001but i gotta have it probably have it i don't have it forget it oh why was that not my first i'm not in intelligent mode yet yes i know good evening i like to call this regular monthly meeting of the bedford county school board to order ms johnson will you please call the roll mrs kirby here mr hill here mr daniels here mrs harrison here mr holbrook here dr mealy here mr nelms here madam chair you have a quorum thank you ma'am do i have a motion to approve the agenda have a motion by mr hill do i have a second second second by ms harrison any discussion all those in favor signify by saying aye aye opposed motion carries do i have a motion to go into closed session madam chair uh i make
002emotional session madam chair uh i make a motion that we go into closed session pursuant to code of virginia 2.2-3711a 127-1 to discuss the assignment appointment performance discipline and release of contract for specific school board employees including the evaluation of the superintendent as provided in his contract of employment two for the purpose of discussion or consideration of a disciplinary matter concerning a student enrolled in before county public schools and seven for consultation with legal counsel pertaining to actual or probable litigation i have a motion by mr hill do i have a second second by dr mealy all those in favor signify by saying aye aye opposed we're in closed session okay do i have a motion that would come at a closed session uh madam chairman i make a motion that we come out of
003closed session i have a motion but dr mealy do i have a second second second by mr nelms any discussion all those in favor signify by saying aye aye opposed we're out of closed session ms johnson would you certify a closed session please whereas the bedford county school board has convened a closed meeting on this date pursuant to an affirmative recorded vote and in accordance with the provisions of the virginia freedom of information act and where section 2.2-3712-d if the code of virginia requires a certification by this school board that such closed meeting was conducted in conformity with virginia law now therefore be it resolved that the bedford county school board hereby certifies that to the best of each member's knowledge only public business matters lawfully exempted from open meeting requirements by virginia law were
004discussed in the closed meeting to which the certification applies and only such public business matters as were identified in the motion convening the closed meeting were heard discussed or considered yes yes yes yes yes yes yes okay do i have a motion regarding student number two for 21 20 21 22. madam chair i made commotion for student number two 21-22 that we uphold the superintendent recommendation you have a motion by mr hill we'll have a second second second by ms harrison any discussion all those in favor signify saying aye aye opposed motion carries tonight we've got a special presentation by mr dunton from the legacy education center welcome mr dutton madam chair and dr bergen and the school board members thank you for the opportunity to share with you tonight been looking forward to sharing
005with you the program that we've been developing and we think it can add some benefit to your post-secondary efforts you know once they leave your program so we're a post-secondary program and um one of the things that uh got me started down this journey was simply you know as being a coach and coaching at liberty university for years and being in the city i was always conflicted why our numbers were so high with either poverty or workforce development and so about 15 and 16 i started going to some of the meetings my wife would go where are you going tonight well i'm going to go i'm going to go to these meetings and see what's going on with our initiatives in this area and i said because i don't understand why we can have um
006you know all the resources we have for for young people to move into and they're not getting to the workforce and really it's that it's it's a workforce play legacy education center is really a career center and we focus a lot on mentoring as well what we've developed as we get to it so we went through and we started really looking at what the outcomes were uh i would listen to a lot of initiatives like hey we're going to take vegetables in the food deserts and you can do you know different things to try to you know massage poverty where it was at or these issues and i was like okay those aren't changing anything you know and so a lot of times coaches are problem solvers so i started looking hey how are we
007going to solve it and uh came to the conclusion you know dr bergen as a coach you try to get the ball inbounds get at the front court get 22 open at the rim so you can score the only way you can change poverty you could change income levels and i mean i think we can talk about a lot of different things but i think we can all conclude on that so then it was hey what are some of the hurdles that that are being faced that's not allowing talent real talent to access themselves into the workforce because we live in a climate right now where the workforce is just i mean they're just crying for labor and uh they want to see labor come their way so what we what we did is we
008sat down with an unbelievable team i was able to you know we were able to collaborate with and she's not able to be here tonight but our director of academics is dr hezedean foster she was the first integrated principal in athens county tremendous person taught 10 years at longwood so she oversees the academic component for the students and uh you know there's some programs out there that don't always have accredited academics with them he said hey we're not going to do anything we're not going to have any students take any classes unless they're fully accredited so students can go from legacy education center they go to university of virginia you know they can go to liberty they go to james madison go into the workforce so it's very important we had accredited academics we see
009ourselves as a transition okay and i think you guys are to be applauded for all the efforts you make to get students across the platform to do what you can do career development wise but that comes to an end at some point in time the the school bus stops coming you stop in the 12th grade and then what i was looking at when i noticed is okay what's happening on the other side of that and so we see ourselves as a transitional face for the students that need more mentoring more support we also see ourselves as a trans transformational program because life skills are a crisis right now and so we used the word and we've coined this phrase employment maturity lack of employment maturity with a lot of students that are coming out of
010high school whether it's medford lynchburg or whatever you guys might be doing a better job than some other areas in the state but we know the numbers are where they are so lynchburg has to come face to face with the fact that we've got 22 percent poverty okay that's a big number in the city we have to come face to face with those sll scores that you probably saw last week which were incredibly low so those students are going to need some support there's something going on inside because it's not the talent that the student has that's not getting them to the workforce so as we if we move through it then one of the things that we do and we've got a couple of our students here that are bedford county students is we
011start teaching them that their relationship with legacy education center their relationship with me their relationship with the staff is about their economic empowerment so we start flipping the switch for them to get them thinking on an economic basis and a lot of people who are facing hurdles they're they're constricted they're not thinking that way so even though we may think that way or we may think they're thinking that way as i've gotten into it for two years now they're not thinking that way so they're actually in a hole and we've got to bring them up to the basis of okay understanding what economics really means and really seeing themselves now they no longer can ride the bus they can't get meals they get where are we going to go so we start teaching them that
012you get paid for the value you add the marketplace you got to get mature about understanding how you add value now you know marcus how does a student add value in the market's place if they don't know they have value so a lot of times we're coming out of situations where we've never even understood i got value i mean we assume they they got value but when you get them isolated right now this is one of our key members of our team is uh mike mcpherson his last position was he was the financial manager for the entire air force so he's out of dc comes down a lot and he says the world is way too complex people quit so the complexities that we're facing in the millennials with limited coping skills becomes a real
013problem for them so they quit and so we have to help them through three things we're mentoring it has to be first of all you gotta help them through the complexities it's not simple to get a fast food done you guys can do all you want to do to help with the fast but there's still a number of people that are going through the doors and knowing how to do the fafsa well they can't get their parents taxes you know and different things like that to just access education the other thing is it becomes a lot of fear what am i doing while i'm here i'm comfortable when i go out and i'm on my own i don't see the teachers i don't see my principles you know there's a lot of fear and that
014fear then leads to isolation so you know we're in there working to solve it and we meet different cases so i want you to meet a couple of students tonight first and i'll finish up with what we what we're asking what we do um leo you know lightroom i mean leo snead played for me and i had a relationship with him and he's a superstar i mean this guy's unreal he graduated a year ago and he can tell you a story about his economic lies but unbelievable maturity so so um you know school board member nelms there's a couple things that happen with the students first of all you got disadvantage you've got underserved but you also have directionalist students right now so what i mean by directionalists is okay i have an idea about
015what i want to do but how do i get connected with it so dr immediately 85 of people get their jobs because of their network so if i'm in a circle where i don't have a network to take my talent to the job how do i get there and and this is something we all have to think through so we become the network sometimes the student doesn't come and take classes leo had never taken a class yet but we helped him with his life skills we helped him get himself into into a place of joy okay so so leo come on up and take your hat off here and come come speak to this lovely board and share them your story and where you're headed right now in life hey everyone hi um so uh
016i graduated last year um since then uh i've gone i worked last summer i worked at a farm and then after that i got to banker steel with the help of coach dunton right here and uh since then i worked at um i worked at banker steel from august until april no to uh i forget i started at the mill last week but i started georgia pacific last week and so far i've been doing good there and last the a big reason that i am at the mill is because of georgia i mean it's because of banker steel and um you know uh i worked there for seven months they were it was a good place to work and uh a big reason that i got to banker steel was because of legacy and going
017to there and i never took a class but i would ride up there and all through high school i've had coach dunn by my side helped me through basketball and stuff and that's taught me a lot of life skills through basketball and sports i've that's taught me a lot about not quitting and just sticking in it because you know you got to start somewhere and um not everything is you know handed to you but it's taught me a lot coach dunton and legacy has taught me a lot to just stick with it and stay with it and so far it's been doing great for me i've been out of high school for only a year and i've switched from banker steel over to georgia pacific and i think georgia pacific is a great place to
018work and it has a lot of uh routes for me to go down so yeah all right thank you so much and what i want to point out here is um leo doesn't get to bank or steal without the support from legacy okay and so what happened with the banker steel position is he actually did a phone interview so we connected them they wanted to both be welders him and garrett worley so they both come out of bedford liberty high school they want to be welders so we operate through your passion dr if you tell me hey i want to be a principal you know we help you with education you want to be a welder we're going to take in that route so they want to be welders so now i you know i'm
