and their representations and i think these
155are all numbers um maybe you could help me get the percentages for these on the graphs i think that that would be very important i started to put them there but they would have been so tiny you would never have so i can work on that i'll just work with you on that and get some of them so that i can have a clear understanding of that and then um i know you've said that we use the coget yes and i i know that that's been a national test use for it then do you know probably as you dug in you do i just don't know the answer to this does that protest or assessment have percentages with national norms for ethnicities how does that tend to you know to skew that or is there
156a correlation that it's just maybe not happening in cameras but it's happening in other places too because of the test and we're looking for a better assessment that's what i'm curious about and that's why we're beyond the world you know that that is why the gifted specialists are starting to pull together what other tools are out there and where does the cogat measure in regards to that that is exactly what we're working on good thank you and i know i've heard you talked before about um looking for ways to communicate with our students and our parents better i'd love to hear more about that that's why they don't have time to do that tonight but you know maybe what avenues are you finding in order to be able to do that and are they successful
157and how we can support that stephanie thank you nice nice nicely done [Music] thank you the last thing i had was that um i think it was mr graduate requested to know the number of parent conferences we had parent conferences from parent-teacher conferences in regards to october 29th through november 5th we had 933 parent conferences that we completed within that week so kudos to our teachers awesome job madam chair i am finished for the night much much to be read and absorbed on the same thing about just kind of looking at everything thank you paul that all semantics and ms smith as well i've always been trying to figure out how we're reaching the students to have to know more about the gifted program and i'll share them with miss thompson and what she said
158as well that's that in itself is a uh big topic all right we're moving on here madam chairman and vice chair members of the board i have several updates for you this evening uh the first is at your place and that's just the the current update on our vacancy but with that memo which continues to dwindle fortunately but still not complete so we continue to look for selling some of those roles particularly in the classifying area we have some great possibilities to get the secondary art and cte filled by early second semester potentially still working on trying to attain social worker we have some possibilities upcoming in that realm as well and our efforts continue in all of our classified areas and we'll speak a little bit about a study we're doing on that in
159a minute we have hired several custodians and instructional assistants since last board meeting and continue to work at that but i'll take any questions that you might have about this memo okay secondly just wanted to give you an update where we are with our calendar committee i mentioned a briefly last meeting our first meeting was october 28th we did send the survey out to all staff and i believe you should receive that as well to identify what our division priorities are for our calendar for the 22-23 school year we'll discuss the results of that survey which ends tomorrow i will discuss it next friday among our committee before we go to break we'll generate based on that discussion of the data a draft calendar or calendars depending on the results and we'll work on putting
160that out again for survey with actual drafts in december our goal is to get that information back so that we can have a proposal a draft proposal to the board for january the january board meeting and potentially if there are any requested changes we can entertain those and if not and we may end up with an opportunity to vote in february see how that process unfolds any questions there thank you okay uh and thoroughly uh you have a second memo at your place that has to do with salary studies that we've been involved in since early last month recognizing that we want to make sure that we remain very competitive at the top in our region for salaries specifically for certain areas that i've identified for you instructional assistants bus drivers bus assistants custodians child
161nutrition workers and substitute teachers so we are nearly at the end of gathering that data from all regional divisions doing further diving and doing some comparative measures with that data so that we may ultimately end up with some proposals in the current budget season on how we might address some of those areas of need so we're in that process we recognize that this is an area where we want to make sure that we're valuing valuing you know amazing employees and we're taking the steps to figure out where we stand and what we might need to do with movement there so any questions related to any of that material i'm happy to also take questions yeah good okay and that's all that i have this evening you know the question was going for i appreciate all
162the work and updates and this person that we're going to be looking at for the new budget coaching we are happy to be here with our student representative um so for the past few months i have been working like independently not so much i've met with mr hamlet our dean of students a little bit to talk about like what i wanted to do as a whole and i've worked on a smaller scale on the broader scale and um i first started with instagram and 12 men if any of you know 12 minutes if you dumb it's all right i can give you a little background it's a school tradition where um we have a bunch of guys get painted up and paint and they have like a full uh see a few senior football numbers