019saying okay what's the best way to go through it well when you actually talk to bank or steel they're excited about the fact that you know the student's going to get some life skills through us and still get that kind of support and then enter into the labor force well everybody can have a different path so garrett gets in and they put him in one plant they put leo in another plant and garrett moves right into welding and so both of these guys are already making like 50 000 a year we have the ability to do that right out of high school boom so leo got a little frustrated with hey coach why is garrett moving into the welding and i'm still over here on the machines and so i called the president and asked
020him hey you know this is what you're going to do because he's about to get an opportunity to make 19 an hour at georgia pacific and you're going to lose a great worker this is not an average one this is a great worker they they took him right off the bat put him right up in some lead positions over there but for whatever reason they didn't move and make him a welder and so then he took the opportunity to go to georgia pacific we're talking our way through it give them a two-week notice make sure your job's going to be great because you've got family that works at georgia pacific so he's going to do a great job at georgia pacific uh like to also introduce thomas robertson so thomas walked into my office and
021know three four years ago and uh came in jv position was open you know thomas came in presented himself and and i said hey do you have a degree yet where are you having a degree share me what happened with his education and uh and i said well we're not going to be able to hire you in that position but if you want to become a volunteer get into the system and we'll see if we can get you volunteering well lo and behold this guy becomes one of the greatest role models that ever happened at liberty high school i mean he's unbelievable what this what he does so i'm like look thomas you got to get your education come into legacy start working on it so chris he he he fell out of his education
022because he had a child when he first went to cvcc come back in 17 classes now he's got 13 ace four b's he's working at adzel and he's making great money and he's doing it he's doing it because again we're supporting that's real talent and if that talent doesn't get supported then sometimes they fall out so thomas come share your story real quick with the school board thank you how y'all doing today how are you so as he said my name is thomas robertson i graduated back in 2012 from liberty high school so after i graduated i took that uh basically that fall semester off before i started back in the spring so from the spring to about the spring of because of the spring of 2013 to the spring of 2014 i was in
023fully enrolled four classes 12 credits 12 to 15 credits every semester going all the way through and then the one thing that most 20 year olds don't want to hear get that text message to say i'm pregnant it basically took me down a dark route and it basically led me to you know falling beneath my own standards so in 2015 when i took my next semester i ended up failing because i already had too much of my plate from working to now i have a child on the way and that took me out i felt like i it was just overwhelming and everything i didn't really have the mental or physical support that i needed that or that i needed more than likely so as time went on i still stayed involved with my community
024and everything i still i coached uh wrecked basketball right football tried to make sure that i was a positive influence to let kids know that you know even even if you don't have support where you're at i'm i'll always support you no matter what so 2019 comes 2019 2020 i found out about coach dunn at liberty i try my hardest from different people to going to open gyms and everything to get my name in there so that coach dunn knows about me so that i can be a positive role model to these students and everything and like he said he offered me the volunteer job position and during that role he had introduced me to legacy so when he told me about legacy and he told me that you know it offers a great role
025of support and everything that that sold me right there that was like i never had support whatsoever so finally got the support and i started back in classes on january of 2021 so the spring of 21 and i've been taking four classes every semester non-stop since then he uh with that support i was able to uh get a job where i'm a logistics manager at asdale but it's a customer site inside of it called valen which i'm a part of which i'm the logistics manager i'm a varsity football and basketball coach at liberty as well as a barber and a father of two kids so overall the help from legacy to help me build what i know i am and push me through has been very is that that is exactly what i needed overall
026thank y'all yeah those two guys are superstars and um they're both making enough money now or if we need lunch money susan we can probably get it alone from those guys i might have to take them up on it oh yeah so here's what we do in legacy so legacy part of the secret sauce is this we we put it in a block schedule so you come to legacy from 8 30 to noon monday through thursday and you take two classes every eight weeks and in 21 months you can have your aaa degree we have a staff of three phds five master's degrees dr moving is here with me tonight so dr moving taught 20 years at liberty taught a bunch of years at longwood he's in the center every day working with the math
027students okay and he can teach any level he wants we call him a math facilitator because we're taking we're bringing online accredited academics to the student and then you know we're allowing them to facilitate the degree through that process you know the original vision is is kind of like okay if when thomas is two classes away from graduating so we're working right now with him on moving to liberty into the school of business with dean bratt and uh dean brad will be his mentor as he goes through it so access again the students are getting more access they're getting and then people are seeing their talents so then obviously they're going to add more value because they see more value on themselves they're going to get paid more and therefore they'll be out of some
028of the hurdles so we we we go from 8 30 to noon from 8 30 to 9 we pound life skills we are in a life skills crisis okay we pound so it's coaching so i get to coach again hey let's go you know but we're we're pounding life skills so you can get employment maturity you know you take a job you need to go into excellence you know think about your mindset this way what's wrong with showing up early staying late uh somebody's got a problem stay 15 minutes later and solve the problem don't just say how little can i do and still get paid you know so you start to see you start to see a reconditioning of their of their attitudes and their mindset and we got our core values that are
029in the material that i gave you so what i what i saw as i got into the space there's hurdles and barriers that we are not associated with i was not associated with the same degree that are that trap people they trap people in hurdles and bears they trap talent and hurdles and barriers um you know you can get dismissed because of a degree and it's hard to get their degree if you don't have money transportation is a huge issue we already talked about the networking you can get trapped because you get involved in informal employment so you start doing so like temp jobs become really tempting to people that are in poverty so they take a temp job and i get trapped in the temp cycle six weeks here six weeks here six weeks
030here never really get a resume never get more of another career and again we try to we get a way to help them through that child care we provide child care for them if they have children you know financials and securities you know i can't do this over here i can't take the risk as some of these guys took because i got to pay the bills right now so we help them through some of that those are the hurdles and barriers so our goal at legacy is to remove every hurdle and barrier that somebody has so they have full access to their education and every student has you know if they if they qualify for appel they have fifty six thousand dollars to buy their education over four years most of them don't know it
031so we have community events where we bring in you know families and grandmas and pastors and educate and say hey do you know you have fifty six thousand dollars to educate yourself so you can buy education and uh you know one grandma came in she had four children said you know you get 225 000 to educate your family no clue do i have to pay it back no you don't pay back it's grant money you know we just got to access it the right way so budgetarily you guys think budget so budgetarily the students is prepared to you know buy their education if they can't buy their education with their pell grant then they have to pay for it joey spurberg came to a legacy as well and so joy spurberg did not qualify for
032appel he bought his classes we gave him all the support services around him he's now working at hurt and profit he's about to graduate in the summer he's going to go to university in lynchburg because now he wants to be an environmental scientist okay and we've got it all set up to walk him through it so it's not just the students that have pell they can they can come and get the services no matter what last thing i would share with you is why are we standing here today we'd like to have access to your students we we we we try to go through it every the right way we try to go through the authorities the right way so we have uh mousse with lynchburg right now we were in heritage yesterday for three
033three hours all the lunch periods uh we're going into campbell i've been in alta vista so dr johnson has already set us up we're meeting with dr johnson the principal's no april 21st to go in so we'd love to sit down with uh you know dr bergen and you know however he would see it you know allow us to have access to the students to share the program you know like i think what they're seeing in lynchburg is that you know we're doing it a lot like the military so we're just sitting in there and the kids can come and they can so we signed up 20 yesterday heritage you know to come to legacy went into charlotte county because they love dr foster and so we talked to the uh that in their setup
034we went in and we talked to the students at the jobs for virginia class at 8 30 met with the counselors they had all the seniors in the auditorium like this we shared it with them signed up 35 kids at charlotte county they're going to come to legacy so i'm saying this i believe this dr berg i believe in every school there's 15 schools in our bandwidth i think there's between 30 and 50 students in every school that would benefit from legacy so we're making plans right now to move it to we started out the pilot program we have proof of concept now so i'm not standing in front of you guessing we can transition a number of people into great jobs we believe that we're going to go to 150 to 200 this year
035so we're actively recruiting right now with the plan to go 500 plus the following year and so we're we're working with lynchburg region business alliance we're working with virginia career works which becomes very complicated you know to get their money to the student and so you know we're here to offer a legacy to whatever we can do for bedford county appreciate all that you guys do appreciate the ability to share this with you respect your positions you know know you got to run a school system we're not trying to you know sit here and say anything but be a support to your students when they when they leave and we'll do all we can to help them uh we spent great years here you know in the county my daughter and i you guys helped
036grow my daughter uh and uh so we respect what you're doing anybody have any questions at all probably went a little longer than you wanted to but anybody having questions for mr dutton all right thanks a lot have been great very informative i'll email dr bergen and we'll see if we can you know put something together sounds great thank you so much thank you to youtube as well mr hagler third quarter financial report as if you haven't been on hot seat enough good evening try to remember to click this for the uh people in the audience um yes here to present the third quarter financial report really projections on uh where i think we'll end up for the year not just uh what's happened so far up into the third quarter but kind of looking