163on their front on their backs and like it spells go lancers and we all invite a bunch of people to come out we have a little tailgate kind of sort of thing we play music and we just have a good time together we're supposed to be like a more of a family sort of thing like a family bonding sort of thing and i have used that to my advantage to invite a lot of people out and it has grown tremendously i would say from the first week that we started it i only had a few seniors a few juniors and by the end of the season it was definitely branching out to freshmen and a lot more which i would love to see and it was amazing we mainly did this through instagram and our
164lancer party account with me caleb ramsey and adrian goins we used that to our advantage when we said about themes and a few other things we also used snapchat through chats to make sure that women like some of the females and some of the guys knew that they'd come out and they have a good time if they wanted to have some fun just paint up and have some fun around an apartment junior parking lot um at friday night specifically i have definitely seen an increase from last year and years past of student section like turnouts i would definitely say football student section turnouts from the first game to homecoming to the last game have definitely increased from just a few rows to about four to six rows being a little bit more packed and like
165a little bit less of like the parents and like siblings being right behind us we've had a bunch more rows to move up from and see a lot more increase in that um what i've seen across everything has been a lot more diversity i know i've seen a bunch of students from jf glass and a bunch of other surrounding schools that came out and sat in our student section and just had fun at friday night lights as well as different volleyball games i might have been like playing on the court i'm like oh that kid doesn't go here but i know him and it's like it's fun to see that even though they don't go to our school that they are having a bunch of fun at our school including themselves and all of our
166traditions and all of our fun that we have and i know i've used snapchat a bunch to output to network and awesome and show like what we're doing what's going on we have a lot of fun so i've seen a turnout a little bit with that seeing more and more kids view my snapchat or other instagrams and stuff like that and actually come out because i know some of you would actually not come and some have definitely made strides to come out a lot more thank you good evening everyone um i just wanted to give you a little bit of information on what i've been doing over the past month or so um for me personally it's been a pretty busy month with college applications and golf school and this and all the stuff that's
167been going on but i have been doing a few things in particular um mostly at for robotics admin ellison it's going really well so far we have a really awesome team that's here and we're actually going to our competition next saturday and it's going to be in person for half of it and i'm half excited for it i'm really looking forward to the students being able to interact with some other teams at least a little bit we actually just got approval today i believe from dr wells for uh the field trip to go there um and then next week we're going to be recording our project that will fix this year's problem that they gave us um and sending that to judges and doing some live zoom on thursday and i would let you know
168uh next thursday uh so it would come today we if you would like to you can come by and see what we've been doing with the robots um on the table see our project we're having the parents be able to come in since they will not be allowed to go to the competition and unfortunately there are no spectators allowed at all at the competition so i can't invite you to that not that you want to go it is an hour and a half away also i wanted to mention that the future center has been very helpful at the high school for me personally and a lot of my friends who are working on their college applications and scholarship scholarship applications everything from fafsa workshops in my english class to making reading essays and getting advice
169on how to pick a college or even for those who aren't going into college and being able to make plans that way with other programs i've been really impressed and i'm really proud of how well that's going a lot of my friends in other school systems are like you know what you're like you can just go get your essay reviewed by someone who's like paid to do that and it's really awesome that that opportunity is given to the students for that and then finally i finished developing a student survey that i'll be sending out hopefully tomorrow or sometime next week that will just give a good a little bit more information about how students are feeling right now what kind of schedules they like all those types of things as well as i just added
170a question to for those who have seen it perhaps in student review on the construction proposal and seeing what the students think about what could be changing at their school uh if there's any questions i'd be happy to answer this so can i make a connection to the future center though if you'll remember 30 years ago our student representative india page spent the year talking to you guys about the need for more supports at the school for students trying to access college and career and so kudos to dr brown and his staff for putting that together and obviously producing something that is making a real difference with our with our students [Music] good stuff thank both of you for all the updates from lancelin and yes i agree your student section at football games police
171was huge yeah all the things y'all wanted was kind of nice i liked that i had worked with jf and i said look at there look at me all right dr um uh yes ma'am i want to give an update to a couple of the committees or teams that we have put in place uh and what some recommendations have come from from those folks at the september board meeting i discussed with you the superintendent's advisory committee which would have representatives from all of our schools on it and in october we sent out a survey uh to ask staff about the the things that were concerned for them issues for them and once we got that information the team [Music] gathered all the data and they they came up with four themes and i discussed these
172in october uh communication uh instructional expectations mitigation strategies and teacher morale and so uh we divided that team up into four groups one for each one of those issues and asked them to begin working on solutions uh to those uh those issues and so i would like to bring to you tonight their recommendations um in the line of communication uh one of the frustrations is that there's there's so much information and a lot of times that information that comes from central office to principals then down to to staff is is kind of disjointed sometimes inconsistent and that causes some frustration so their recommendation or their first recommendation because we will continue to do this throughout the year but their first recommendation was to uh have me prepare a bi-monthly report that would um provide direct
173communication to all staff so there's no filters that go through that communication and and one of the things that they want to know is what happens here they want to know what board actions are taken and what board decisions are being made they want to know vdoe updates and changes and they want to know changes in expectations from the school division and that will start tomorrow i will send out our first one tomorrow with that information the instructional expectations so really this stems from the idea that coming into this year there was the belief that school would be normal there would be normal expectations and those kinds of things and you all know after the first month that that far from the case so it caused lots of issues that were not directly related to
174coded but indirectly they a lot of things because you've all heard the the lack of planning time the lack of you know the lack of mitigation strategies that keep kids in school quarantine all those types of things so what they wanted to do was to have a model much like the superintendent's advisory team in all of the schools and so they have recommended that each will develop a mechanism to seek staff input on all these issues while maintaining transparency about survey results and then seeking staff input on those solutions so it basically this group is working on division-wide issues the schools will work on their school-based issues mitigation strategies i think one of the the big frustrations was that we had lots of students that weren't in the building last year and weren't explicitly taught
175mitigation strategies and so we have lots of students that maybe don't want to mask right they don't you know they don't space properly they don't they don't take them as seriously as they did last year and so they have recommended that we begin a video contest at each school to put out videos that would encourage their their colleagues to to follow the proper mitigation strategies we'll have contests we'll have prizes for those schools and the overall division winners and the final one was uh teacher morale and we had lots of discussion on teacher morale and of course one of the things that that came to the forefront was that teachers didn't have time this year that they've had in the past and how can we find time to to to give the teachers so they
176can plan and prepare for the work that they have to do and so they've requested that the teacher work calendar be revised to assure more uninterrupted time to plan not only during the day but to add calendar days for teacher work days and so that one is one that we'll need to do work on and bring back to the the board for some decisions on them the other three are just steps that we're taking to try to to improve those issues are there any questions on um these recommendations that came from it came from this the staff it did not none of these came from me or my office and i think they've done a great job and they were they were very uh thoughtful in their in their work i agree with you i'm
177glad to see some structure taking place and some communication and some efforts towards helping some of the issues with communication and expectations and future morale and got a good start i'm wondering if you a superintendent see anything in here that is missing that may be helpful with things such as teacher morale right well communication that's not included i mean what would you add if you could add something well they have lots of suggestions it's just we're doing we're going to do one at a time we're going to we're going to try to implement it we want to do it right we don't want to throw 20 things out there and not do it exactly right so we're doing it one at a time so that at our next meeting they'll come up with another set
178of solutions they have lots of solutions it's just we're trying to get that and get that but as superintendent if you have to do two things to increase improve teacher morale what would you do time collin and i believe i would um i think probably the second thing is to you know there are several things but i really think that the idea that the state of virginia is is holding schools across the state accountable for things that are really beyond our control like this attendance issue to say for for the state of virginia to come out and say that we're going to determine whether you've been affected or not this year i think is highly unfair because this year has proven to be much more difficult than last year yet everything was weighed last year
179nothing was weighed this year and i think that would take a real burden off of our staff if they did not have that on their shoulders because they know they know that the state is holding them accountable and sometime in may the state's going to decide whether or not we've been affected and i think that really weighs heavy on our staff thus the reason they need a lot of they want more time to plan they want more time to prepare they want more time to dig into this data and so i think those two things would be the most important things well if i had my two cents worth which you know i'm going to anyway as you're working with the committees i would encourage them to look at maybe some things that are untangible