037forward over the next three months and giving the board an idea what our ending balance might be or if there's any kind of issues that might materialize so yes yeah there we go okay first we'll take a look at the revenue can can you move closer i don't mean to can you move closer to the microphone how's that yeah is that better that's better okay thank you thank you so the first page we're going to look at uh is is really the revenue uh forecast for the operating fund and so things are looking very similar that they as they did for the second quarter so no major changes there one grant that we were awarded in between december and now was for some learning loss over the summer so that was a grant we applied
038for and were awarded 388 000 all that money is being applied to what we did last year last summer so we kind of recouped all that a lot of the money that we did all the extra work we did last summer we went longer in the day we went longer in the summer and so we spent a lot more money on summer school than what we normally get from the state and so we were able to recoup 388 000 there that goes into the revenue and that helps our ending balance so other than that not a lot of changes on the revenue side from the my last presentation in january which was um showing us a halfway through the year so we're looking pretty strong there i don't anticipate having to do any more supplementals
039for the year i think we're done with those i'll be happy to answer any questions about the revenue side on the operating fund here yes dr meelan um mr highway i just want to make sure i understand that 380 000 is just going back into the revenue we'll bring that into the revenue and that but in no special category or anything just just coming back in yes we waiting is in june i will bring to this board uh recommendation of a category transfer will transfer money out of the instruction where we're going to be coming you know under budget move some money down to the maintenance and also technology to take care of those shortfalls the maintenance department is having overruns really because of repair and replace near 125 000 projected over budget on that
040just for breakage and some things that were breaking earlier in the year um still not certain on what the fuel impact is going to be we're paying higher price for fuel right now my run rate might be a little bit high there because we've really gotten through the winter so but uh so i'm gonna wait till june to bring those uh budget transfers to the board and then that would bring us through the rest year that would be my recommendation i could apply it to karezak money but i'd rather you know we could just leave that for hvac or other future learning loss we have enough money in the current uh forecast to go ahead and move into a category transfer so that's the technology and maintenance is probably the only area i see kind
041of exposure right now where we need to do some moving or moving around i'd be happy to answer your questions yeah you mentioned fourth and fifth grade expansion can you go a little bit detail on that yes we uh we had one-to-one chromebooks um for i guess sixth through twelfth dr hoistington's here also that could help me on this we wanted to go down to fourth grade and so when we expanded and said we wanted to do one-to-one chromebooks for fourth and fifth also then we we purchased addition chromebooks at the beginning of the year that was not in our original plan for this year but we expanded and um and uh moved to do that so we're only on one to one fourth through twelfth grade um i'll defer to dr hoisington on that
042okay i missed the question though yeah so one to one so are we only one to one for chromebooks fourth through twelfth grade we will be for next year um k through third have devices but they're devices that um rotate out of the upper grades okay but i mean k through 12 have devices they have devices assigned to them they just don't go home right now okay five next year four five and up well perfect thank you we're buying the chromebooks we're putting the orders in october november december and we're getting them so we you know really a lot of these devices have started coming in actually they're a little bit ahead of schedule sometimes they come in i think last year was may or june so we've already received these and we're processing and
043getting them ready so uh we have to there's a long lead lead time for these devices mr hegel i believe miss harrison had a question mr hackwell you mentioned that there was some breakage with maintenance i was wondering if you could be a little bit more specific in terms of what some of those issues have been a lot of them when we look at we set the budget we have a repair and replace line and a lot of times that's hopefully enough but when things break down and you have to get them running you know that that budget line has we've we've seen pressure on that budget line ever since the beginning of the school year some some of the items that broke we actually went into the cip plan because they were more expensive
044but hopefully in the future um in next year's budget i didn't actually go up on that because we're fixing a lot of the hvacs by you know rent you know bringing those back online and putting new ones in this summer and last summer so i'm hoping that repair and place will go down i didn't increase the budget for next year but this year we had a lot of pressure on that so it's just not hvac it's boilers and it's anything and that's the building related have you noticed that there's been any type of just mechanical in terms of pipes leakage and issues like that um i think there's some water lines being fixed right now at a couple schools you know so you know water lines anything that relates to the building maintenance and stuff
045would go through this to this account and we have three months but i have to project that we're still going to continue to spend on this account so i'm just projecting that's where we come if we don't have any other breakage or any big breakage over the next three months we'll probably come in at better than what i projected just hard to tell we have three months to go and really what i do on some of these accounts it's some of them a little bit more complicated i do more detailed analysis but you'll take one of these lines and you'll go okay we're nine months into it so you'll say okay just extrapolate that out to 12 months and that's what you're going to spend for the year hard to tell when things break and
046how expensive that's going to be that's right any more questions we'll have a pause yeah so we're looking pretty good ending balance probably somewhere between 1 and 1.5 million some of the revenues still yet to be determined state sales taxes continue to be strong so hopefully that'll last for the next uh three months here but that i find out about that in the month that we receive it and also our membership number is based upon the march 31st membership i still don't know that number won't know that until the end of april so some of my state revenue projections are can fluctuate but i'm pretty strongly bounced so i don't think there's any concern about fluctuations there okay okay we'll move on to the balance sheets um and those are further back actually in in
047some of those categories i give more detail on each of the major categories and there's more detail behind that on the document the pdf document on board docs that is not up on the screen so we'll look at the other major funds in the school system we have the nutrition fund doing very well this year um the federal reimbursement rate um right now they're under a program where any kid that comes through the line it gets reimbursed um so there's really the only charges and sales are like for extras so we already have a net profit at this point you know 315 000 um and this does not include it includes the expenses as of march but i didn't know what the revenues were so we still have march revenues to bring in this so
048we've got a pretty strong balance sheet here and i'll be working with um the supervisor there that if there's any maintenance or equipment that needs to be replaced it's probably a year to do it and get a lot of that thing a lot of those things maintained so the state really doesn't want us carrying over too large of a balance so they want you to spend it down so but happy to report that textbook fund um projecting um a little over a million at the end of the year um that's assuming i think there's still the textbook adoption to be considered i've got that factored in here that if those monies would come in then it would also go out so um i think the board's gonna be talking about that tonight but still a
049strong balance in the textbook fund and the budget document i kind of projected what we need to do in the future to make sure we state maintain a strong balance in that fund so we can do adoptions in the future and that's in the appendix of the budget maintenance reserve fund these are for projects there's a much more detailed document i think dr dewis has put together on the cip so what i'm just showing here is a snapshot of what is the balance right now and i think that booklet and that document will show a lot more detail of what we're planning where are we going so this is just a snapshot in time what is our balance as of this moment there's several different funds coming into here we're bringing cares act funds into
050here to do replacements we have um and there's also some state funds coming in here so there's different things moving in here to pay for these projects but 3.1 right now is the projected balance and finally the self-insured fund i think i mentioned in january we did see increased pressure on this fund it showed and that really showed and materialized itself in what we passed in the budget going up five percent on the uh premiums on our health insurance and so you can see there was a continued deterioration um not it's larger than i'd like but it still has gone down i believe there's some stop-loss uh reimbursement still pending that will bring this back up but you can see we began the year at 6.2 million and we're at 5.4 million so about 800
051000 less than the beginning of the year on our self-funded insurance um with the five percent increase that will increase the rev you know the amount going in here by 400 000 next year so there's been a lot of covert related expenditures i think during the budget process i mentioned about as of right now or last month it was about 1.2 million in expenditures for covet related expenditures either testing hospital or anything related to that i look at those as a one-time hopefully they'll just come back down and we won't have those in the future and things will level out so still in good shape on that fund but we'll have to continue to monitor that and address it in the future if it continues to go down any questions on those those four funds
052outside the operating questions i have a question on the operating system so right now we're you have a projected you know budget surplus right now um if that holds through the next quarter what's the what is the plan for that surplus where does that money go i know you said you can move it around in different categories but if we move that down i would still project you know close between a million 1.5 um the the long-standing tradition here in bedford county is that once the audit's complete we verify that that is the exact ending bounce i would bring before this board a recommendation on where to move that for one-time expenditures it could be for textbooks but most times we in the past we've mostly moved it into the cip plan for maintenance projects
053so that gives that influx in there once this board passes past that resolution then i would take that to the board of supervisors and ask them to go ahead and adopt that based upon this board's adoption so i i would recommend probably looking at things as they are right now that any leftover balance we would ask for that to go into the cip plan maintenance reserve which will allow other projects to get done perfect thank you any questions for mr hagler all right thank you thank you very much dr jasper good evening i know i'm standing between you and dinner so i'll try to be brief with my comments but i'm here to present tonight uh information and action about the perkins grant so as we outlined in the attached application the funds associated with
054this grant will be used to support students in grades five through twelve enrolled in career and technical education courses so we have programs in all six of our secondary schools and susie gibson and the funds will go towards items like purchasing equipment instructional programs teacher training student competitions and travel costs for various cte events so for example our students attend local and regional competitions actually have one this weekend scheduled in virginia beach the grant was developed using a comprehensive local needs assessment and with input from schools and by analyzing the performance reports from previous years additionally we sought input from other cte supervisors and directors and surrounding divisions and we met with our contacts from the virginia department of education so upon approval of the budget mr haas and i will continue to meet with
055the cte department chairs and school principals we will discuss short-term long-term funding needs and we'll use this feedback to allocate funds for the 22-23 school year and plan for future school years if this is approved by the virginia department of education then funds will be available to us after july the 1st so in closing i just want to say especially to our new board members that we know that you have interest in in cte especially we'd love to give you a tour of susie gibson so please feel free to reach out we'd be happy to do that and show off some of our excellent programs so this time i'll be happy to take questions dr yes uh dr um within this grant you you noted that uh you the reference to uh currently underrepresented groups
056specifically which groups are you referring to and how do you propose to improve their sure participation so if you look at the performance indicators on the grant we we do really well we have a lot to be proud of with cte and some of the categories of before your graduation rate academic proficiency in english and math and and there's a whole host of items but the one category that over the last few years we've come short is the non-traditional and so non-traditional would be someone in the job market where less than 25 percent of those employed falls under that so it's really gender based and so what what you might find is like females in construction or males in a cosmetology program and so what we've done is is we want to keep the success
057that we've had in past years but we did move some other monies around to try to work with that non-traditional because that is the one area where we fell short of the performance goals and so we're going to be researching professional development ways that we can recruit and then support because one of the factors we're finding is getting kids in the program we're doing okay there but we want to get them to the point of a completer to where they go through two years and get that that certification at the end and so there's that support that's needed as well um and so we've initially started researching how to support we want to continue to do that by again putting more resources to help support those non-traditional students um also since it's nearing the end
058of the school year what kind of improvement you noted on page 33 that you were seeking improvement and i was wondering what you what kind of improvement what what you were looking for with regard to that on page 33 yes it says improvement targets related to general enrollment program completion including non-traditional completion credentialing and non-traditional and advanced studies diploma participation will be established so do we not have any uh targets for that at this time or yeah well part of the comprehensive local needs assessment that's actually due april the 29th so we're going to be looking through that and part of that is looking at our performance indicators and and looking at our enrollments there are some some some special populations what you might call um and so if you i can that those would
059be populations like special ed it could be anywhere from homeless foster care anyone like that so we're going to look at those numbers and see what we can do to support those students as well i have one more the grant refers on page 13 to work with local community colleges for the provision of courses specifically related to hvac and cyber security sure so what colleges is my question have we worked with uh toward this goal and will students have the opportunity to be enrolled in those classes if they're going on next year so the program of studies we did at hvac uh this year and so we have we have that job currently posted uh we've met with with southern air and some other companies uh we're finding that's going to be really challenging to
060find an instructor and so we're ready to go you know we want to do that but being realistic we may not find somebody qualified to do that so cvcc does have their own cte academy and so we've met with their directors and their leadership and the plan is for those that have expressed interest we want to make sure we can connect them the other thing we've done is for those that were not accepted by susie gibson into their programs we we've been able to put those families in contact with the cdcc cte academy so that way even if it's not through our programs we're still partnering with others to meet their needs and support those kids what about the cyber security part now we we don't offer cyber security now but we're starting to see
061there's some interest there and we've actually looked at our job market that is something we anticipate growing and so we have discussed that as we move into the the following school year we want to go ahead and start looking into programs like that we've had a lot of potential community partners reach out and the we think there's some potential there so there's a lot to be explored but i think what excites us is it seems to meet a need based on our local job market and so a lot of good opportunities um and so now we've just got to get the hard work done and get those programs started okay thank you so much yeah i just wanted to verify so the funding that we received from this grant it's additional funding not replacing funding
062that was already yeah correct okay so we're still spending down the money that we received last year and then next year this this is additional yes sir just wanted to make sure it wasn't a replacement or yeah that money got taken away no no we still have some local funds not nearly as much as perkins but there's still some local funds okay thank you any more questions for dr trosper thank you appreciate it [Music] okay given it's 6 33 so we'll break now for dinner and we'll reconvene at 7. that's right [Music] a few policies that need to be reviewed just a few just a few [Music] i just dropped that thing in the bathroom i'm gonna sit this down all right yeah okay think about that actually good good evening i'd like to reconvene
063this april 7th meeting of the before county school board would you please rise to say the pledge of allegiance i pledge allegiance to the flag of the united states of america and to the republic for which it stands one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice for all thank you very much mr edwards recognition of students and staff madam chair mr vice chair dr bergen would you please come forward my apologies madam chair for being delinquent in getting you the certificates hopefully you've got your signatures ready students when i call your name please come up the stage and be greeted by the chair vice chair and dr bergen and then please stand off to the side and we'll see if i can't grab my phone and get pictures once our collective groups are finished
064being called tonight we celebrate more of our students across bedford county that have recently achieved success graham woodruff is a 7th grade student at forest middle school and in february graham made it to the final two and then faced stiff competition from a student at forest elementary school before finally spelling his way to the crown graham moved on to regional competition last month against champions from 16 school divisions 33 rounds later graham was the last speller standing and became the third bcps student since 2009 to move on to national competition in washington dc later this year where he'll face more than 200 other regional champions bcps and regional spelling bee champion forest middle school's graham woodworth [Applause] all right take a couple here one two three one two three thank you [Applause] moving on jefferson
065forest high school put on a great performance at the state deca competition recently deca which is short for distributive education clubs of america encourages students development of their business and leadership skills through academic conferences and competitions in the state competition for the category of impromptu business we have not one but two state champions to be proud of the first abby beard [Applause] and the second champion amber trent [Applause] abby and amber were also honored as state runners-up congratulations to you both [Applause] okay take a couple one two three one two three thank you [Applause] and finally what an awesome season for the jefferson forest high school girls indoor track team they missed a state championship by the slimmest of margins finishing as state runners-up by just a point in vhsl 4a competition we have two
066members representing that team on hand tonight to be recognized and the first one taryn harvey [Applause] at least i thought okay taran may have not made it tonight alexis plaster is our second member of that team okay well you'll just have to trust me that the jf indoor track team had a great season and we'll make sure that they receive those certificates so congratulations to the jf girls indoor track team state runners-up [Applause] hmm thank you mr edwards and congratulations to everyone um now we'll begin the public comment period of tonight's meeting and i don't have my script ready the public comment portion of tonight's agenda is limited to 40 minutes speakers are asked to state their name address and voting district the school board is here to listen to your comments but will not
067engage or respond to speakers during this 40-minute period please remember that this is a public meeting and that we expect all speakers to refrain from any foul abusive or hateful language mr edwards will serve as timekeeper for individual speakers with a ringing bell indicating that a person has 30 seconds remaining and a second bell will ring indicating a person's four minutes have expired mr edwards will also serve as timekeeper for a cumulative 40-minute period while mr edwards four-minute finger four-minute time bell rings please discontinue speaking and allow the next person in line to come to the podium should you be unable to finish your comments please send or give them to ms johnson and she will give them to the board members and we also ask that you please do not adjust the microphone at
068the podium for it has been positioned for optimum audio quality our first speaker tonight david dietrich ladies and gentlemen did you notice the recent discussions of controversial books several books were identified by parents as inappropriate for high school age students many administrators and teachers rejected that position a committee met to review these books it ruled unanimously that the book should remain available and who were those who made that ruling reportedly the same educators who supported the books in the first place one book beloved was said to have been reviewed and approved by the very educator who earlier had made the book mandatory reading in class yet beloved remains a controversial book for many parents mostly for its graphic content this book was discussed before at previous school board meetings every time the public met with
069pushback beloved was said to be mandatory ap reading yet it is not it is suggested reading only as are over 120 literary books parents want to ban books was the claim beloved represented unique culture we were told the attitude toward parental concerns was cavalier and dismissive so let us offer another approach i recommend a book that also represents culture my culture the book is entitled the book of concord it is a beautiful and informative book about the love of god do not be judgmental about this book do not cast judgment on my culture my family has been confessional lutheran since the reformation of 1517. and this book has inspired generations if other books are mandatory reading because of unique culture then why should this book not be given the same level of respect on what