180i think if we focused on building relationships providing our teachers with legality professional respect so simplicities support if they're asking for support give them support um give them autonomy help them get back to that level that they used to be at that they were the masters in that classroom of their students and you know teaching and their students learning i agree with you time because i know they've had canvas and google classrooms they've had tons of assessments that data i know when you give a test you don't just put them in a classroom and take the test the teacher then has to take the data and enter it into a spreadsheet and then it's leveled and it's tiered and then you have to offer remediation based on those levels in those tiers and i understand
181all of that but i also know that in the midst of coping when we have students they're two years behind a year and a half and all of those mandates you're talking about are being poured on our teachers when you told me about the attendance i wanted to say hey board let's just vote we're not going to worry about that this year you know yes we want our students here but to make sure to make us feel like we're failing school because you know because the students stay home with code i mean our teachers and our staff needs to know that they have autonomy and that they are respected and i just think it's really really important that when we talk about communication it's not just saying to our teachers this is what the state
182says you have to do it's talking with them and encouraging them and making sure that they have input decisions and they're not just this is what you're going to do and this is how you're going to do it if we don't get these committees to help implement and bring some of that into our our staff i'm afraid that we're going to lose more teachers i just want to encourage the good start here to start to think about the intangibles as well [Music] yeah because if you say to a teacher you can come up here to a mental health session but then you come over here and you've got all this data and all these mandates on you and no one's listening to you and no one allows you to have input in decision making i
183think that they get very frustrated and i think that it's important that we really get back to the basics that we focus on our instruction that we talk with our teachers about how important they are and make our students and our teachers a priority for them so i think this is a good start but i did see a lot of intangibles that were missing and i know our teachers are crying out for those so i'm going to move to the mental health and i'm going to try to escape from that when our mental health team met we discussed how we were going to support our students and our staff right and i think the thing that needs to be understood and i know that we've used the term mental health but we're not mental health
184providers we're educators and so we have to do things that are education-based that our staff can do our administrators can do and so as we did our work there one of the things that we talked about it was the support for staff what really our staff needs is to be is is for there to be an environment where they're treated as professionals they are they are they are valued they are heard input is sought from them and so those very things were all a part of our conversation i will tell you this monday of this week and wednesday of this week we trained our administrators on those very things we did professional development surrounding strategies that they could use that they could be intentional about building back those relationships because i think 18 months has
185created some fractures in our buildings with with staff and administrators and students and so we have to spend a lot of time and a lot of intentionality on building back those relationships giving our staff the ability to to vocalize their concerns to ask them how to solve those things and so a lot of what you just said we spent three hours on monday with principals three hours on wednesday with assistant principals and they are all developing those strategies to go back into their buildings and start to complement those things and i know of some of that that's taken place and i'm i'm really going to applaud that one-on-one face-to-face conversation but also i think we need to make sure that we want our teachers to feel that there's trust there and that they can talk
186freely and not that things are just mandated for them i think they've had enough of that so what we ended up doing with our mental health team is we broke up with a staff group and a student group and we looked at a lot of data we looked at discipline data we looked at lieutenant's day we looked at counselor data we we did a resource map so we could determine what types of things were we already doing so in some schools they're doing certain things really well and we don't want to reinvent the wheels we got all that data out there and so i'm going to give you uh after several meetings what the staff has recommended for helping support students and staff so in terms of staff for immediate implementation it's the same thing
187that we've dealt with with the student um the superintendent's advisory they immediately they want mechanisms put in place so staff can voice their concerns and so there can be dialogue in the building to to to fix some of these problems and talk about some of the issues that are preventing them from feeling like professionals or preventing trust or preventing them from having the time to do what they need to do they also had some things that were recommended for short short range implementations and like not immediately but in the near future they want us to work on the teach calendar on the work calendar uh to also to so you're seeing some crossover between recommendations they want us to bring up uh uninterrupted time to plan during the day and add calendar days for teacher
188work days that was that there were there were several surveys from the mental health team that were put out and so a lot of this came from that they also recommended that we continue to work with what mr gallagher's been trying to do to get these instructional assistants hired to get them in the building to provide more hands to support but they also want us to reach out to the community and develop a volunteer program so folks in our community they want to help the schools function to come in and go go through some training and become volunteers to to help with some of the duties and classroom coverages that have been just really burdensome this year and finally they talked a lot about the employee assistance program and and the fact that it's it
189it feels kind of cold to them and almost separated or formed we don't have a lot of people that take advantage of it so we have a parent on the committee that works in the healthcare health mental health field and she she said that it would be a good idea to contract with local mental health providers because that gives our teachers a little bit more connection to actually the people that they're dealing with and so that is a longer range implementation so that's something that we would have to to work through the board in terms of uh how that would look as far as students are concerned the thing that they all felt like that could happen immediately and we was to make sure that division-wide every teacher and every classroom was implementing those essential
190teaching strategies that we talked about in september and they believed that it would seamlessly integrate lessons without jeopardizing the instructional time you know how you how you bring a child into the classroom doesn't take any time right if you can create a welcoming environment a safe environment an environment where kids feel like they belong we are going to have better behavior better results from our children some of the major implementation that they're looking at they want us to look at our master schedule there's some worry that we don't have opportunities during the day for students to to release some of some of their anxieties we talked about it was let some air out of the balloon give them some time give them some space to to kind of not just be at the grindstone and
191they also wanted intentional time for for whatever interventions they might be that kids might need for support and the final one which is a longer range um there's there's something called a universal screening tool for social skills right so y'all heard about vkrp tonight part of vkrp is you screen children for their ability to to have social skills how well their their their skills are and things like working in groups or sharing and regulating their their anger or their their temper uh if they fail how do they bounce back those kinds of things and there are several tools that then become that you can do throughout the school division that are age-appropriate right so instead of sharing it would be how how students collaborate in the classroom would be more in line for an eighth
192or ninth grade student but what the committee felt was if we all have some kind of anecdotal data saying our kids need this or our kids need this you know our second graders they're just really struggling with with being able to to deal with their frustration levels when they're not doing wellness and so a universal screening tool would uh give data to our school system to our schools to figure out what skills are lacking what what those social skills are lacking and then to to develop you know interventions to support that and things that will build those skills for our students those resilient skills those cooperation skills those those ability to to work with others and all those kinds of things that i think have have deteriorated over the last 18 months and because they
193just have not had the practice of doing those and so this would just be a way to be more intentional about that now of course we would want to make sure that everybody understood what they were that they were that they could be their parents could have options as to whether they they were going to have their child go through this or not but we feel like if we're getting data on how kids can add subtract we probably ought to have some data on whether or not they're being successful at working with each other or controlling their anger or or those kinds of things so those are all of the recommendations from the mental health team and um you know i think they they are i think they're practical you know they're not they're not
194they're not clinical right they're they're education things and so i think that they are things that we could get to working on and of course any of the things that would actually be changes to things that are happening in our school division would certainly come before uh you guys but i'm really proud of the effort of all of these people they're putting in a lot of time and effort and i will i will make sure that y'all know who all those people are because they do deserve the kudos for all of this work thank you okay and i believe i am at american education league is next week it's november 15th through the 19th and all the things that we've just talked about that our staff and our educators are going through they sure could
195use a uh some support from whoever if you see an educator thank them they are doing amazing work you know i think we've talked a lot about the fact that last year our educators were were held up as heroes in the community and for some reason this year that they are not feeling that and so i i want them to feel that again because they're doing great work again even better work in my opinion than they were last year so please take the time to find an educator and say thank you and the last reminder or the last thing i have is the statement of economic interest for those that will be returning in january you will get the statement in early january january 1st and it is due january 31st and so that is
196all i have i'm sure mr terry you want to start ma'am so the stem academy did have a board meeting this week it was convertible of course [Music] they have plans to you know for their graduation and all the the normal things that they do but of course nothing's done like normal as much that would be as virtual as possible which is terrible i love going to see in the projects it's a whole lot different than seeing them on the computer [Music] but everything is going really well there their mitigation strategies worked they've stayed in everything's going well so uh hats off to ms cash and everybody over there they've done a great job mr terry do you mind if i give a plug to something that's happening with the stem so in november 19th