070grounds should it be rejected surely not because of crass or graphic expression as you will find none surely not because of religious content as many approved books contain animistic or new age religious undertones yet committee yet a committee that approved other books might unanimously ban my book perhaps showing a tolerance of other cultures i do not expect everyone to believe and think as i do to share my cultural values but i do expect consistency and open-mindedness yet the system seems to favor certain cultures certain ideas so what really is going on here these events are but a manifestation of a much bigger process western civilization is under attack and the impacts that impacts us all regardless of our race gender and ethnicity thank you thank you very much mr dietrich carol shadrick miss shadrick okay
071dr whitehurst good evening madam chair and members of our board my name is sheree whitehurst and i live at 1310 vista rama lane in bedford virginia and i live in district 7. first i'd like to thank the board for making available your meetings online i have attended your meetings virtually since the beginning of the pandemic this evening i would like to share with you information about two retired policies and ask that you consider reinstating these policies the first is policy i e c the bill of rights of the constitution of the united states policy iec required that the bill of rights be posted in a conspicuous place in each school for students to read the second policy is policy i e b the national motto in god we trust policy ieb required the national motto
072also to be posted in a conspicuous place in each school for all students to read hosting the bill of rights and the national bot motto in our schools continues to be mandated by the virginia general assembly i reviewed the policy manuals of nearby school districts i found they all still included the policies that require the bill of rights as well as the national motto to be displayed in their schools these districts include lynchburg city campbell county amherst county roanoke city salem city bodytalk county franklin county appomattox county nelson county and pennsylvania just to name a few some may say we don't need policies that are found in state law the truth is we do because school board policies help explain state and local laws and provide assistance to ensure that people carry out their tasks
073correctly school board policies also provide expectations and structure to the school community lastly the district's policy manual is what parents students community members and school staff use to identify operating procedures and standards community members would like you to take these two policies out of retirement and put them back in our policy manual i.e moment of silence and policy iea pledge of allegiance are still active in our policy manual community members believe the bill of rights policy and the national motto policy need to be added back to our district's policy manual alongside the moment of silence and the pledge of allegiance policies thank you for your consideration to this important request thank you dr whitehorse christian sneed good afternoon christian sneed district 7. back in january i spoke at the school board meeting with a speech
074entitled facts are our friends and how facts are inconveniently left out at times so label this speech facts for our friends part two book review dr bergen after last month's meeting you took time with my wife and i have to meet and we greatly appreciate that we had some really good conversations afterwards but there's a question that just didn't sit right when we left you asked my wife at any point did you indicate that you did not want to be a part of the process regarding the book review i struggled with this question in this question for a while replanted in my head until eventually i just drugged it off to dr working you don't know my wife she doesn't quit it's not in her dna especially when protecting children but this question is an
075important one because it was also during that march board meeting that dr woodford mentioned that the board had received an update on a wednesday memo and by using the freedom of information act with the help of moms for liberty i was able to obtain a copy of that memo and in that memo it states by mrs sneed that she withdrew her request to challenge the other 11 books that were shared in november at the board meeting and that said she might change her mind in the future that's not factual information factually she had a phone call that transpired on monday december 13th between my wife and dr trosper dr trosper did offer to review the books by school in hopes to organize this process as there are a lot of books being challenged accurately mrs
076sneed then informed dr trosper that she was putting the pause button on reviews until the new policy was revised and then she would let him know how how she wanted to proceed moving forward after she looked at the new policy revisions never did she remove herself from the process never did she ask for all the books to be reviewed without her in the room and that quote from that memo referred by dr woodford was never spoken a conversation nor discussed or even interpreted that way in november of 2021 a parent of a 10th grade student at liberty high school reached out to the honors teacher english teacher because of the content contained in the required reading the glass castle the parent was concerned after seeing quotes from the book back from when we were got
077together in november of last year the students teacher willingly offered and was very accommodating by the way to make an alternate reading the student was given the book two kinds by amy tan my question to the curriculum department as well as the board is to consider this if a book is given as a suitable alternative why is the glass castle being used at all why can't the alternative book be required in its first in its place in the first place what specific academic goals achieved by the glass castle that is not achieved by two kinds we're happy to work together with the curriculum department and or teachers to suggest alternatives as we had with the book beloved remember the january speech where i mentioned that eight titles about slavery mostly written by black authors woman
078authors and a hungarian author were offered as alternatives but not communicated to the board or the general public by this curriculum team and i lost some facebook friends because of it we'd like to do the same thing moving forward with the other titles for the required reading we want to offer healthy alternatives perhaps parents have the ability to opt their children into certain content as opposed to opting out we're not banning books we're just making healthier alternatives after all it was a 10th grade bedford county student that said i thought that the book was very inappropriate for my age group it made me feel uncomfortable and disgusted about sexual abuse about physical abuse and the language that was read was well beyond what i expected i feel obligated to say that the rules in this
079in this room that prohibit me from reading the content of that book at school board meetings or i'd be asked to leave so in closing i'm going to read another book that's controversial as it was referred to by dr woodford in last month's meeting there's nothing concealed that will not be disclosed nothing hidden that will not be made known and what you have said in the dark will be heard in the daylight and what you've whispered in the ear of the rooms will be proclaimed from the rooftops thank you for your time thank you mr smee leanne ellis hello my name is leanne ellis i'm the librarian here and i live in district 2. i would like to thank the board first for budgeting for full-time library media specialists in every school and for one
080full-time library media aid per 750 students we appreciate that support happy national library week to you all i am one of the librarians who took part in the committees to look at the officially challenged book beloved and the books from the list that are in my library last month's board meeting was alarming to me in several ways and i would like to address them first i must dispel the idea that the bible is not in our libraries the dewey decimal system's entire 200 section is dedicated to theologies of the world and even if i weren't a christ follower i would not be doing my job well if i did not include the bible we have multiple copies including different versions next it was stated in the march meeting that librarians had a vested interest in
081keeping the challenged books on the shelves it felt like a picture was painted of librarians and teachers greedily clinging to books in hopes of indoctrinating children and that's simply not true the library is an ever evolving place it should reflect all of its students so a huge part of curating a collection is to weed out books that are inappropriate to the student body for example i recently weeded several of our career books because they talked about computer careers using terms like floppy disks and dot matrix i've also removed books that i found to have inappropriate content i'm not married to my books that brings me back to the five challenged books from the list that are in my library they were not found by the committee to have salacious content i know that a lot
082of people get very hung up on beloveds disturbing imagery involving cattle but if you take the time to read the book you'll find that it's obviously not a how-to guide you see there's a very big difference between a colleen hoover book and a tony morrison book one uses explicit sex scenes to pull readers in the other briefly addresses a repugnant sexual act as an illustration of the harsh conditions the characters lived in one is a book that people like to read at the beach and the other is used to teach and understand literary devices while showing uncomfortable truths about our country's past one is not in my library the other is a pulitzer prize winner that's on the ap list and has been in my library since 1991 when i was in seventh grade the
083committee's decision is strongly in favor of parents choice when it comes to checking out books if i get an email from a parent who says they don't want their kid reading toni morrison's books that's fine i'll put a note on their account the student will not be able to check them out and if they find time to read in the library i'll make sure that they don't select from her books that said my son should have access to all of the books in the library because that's my choice as a parent as well i'd like to present you with an analogy one of my sons has a severe peanut allergy i'm scared to death of what could happen if he accidentally ingests peanut butter but i'm not here asking you to ban peanut butter from
084our schools because that's not fair to the rest of the student body i have the choice to pack a pack my child's lunch or i can trust his judgment that he'll pick pizza or ask what ingredients are in the cookies what's happening with books is similar people are reacting from fear what if my child reads something and suddenly asks questions or challenges me let's try using parents choice and take care of our own children rather than letting a group of citizens deny all of them the choice to check out and read certain books in conclusion removing books is not exercising parents choice it's saying that you think you know better than parents teachers and librarians who keep the books for those allowed access removing books says you're willing to risk losing ap status because it
085appeases a vocal portion of your voters the majority of whom neither work at bcps nor have children attending our schools these books are being used as political fodder taking time and energy away from more pressing issues and it's not fair to our students thank you for your time valerie staton [Applause] valerie staton am i going to be tall enough when i got married i registered for like five step stools to put around the house in random places so can you hear me now okay thank you um good evening my name is valerie staton and i live in district two i'm a parent of two bcps students and i've worked here for 17 years i'm here tonight to speak in reference to the budget i really hope that the board of supervisors approves the budget that
086our leadership team created and you approve but historically they don't they typically do not fully fund our schools the way that we would like them to so i'm here to speak about the things that i feel like you should prioritize while i appreciate the push to get our salaries back to pre-recession levels i feel as though we really need to focus on making salaries of our support staff more competitive as a teacher who typically instructs the special education population of the grade level that i teach i feel it's imperative that we offer a salary to our paraprofessionals that is not only equal to but higher than surrounding localities i can't do my job or provide the support that i need to my students if we can't get more paraprofessionals in the classrooms not only that