197they're doing their annual interview mock interviews and so this cash goes out and gets professionals across the region and then the students go through a formal interview with those people and then they get critiqued by those people so i know this because i'm one of the interviewers so i'm looking forward to whoever it is i get to talk to but i think that's a really good real life application skill that they're getting early on yeah and i know some of the students who've gone through in the past have gotten a lot out of it so uh yeah this is a great program um that's it for my committee i would like to uh i got to start off talking about the construction project i think you know when you see a big project like that
198it gets everybody excited i hope it can happen like we wanted to i do think we need to make sure we're taking care of what we got going on first and then extend ourselves out to get as much done on this project as we can we keep our fingers crossed that the board of supervisors will see things the same way and we can get it done without too much burden you know spread to everybody but it is a big project i think uh the high school will benefit the community will benefit um it will be um a great thing for amherst county so not just the schools but um sorry sienna and peter that it won't happen until after you guys graduated my kids are already moaning that it's happening now but um also on
199that thanks for the 12th man group it's so much fun to see the guys and girls at the football games you know really promoting school spirit and they'll see him at the at the home games i see people gathering at the away games and and it's and you're right we do have students from other so other schools participating in our events a lot of that has to do with gov school and stem academy and how kids are intertwined a lot more i mean so it is great to see you guys doing things with other students and just being a community i mean just you know we're our own county but it's we're all region 2000 community here it's a great thing to see you guys all together um and peter good luck with the robotics
200thing it is good you guys get to go out and do stuff again um shame you can't have fans there but you know and but good luck to also all the the people trying to figure out what they're gonna do after graduation you know doing the applications and and figuring all that out um it's what you guys are going for it's what you guys are going through all the schooling for to get you to that point so good luck to you hope all comes all your dreams come to fruition i'd like to thank all of our speakers tonight we need to hear from people from all sides especially our bus drivers i hope we can get things taken care of as far as the ac and make a work condition better for the drivers and
201the students and buzzes [Music] it is not an easy job and like he said you do see it on all the news channels that every school system is having a uh an issue with bus drivers so i think if we try to help take care of ours maybe we won't get in that situation as bad but and then thank everybody for the reports dr norman that's that's a ton of data thank you for being able to put all that together and uh you do that's for sure so that's it thank you thank you okay i don't have a committee of reporting so i'll start out you know that was a sad occurrence about alan bellgarden's passing it was nice that we could honor and recognize him and his family here and then echo a lot
202of it mr terry said people coming to the microphone is important community engagement is important so it definitely needs to be kept up you know we got to hear from the community to know what you're thinking do and as far as our audition goes i'm looking forward to that i grew up in nelson county and i've been so jealous of their auditorium for years so i'm hoping that we'll move forward and we will have a nice space for our community too gets to use that for events so that would be nice um yes dr norman and mr maddox i like the data it's a lot but it shows us i mean considering what we came through i think the reds and the yellows could be worse i know we're not too pleased to see the
203reds but i think considering where we came from we're doing okay um mr maddox i'm glad ct is potentially growing and that something positive will come from your applications for more opportunities for our students and thank you student reps as usual showing up i checked out the gaming thing after the last meeting and didn't understand a lot of it but see how it'd be fun for students and about your mental health report i think that um you know talking about what we've just come through this isn't some important stuff too i mean my kids will be the first to tell you that i'm not a touchy-feely person but this goes beyond you know hugging somebody people are losing their jobs because of code or vaccination status or whatever there's stress in homes caregivers the head
204of households your parents and that's all trickling down to our students and um i can't imagine what they're probably feeling when something some added stress is going on from the situation so i think it's good i think it's really good and i think your team did a really really good job and thank everybody the teachers the bus drivers all of the staff for everything you do every day yes ma'am i apologize get you off mute um i would like to thank all our speakers that actually came out today um again our bus drivers we hear you and we are going to try to help you um and also our student reps it's always great hearing from you guys you're just a little ball of sunshine all the time with everything you're doing and your energy
205we really appreciate everything and also the resolution tonight i think was wonderful i'd like to thank everybody for putting that together and uh thank you to dr arnold for working with some of our teachers to help address some of their needs and um i think that's it for tonight but thank you all so much and i appreciate you letting me come in remotely this evening thank you thank you i'd like to start off and just say to stan and peter that your presentation was such a perfect balance of how we need to go through life i mean we need to really focus on being innovative and finding ways to pull pull people together have some fun and have that community but the same thing we have work to do we have to get our college