087but our bus drivers and substitute teachers need an increase in pay as well and i would call our substitute situation a crisis we cannot do our job adequately if we are covering classes during our planning period and so we really need to get the pay for our substitutes higher to attract more people to that job speaking of supporting our students i would also like to speak about the intervention design specialist positions we have three of those employees at the middle school assigned to those positions and they are an invaluable resource to our students and this is a program i would like to see continued they have provided a level of support that we haven't been able to do before we have a population of students who now feel like they have a place to go
088where they fit in and feel comfortable or if they're struggling to make it through the day they have a place to go to take a quick break and get a reset um we have students who are dealing with some pretty heavy stuff and our idea staff is ready to jump in to the gap to support their students in their struggles i don't remember who brought it up last meeting but there was information brought up about staffing guidelines from the state and what they feel is an appropriate class size and anybody who says that a number over 30 is an appropriate class size has not only never worked with children but likely have never met a child people put their money and time into things that are important to them and just as an aside my
089husband my family was at we were eating the lord's chicken last weekend at chick-fil-a and he commented on how happy the employees were there and how quickly they served the staff or not serve the staff but how quickly they served customers and i said look at how many people work here like there's staff members everywhere working so i was curious and i called to talk to the manager at chick-fil-a just to see how many people they have working on a typical weekday night and he said around 40 staff members worked there at the awards room chick-fil-a worked there on friday nights and i went to see how many classroom teachers we had at standard middle school and it's around 37 so i'm like chick-fil-a is better staffed than we are at stanton river middle school
090so we have we've really got to put our money where we can staff our schools appropriately and provide students with the level of support that they need thank you thank you very much kristen honeycutt good evening my name is kristen honeycutt i work at big island elementary and i've been working in bedford county for almost 11 years last month i spoke unprepared because i felt compelled to redirect the conversation to focus on how to better support our staff excuse me as soon as i signed up to speak this month i began drafting what i would say but none of those drafts truly conveyed the message i wanted to i remembered once a teacher about 2015 who posted responses she had gotten from a writing assignment entitled i wish my teacher knew and the responses were
091eye-opening and heartbreaking my mom can't sign my log my reading log because my mom's never around i can't do my homework because i don't have pencils at home things like that so i created a questionnaire with a similar theme i wish the school board knew and i wish the public knew and i shared this with staff from every school zone different levels of teaching and different school responsibilities so it wasn't just my teacher friends the responses were similarly similarly excuse me eye opening and heartbreaking i have a document that i'll share but i wanted to share some examples things i wish the school board knew the amount of time and energy we put into researching professional development planning etc but yet our voices are still not heard and our opinions don't seem to matter how
092happy i am to see all my students smiles again i wish the school board would see things from our perspective and not just what parents and others within the community want i've never felt more worried and stressed about my job and the requirements of it than i do because of this non-education background members of the school board these are not my words who have their own profession personal agendas not thinking about how they are hurting teachers staff and students it pains me to watch school board meetings because of the arguing going on between members and not listening to one another the shifting of staff between buildings hurts the community we're trying to build with students and families and the culture in the building that we were being watched by current employees prospective employees by the
093general public what makes for good television does not make for a good working environment or a good recruiting video we're in a bidding war for new teachers to replace the ones that are leaving and when a recruit sees the behavior displayed at some of these meetings they're not going to want to become a part of bcbs then i wish the public knew how much we love and support our students their attitudes towards teachers and education are seen and mimicked by even their youngest children how much their support really does mean to us and then it seems no matter how hard we work how many gaps we bridge how many students we help the negative shouting just seems to make everything we do meaningless and teachers are leaving as the students are going to suffer and
094then my own little two cents i was extremely relieved to see that i'm not the only one with some of these feelings but i have to ask if our teachers keep leaving and the current pool of college graduates is so low who's going to be here for our children thank you very much for joining up bethany huggins good evening my name is bethany huggins i live in district 4. i am current a current employee at bedford county public schools and i have been employed here for about three years now i'm here today to discuss my interests and concerns with the budget for this upcoming school year i'm here to ask that there be an increase for salaries for all staff teachers support staff bus drivers custodians all employees that work daily in a school i
095know that you all have conducted studies in the past on staff salaries and the benefits of increasing salaries it is your responsibility to follow through with what you have found everyone is happier when they get a raise it boosts morale it helps keep employees from switching jobs it shows that you value us and our contributions to our community i appreciate that some employees are going to get a four percent raise this year but that does not even cover inflation the annual inflation rate for the united states is 7.9 percent for the 12 months ended february 2022 the highest it's been since january 1982. even though some employees are getting this raise they're really losing money what makes me want to stay in bedford county when all the surrounding counties pay much higher salaries for their
096teachers and staff i think about this frequently when the end of the year comes around and what makes me want to stay in bedford county when i'm underpaid and under appreciated by the county you're going to lose great staff because of this to keep quality teachers you must pay equitable salaries and our salaries are not equitable at the moment i know that some may argue that staff gets summers off and that is a respite from work our pay in the summer months is spread thinner because we are not physically at the school's teaching but rest assured that we're still working on lesson plans learning new curriculum that has been adopted by the county and preparing for the next school year we do 12 months worth of work in a 10-month period we deserve more i
097had to have i had to get a part-time job to keep my family's heads above water i was living in denial that my job as a teacher could sustain my family on its own but i had to accept the fact that i will never be paid what i deserved why should i have to get a part-time job when i already hacked the job of my dreams why do i not have livable wages as a teacher this is the conclusion that i've come to my county does not appreciate my efforts as an employee i feel appreciated at my school by my co-workers and administrators but the county the school board your actions over the past three years i've been here have spoken much louder than any words you have ever said your actions have made me
098feel undervalued as an employee so you want to have employees who feel valued who feel appreciated who want to stay in your schools and who will do the best for the children who need a boost of morale pay us equitably pay livable wages and give us respect thank you [Applause] shannon thomas [Applause] good evening i'm shannon thomas a parent and staff member residing in district one i've lived and worked in south side bedford county for 30 years and appreciate your dedication to serving the students and staff of bedford county as well as your patience and attention to the remarks already shared here tonight i'm here because it has become increasingly clear that what is best for bedford county students and staff has become less important than what is best for um than what parents want
099and that concerns me a great deal as elected officials you have an obligation to the adult voters in your district some of whom are parents of students in bedford county however you are also obligated to make decisions that reflect the needs of the students and staff who learn and work in bedford county schools there have been some consistently loud voices during public comment at these meetings recently promoting parent choice in public education but public education exists to serve a large and extremely diverse population of students and narrow views of a loud minority of residents while important should not be the only voices that you hear and act upon there are 9 000 students in this division far too many to allow for parent choice when it comes to curriculum as a parent who is also
100a teacher i am uniquely positioned to recognize that parents don't always have the knowledge necessary to make informed choices about what their children learn particularly at the secondary level for example as a junior last year my daughter took ap us history and ap biology both subjects which include facts that well-meaning but uninformed parents may wish to shield their kids from as a professional educator i might reasonably have felt qualified to choose what she learned in courses like these however as my professional content area is english i recognize that my specific knowledge of history and biology does not equal that of the public school professionals who teach those subjects so i trusted them to select the content critical for her success in their courses my trust was not misplaced as it turns out she learned what
101she needed to learn well enough to earn qualifying scores on her ap exams in both classes scores that will save her both time and money in college next year are there some bad teachers out there who may distort their presentation of historical and scientific facts yes do they get a disproportionately loud amount large amount of media attention for political gain and to create fear also yes despite the message of politicians and the media about parent choice loving but misguided parents who lack professional content knowledge should not be micromanaging public school curriculum that expert educators have been hired and are paid to teach we have some real problems in bedford county schools problems that don't seem to be getting as much attention as the more politically charged issues making headlines across virginia for example we don't
102have enough bus drivers i have students in my classes who can't get to school because there is no one to drive their bus i'd love to see evidence of more focus on the real problems like providing dependable transportation so all kids can get to school isn't ensuring that school attendance is equally accessible for every student in our division of the utmost importance in closing i'll share a quote from tequila mockingbird a classic american novel that my sophomores just finished reading in it atticus finch a beloved fictional father tells his young daughter scout that if she can learn a simple trick she'll get along a lot better with all kinds of folks you never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view until you climb into his skin and walk around
103in it i've challenged my sophomores to take this advice and try to see the perspectives of others before making up their minds as the governing board of our large and diverse division i trust that each of you will do the same the loudest voices you hear aren't the only voices speaking there are many perspectives to consider please listen to all of them thank you thank you mr cindy gillespie [Applause] thank you for giving me the chance to speak to you this evening my name is cindy gillespie i reside in franklin county however i'm a parent of two students in the state river zone i am the math department chair and i have been teaching at state river high school for the past 23 years as department chair i have helped with the hiring process i
104deal with the budget and i'm also part of the interviewing process helping to recruit and retain teachers i have taught almost every math class that we offer here at state river high school from algebra 1 to dual enrollment and advanced placement calculus i love this school and the family atmosphere that we have here most of us stick together through the good times on the bed it has been with great sadness and hesitation that i have sought out teaching positions in other counties the family we have at state river is the only reason i have stayed the only reason i've ever looked to leave this school is the pay scale in bedford county compared to our neighboring counties we all know that finding good passionate qualified teachers is hard to do our pay scale is enticing
105at first but it quickly loses its competitiveness we are lucky if we are lucky enough to find a teacher that is in it for the long haul then we need to entice them to stay in bedford county our most valuable assets in the county are the veteran teachers and it this is where our pay scale is the most below market value and the surrounding counties it takes a good teacher a couple of years to get in the groove and after the past several years even the most veteran teachers have been burning out in preparing for this meeting i looked at the bedford county salary study and even narrowed it down to just franklin county roanoke county in roanoke city since those are the districts that i personally have looked at moving to the teachers that
106spend their careers in one of those school divisions will earn at least 160 thousand dollars more over the course of their career than someone in bedford county i am dedicated to bedford county but after i saw those numbers i'm naturally inclined to move there are more that is more than an entire year's pay and it also makes a big impact on my retirement since vrs uses my highest three years salary it makes sense for me to spend my last years somewhere else so that my vrs is higher that affects the rest of my life if you think we are worth keeping then we need a salary scale to reflect it thank you miss goleski the boys have time for one more stella osborne okay we'll have time for one more speaker oh is that her
107hi i actually did not know i was going to speak so i am surprised so i'm just going to say what i was going to say as a librarian that um what echo what leanne already said i really appreciate everything that you have done to support the libraries as far as full-time librarians next year and also the fact i'm at forest middle school and i very much appreciate the fact that you all are going to try to put forward with the 750 for every 750 that we will be able to have support in the library and i really appreciate that and that was really all i was going to say so thank you thank you thank you appreciate it i'll close the public comment at this time do i have a motion to approve the
108consent agenda so move miss madden chairman thank you dr emily i have a motion to have a second second second by mr daniels any discussion all those in favor signify by saying aye aye opposed motion carries okay now we're going to pick up from the staff reports that we didn't get to before dinner we'll start off with the capital improvement plan by dr dewis [Music] ms staton did a number on that on that microphone height i'm happy to present to you tonight an updated format for the bedford county public schools capital improvement plan or cip this document which is printed at your place and posted on board docs contains much more detail than previous versions of a capital improvement plan and includes school needs specific project details and financial needs as well the information in
109the cip comes from several sources and is influenced by many factors in the past six years we've had a complete facility assessment of all of our school buildings as well as a follow-up 2019 elementary facility study which focused on particular needs at that level we have a maintenance work tracker system which keeps track of of the problems that folks face on a daily basis and we we pay close attention to what comes in and where we talk with engineers architects and other vendors to consult with them on ideas and strategies to work with our facilities we conduct school safety inspections every three years we also consider demographic information so not just about the facilities but what our enrollment projections are and where proposed housing developments are in the county we have to consider inflation when
110we talk about the capital improvement plan and um and and so as you can see the total needs outlined over 10 years in this plan are approaching 150 million dollars which averages about 12 to 15 16 million dollars per year we also have to plan for the unexpected and so this plan also includes the placement of contingency funds every year after the reversion of the city of bedford to town status bedford county public schools began receiving considerably more funds per year from the state as an incentive to streamline local government operations these funds determined by the difference between the current county local composite index or lci and the city's last lci in 2014 are to last for 15 years from that time the county has been following a plan to give increasingly more money each
111year to bedford county public schools for one-time projects as a way to budget for the potential cliff of funding in fiscal year 29 and as you can see in the chart on this slide by 2028 we'll be receiving 4.5 million dollars in this current county plan these funds are factored into the cip revenue stream the only other funds that are currently known are those from covet relief and they're also factored in to the revenue stream it's still uncertain the level of facility support that the state will begin to provide although we are hopeful that as the general assembly is finalizing its budget that the state will begin to provide a mechanism for assisting localities with facility maintenance we just don't know exactly what that will look like until they finish their business in richmond we'll
112also likely have end-of-year re-appropriations as mr hagler said earlier that could be available if the board opts to direct them in that in that manner but it's impossible really to budget those too far in advance of their availability this plan focuses on preserving the facilities we have by repairing and replacing systems that are broken or may soon be these include hvac or heating and cooling systems roofs flooring paving systems as well as instituting painting and light light replacement cycles specific projects include among others several renovations of older schools recommended to occur after 50 years typically in the industry auditorium renovations in this facility as well as at liberty high school and some athletic facility maintenance in the first year fiscal year 23 which is accounted for at this time from county and coveted relief funds
113so that that amount is you know the money is on hand for for the for what is planned several projects will be accomplished in blue on this slide are projects already underway including hvac replacements at four schools in gym floor maintenance at the school stanton river high school and the middle school as part of a cycle that we need to implement several other projects are listed some painting projects replacing the water pipes that go underground along this campus because many of those pipes have been failing a fuel a new fuel tank at this location for for our buses and other fleet parts of our fleet to fuel up between runs some structural work on masonry at suzy gibson and then again beginning some replacement cycles such as asphalt painting and replacing some older and remaining
114carpet in several schools if funds for some reason were not to be available this year or any really given year to accomplish all the priorities due to a lack of funding or emergency spend spending that's needed we would await year-end re-appropriations we'd await state revenue updates to complete them or we would just delay the completion of non-critical items and those typically would be in areas such as painting or carpet replacement or some of the paving work which we made which we would try to squeeze another year two three years out of if if the money weren't available we may be able for example on the stanton river underground pipe water pipe replacement placing failing spots along the way however we we think that that's just a piecemeal approach that really is only a short-term band-aid
115projects in fiscal year 24 and beyond are listed in the cip and as you can see in the summary chart toward the beginning of the document there they are not fully funded at this point in may we will ask the board to approve this cip document so that there is consensus on the overall concepts in the plan and specifically so we can begin to implement the rest of the specific projects in this first year we'll continue to update the facilities committee regularly and the whole board at least annually or more often if needed in order to update needs and priorities for future versions of this plan now there are potential other needs that are not addressed in the in this cip the facilities committee has discussed enrollment pressures in the forest zone elementary schools in
116light of current and proposed housing developments there may also be needs to consider other full school renovations if specific projects like roofs and hvac systems and flooring that we have planned aren't adequate to fully meet educational needs in a building as you know single projects in previous meetings in addition other projects have been discussed such as additional tennis courts at liberty high school and other specific needs as well one special area to note tonight is that in considering this plan as a whole there is potential for engaging in projects that reduce operating costs in the future these savings if we could realize them could be cycled back into the maintenance fund for future projects the facilities committee at its last meeting and i won't won't speak in too much detail about it because i think
117we'll have an update a little later in the meeting but did endorse the possibility of soliciting proposals for solar power at one or two schools in order to save electric utility costs really just to see what kind of mechanisms are out there to to to really get ahead of rising utility costs similarly we we may be able to reduce electrical usage by installing led lights throughout the district this cip contains funds to do that in a very straightforward manager just money available to install the lights and we know that we'll you know have reduced electric bills after that but but there may be ways to accomplish the same goal that require less upfront capital costs on our part so energy savings or other related approaches can involve financing the installation costs against future savings and
118so either way what i would love to do is um to see if there is board consensus to allow us to move forward with seeking proposals for a limited solar project for example just the first try at that at one or two schools and to just to begin to explore as well potential lighting project financing mechanisms which would also require a request for proposed requests for proposals of course nothing would ever be put into place without approval at the end of that process by the board but that rfp would allow us just to see what's out there and see what what what mechanisms and possibilities there are to do these cost-saving measures these wouldn't be a low bid type of project because we just don't know what variability in the financing mechanisms and financial structures
119there would be and we also of course would need to consider other factors like site design and the impact on our staff timelines and and also learning opportunities for students so at this time i'd be happy to field any questions you may have about this plan before we would ask for approval at next month's meeting and also see if there is consensus to allow us to issue some feelers out there for some of those energy and cost saving plans like solar or lighting okay let's handle the question part first and i've already seen mr hill's finger go up yeah so i just want to verify that this is the recommendation of the facilities committee as far as the um no the cip as far as what's listed here for 23. this is really up for