206applications in so i just really appreciate that microcosm of what you presented for us today and i'd also like to just get a jump start and just thank all the teachers and the students and the staff and administrators and everybody who contributes to our schools you know whether it's education week or or just a regular week you're greatly greatly appreciated and i want to just encourage you to just keep your eyes on the goal i know it's tough but let's just be kind be forgiving love each other build each other up be be a team be a family i know in my career i always felt like i left my home and from one family and i went to a work family and then back and forth and that's what we need to be for
207each other in these tough times like we said we were really faced with a lot of mental health issues um just breathing and loss and just things that we just don't know i mean including just wearing the mask you know but we've been through a year that's been really rough going through here that's not normal again but we can get through this we can have thriving schools we can have thriving students and that should be our goal and in order to do that i just want to be able to say thank you glad to be part of the team and hope that we can keep our eye on that threats i think that's well said um thank you ms thompson i'm going to end it up kind of quick um looking at royal has not
208met we do defeat in december uh getting excited about going to represent you all at the usda delegate assembly i'll be doing that on tuesday remote virtually and then travel to wilmsburg at the end of the week to see if we can learn what everyone else is doing around the state i think we already know everybody's had the same crunch but we're going to do the best we can to see that i've been enjoying some things going on um i did enjoy um mrs bauer and dr allen and his staff with the presentation about the excitement of possibly uh renovating now that i'm gonna face doing some good construction at the high school that's just something good to look forward to even if it doesn't come to pass right away we have done everyone has
209done some good work on that i did uh attend the convocation that you had last week virtually and some good information went out with the student to the teachers along the lines of what you're speaking on tonight so i think everybody's on the same page today of course there was a great uh veterans day veterans day celebration at amherst middle school and uh i tell you um sometimes we think that everything is gloomy and bad but to see those young people out there uh in kind of the walk of honor for all the veterans walking through going to the garden it was just something to be home and that made me feel good basically for the rest of the day but there are some great things going on sometimes we are forgetting to point out
210the good things that are going on and and want to overshadow them with all the bad things that are going on some good things going on here in amherst uh and we need to continue to believe that it is our goal to make everybody comfortable make all the teachers bus jobs custodians nutritional aids and everyone else careful to make you as happy as we possibly can and that's our goal but let us remember that we are in some i keep saying this everything we're in some serious times uh and even though we didn't have forecaster this school year would be a few bumps in a row there have been but uh i'm i'm happy that we have a superintendent of staff who have a nice little go-kart going right over top of them so if
211we keep that attitude i think we'll all make it to the end and dr wells thank you once again for being mitigation chief and coleman chief and all that good stuff and mr gallagher for trying to keep us the vacancies cutting them down i i don't know the answer to the school bus shortage um you know you don't know if the salary or what have you but just trust me just some people are not into doing that right now you know the frequency of hiring just relax everywhere but we're going to try to do the best we can if we're trying to get air prediction on the buses that's gonna i mean i might try to drive one of that and do that but um but anyway we just got to do that and so
212i'm ending by saying that um education week uh we'll talk to you by email and hopefully everybody will enjoy themselves if you need us we know you will call us we can't ask everything we ask but we do the best that we can so with that said i don't think i missed anything we are going to go into closed session section 2.2-3711a2 [Music] virginia sessions for the following a1 plus that matters an a2 all you into right so [Music] i am okay with you messing up an assignment or whatever hey when you do it you do it so hard you hurt somebody okay don't let me see you get out here again again ever again that is behind us but i want to tell you it starts with mentality and i've told you this a
213long time ago you can't think your way into a right way of acting you just gotta act your way and the feelings that come the feelings that come you go out there with great unbelievable energy and excitement i gotta tell you this fans that's what they like to see that's called passion it's called passion people love passionate people little baby [Music] little baby [Music] foreign [Music] [Applause] [Music] me [Music] oh [Music] [Applause] [Music] so [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] bye you [Music] so [Music] so [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] so [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] so [Music] [Applause] [Music] i am a scholar i am the future i am the future i am intelligent i am intelligent i am unique i am unique when a time comes when the time goes i'll be a
214leader i'll be a leader when there's a justice league [Applause] it will always be [Music] [Applause] [Music] uh [Music] [Applause] [Music] my so [Music] all right good afternoon we're here with the james river association at rivers edge park and this is part of our noaa be wet grant in which we're working with our seventh grade students and so we have our seventh grade teachers here today and they're paddling across the river right now and we're going to do a macroinvertebrate certain treatment so we're teaching people how to use the kayaks then we're going to do the macro invertebrate search and i also have a group working looking at the mechanics learning about the river so here's part of our education for the james river and uh stay tuned [Music] me [Music] foreign [Music] oh [Music]
215so [Music] foundation they recently accepted my grant for an echo show since students are required to sit in their seats more than ever as we deal with covet 19 an echo show allows a touchless way to access music videos read-alouds poetry brain breaks timers and even daily jokes the students are loving the brain breaks throughout the day we can also ask alexa questions such as alexa how long is the amazon river the amazon is 4 345 miles long great the echo show is a great tool and i thank the amherst education foundation for supporting the teachers and students of amherst county [Music] so [Music] [Applause] [Music] so [Music] so [Music] so [Music] hi my name is naomi giles and i'm the school librarian at temperance elementary school i want to say thank you to the
216education foundation for two grants that i received last year that have drastically changed my library and impacted it in a very positive way so the first screen i received was for these play-away audio books and these are just little battery charged books that are audio format i did not have any audio format prior to this in my collection so the kids absolutely love these i cannot keep them on the shelves it's primarily for second through fifth graders and they can take these little books put their headphones in and listen anywhere they go on the bus at home whether they're on vacation wherever they can listen to their audiobooks and they absolutely love it i also received an ipad and i use this with my green screen so this is great when i collaborate with teachers
217we're able to do some really neat projects with the students we can also make school-wide videos and the kids love using it and learning about that technology so thank you to the education foundation [Music] so [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] oh [Music] right [Music] foreign [Music] [Applause] [Music] oh [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] so [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] oh [Music] hi my name is jennifer fitzgerald and i am the art teacher here at amherst middle school we just wanted to say a huge thank you to the education foundation and the grants that they provided this year for our education um here we have were severely impacted by the covered restrictions this year and not being able to have community sets of art supplies so we couldn't share our supplies
218like we usually do when we're working on art projects so the education foundation grant money was used to purchase more supplies individual art kits to provide individual art kits to our students so that we could we could use a variety of mediums and use lots of different materials instead of just paper and pencil so one of the things that we have done this year is to use these cubbies for each individual student they have their own little basket that contains their supplies they have non-consumable supplies that were provided so everyone would have their own like scissors and they also have consumable supplies like glue sticks markers sharpies pencils that sort of thing and what i would do each project would be to fill up these baskets with what they would need to use for that
219project and then they could all keep all of their papers and art projects separated here in the cubbies we we did some really cool stuff this year one of the things that education foundation supplied was these individual watercolor trays we each student would have their own housing their own case for their watercolor trays and education foundation money purchased these inset inserts refills type watercolors and i would pop them in their trays so every student had their own set of paints paintbrushes to use for their class [Music] hi my name is julia simon i'm a first grade teacher at amherst elementary and i use the amherst education foundation mini grant to purchase these lap desks for my students we take them outside to do our reading work and we use them in the classroom for our
220school work thank you so much for giving me the money to purchase these i'm really thankful for it [Music] lots of stem materials to work on in centers while they're in the library it allows them to use their creativity [Music] hello my name is sandy jennings neblett i'm the library media specialist at amherst elementary school i'd like to thank the education foundation for providing our students with lots of stem materials to work on in centers while they're in the library it allows them to use their creativity and their innovation skills as well as cooperation to help build their own designs and use their own ideas to create things that they want to see [Music] you [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] wow [Music] [Applause] [Music] wow [Applause] [Music] [Applause] one [Applause] [Music] [Laughter] [Music] [Laughter] [Music] foreign
221[Music] do [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] so [Music] wow [Music] thank you chicken mcnuggets who's going to salem tomorrow raise your hand who's going to sail up tomorrow raise your hand [Music] so [Music] so [Music] so [Music] everywhere [Music] nobody delivered nobody live you probably haven't even had one [Music] now [Music] so [Music] do [Music] [Applause] [Music] do [Music] [Applause] do [Music] i like motion yes and now we have um a motion i make a motion that we approve the personnel report second all in favor aye any opposed okay you have another motion on the floor i make notion that we've approved the religious exemptions uh presented to us by the superintendent in a second second all in favor aye [Music] thank you [Music] so [Music] you