120discussion um which is what we were watching the board to discuss it okay so it's not a recommendation well not fully there were some items that certainly we did discuss but certainly number two would be yours number two is okay but it is up for the board to discuss okay perfect and then the only other statement that i would say mike as far as the solar energy love the idea but i wouldn't i would personally not approve going after it unless the bid includes the company who puts it there is responsible for removing it at the end of the life so they would be responsible for all of removal taking care of anything that needs to be recycled etcetera right i agree and i think that is how many of them are our finance but
121we certainly would need to verify that i would also want to make sure that that company would be responsible for the maintenance and and work along the way just because of the impact on our staff um and and if there are questions about specific items now or between now and the next meeting um specific projects that are listed in the next year or beyond sheldon cash and charles santor are here uh with us tonight and may be able to shed some light on some of the specifics or we see where we can follow up so the 13 million dollars that you've got listed here for fy23 is that what is proposed in our budget or is that what you're asking for us to approve i just want to understand do we have 13 million dollars
122to spend based on the current budget that we've approved for 23. and we're trying to fit those projects into that budget so this budget would be from the project maintenance fund that mr hagler discussed earlier and he may wish to to say more but us with uh the previous year's reappropriation with the county funds that have been put in as well as the coveted relief funds that that amount of money is in place you know and not in the operating budget but in the maintenance project okay is that correct mr angler yeah do you have a school in mind that you would like to pilot this solar project we were approached by one vendor who may also be one who's interested in sending a proposal in who looked using gis and other other tools that
123they had in place also looking at utility usage and and that sort of thing just to see where they might sit we have some school locations which are just not they're not they're too small to have much of a place for a ray we don't have roofs that are in you know that really can can stand the addition of that right now either without some serious study but um there we have a couple of schools that have large grounds mont montvale and goodview which i think would be good first candidates for this because they have available land that's oriented the right way according to the experts so but this is what we would we'd also see if there were other ideas out there through this process i think too that would give us more information
124but those might be two options early on okay and you said he looked at utility usage and stuff like is there a way we can start with the school that's costing us the most to see if that's possible that we won't put the solar thing there it will lower that cost yeah yes and then that that could provide the most savings i think i think when arrays are easier to put in and easier to maintain because they're on the right in the right place gotcha the companies are willing to to contribute more back back to you so yes i think that's an important part of the first choice ms harrison thank you madam chairman um doctor dew is just of course uh piggyback off of mr lim's question regarding goodview elementary school in terms of
125looking at a school that could potentially cost save us a little bit more money we as a facility committee we certainly talked about good view being one of those schools right particularly because of the size of it right and also the location so do you still believe that goodview elementary school would be a good school to at least start placing the solar panels there just to kind of see if it would be cost saving for us i do i think it and montvale are are both great candidates for it and so um if the thought is to um to just start with one then we i need to go back to the numbers to to look at at where we might get the most bang for our buck or for uh for for our savings
126i guess and um and make that decision but it could very well be that school well it certainly and i can't speak for um mr holbrook can certainly speak as well but i know as a committee we did feel that it would be beneficial and a good beginning for cost saving if we would consider goodview elementary school as being one of those schools that we could maybe potentially put the solo solar panels there and i still hold true to that i think it would be a good start in some ways for us to save some money when we look at the list of needs they're astronomical and any way in which we can go about go by saving some money we need to do so i would like to if i may at this time
127talk a little bit about uh a couple of items that are not shaded in blue uh those that are shaded in blue certainly were priorities and and need to be first and foremost in terms of taking care of those that are not shaded the forest middle school painting i spent some time going to the middle school and during their open house and it was wonderful i had an opportunity to see the old section of that building which i believe that's the section that we're wanting to paint the original part yeah the original part by the way it's beautiful i'm so happy that we were able to provide this for our students and at forest middle school and get them out of those mobiles the painting when i look at our needs here just from this
128list alone i i would ask that we really strongly reconsider making forest middle school painting a priority right now and that we look at other greater needs that we have and route that hundred and eighty thousand dollars to meet some other needs um i know that that we have some schools out at the south side when i think about huddleston elementary school and some of the news there but i would ask the board to strongly consider us making changes there anything else miss harrison no that's all okay um anyone else yeah is there a reason why the stanton river high school water pipes isn't a priority oh no no no sir it is a priority that's why it's listed in you okay i just didn't see it shaded in blue i didn't know why i
129wasn't i didn't i don't want to i want to be clear about the shading in blue the blue shading is those are projects that are really already moving down the road have already begun um because they were for example the hvac projects we had had bids on those before they were already in motion they're just going to carry into next year it doesn't mean that those are necessarily higher priorities it just means that they're already in motion and so they're they're we're already moving forward on them um clearly anything we selected for year one the stewartsville roof for example was was a high priority uh roof project higher than than other schools which show up in 24 25 26. the water pipes when we lose water we lose efficiency in the system it's wasteful it's
130costs a lot to dig in and fix one corner of one elbow we did a similar replacement liberty high school when their pipes failed in 2017 at the same time the gym was being built and that system has that has been much more reliable and fail-safe since that time so that's probably a project that would need some good lead design time and and would not be done like it wouldn't be couldn't be done this summer and is not something that really can be done during the year but we could prepare to to to move on that in the following summer if if that's the you know the if this list is what's accepted for for year one mr daniels um about the solar um is there any uh federal or state either credits or uh
131grants that we could apply for to help offset some of that cost as well there may be i don't know the mechanisms that that are now available to us in the appalachian or aep service area and and most schools in our county are are served by that company are what's are our projects that are entered into where a third party installs maintains and and then later removes um the arrays selling the electricity generated to us at a rate that's lower than the current utility rate and so there's just a change in in in so year one there's a some thousands of dollars of saving and year two is compounded three and so forth by the end it's a potentially even in a single building over a million dollars of saving over a period of time
132and so what we just want to explore is the fact that so that there would be no cost to us up front only savings that um that that's worth it and so if we were if we were installing and maintaining the equipment ourselves i think we certainly would need to go after grants and other and other kind of incentives many of the mechanisms aren't aren't that way though okay thank you dr meal um thank you madam chairman um dr dew is uh with this list of priorities here does the i'm just wondering was the water problem ever fixed here at stanton river where the water comes in when it rains down the sidewalk here through that door right there um that's a pretty significant issue yeah mr santa you want to speak to that or
133mr cash sure to answer your question there's only so much we can do with the existing grade of how this building was built but it is one of the things that if you look at that study that was done i think presented a few months ago about the auditoriums that i made sure that the architect was aware of and that we had an issue that we needed to address but there's really this floor is at a certain level and everything else outside of it is and there's not a lot to do to address it without a significant amount of re-grading so i don't know if we can necessarily do it we've done a couple of band-aid things but to their band-aids to solve the problem is to do a significant regrading job outside you can't
134even uh like redirect the water like you know dig a ditch so to speak redirect the water away from coming down the building so that's a band-aid type of thing not really because of the elevation of the current storm water that's outside um there's probably a couple things we could look into to to digging it up but it's there's a significant cost i'll put it to you this way if if the auditorium work gets kicked down the road due to costs for everything else that you guys have to decide and make tough tough decisions on we probably could have to do something for longer term but i think um from our perspective we were looking to see like where are we kind of getting a feel for what the board was going to do the
135next couple months with these big capital projects and then make decisions on do we have to do a longer term band-aid versus fixing it right um me being a construction guy i want to do it right i want to do it right the first time there's a lot of things that we've run into in the four or five years i've been in this position where we're constantly fixing things that were band-aids over the last 20-30 years and to answer your question depending on what you guys decide well we can come up with a longer term band-aid but to do it right it's going to be a very involved process um and i guess i'm wondering the last bid on the the um this auditorium wasn't like in the five million dollar range or something is
136that correct yes that's very close to it i don't think it's though right so those were architect estimates yes you're right and several options were presented right total demolition total new renovation edition so yes the the option that's included in the in the cip is um um is a middle option that definitely expands the the facility and allows a better program and addresses of course the civil issues and all that around the building and what is the reality with regard to actually doing this it's one thing to have a study and a bid on it and this is what we could do but what's the reality because my concern is i mean as long as i've been in bedford county all i've heard is that you know kids are helping sweep water out of this
137building i've even heard that sandbags were put there which i think would then become a fire hazard because you can't open the door um so it's just very concerning when water pours into this building but we're saying you know we need to do some other things i mean water is is destructive in and of itself it clearly is we have the stanton river auditorium over two years in phases in years 25 and 26. partly in that range so that there's time to design if if that is the plan and adopted by the board so agreed now those years also have gaps in spending of about 11 million dollars in those years and so to address your question about what's realistic i think we would need to meet that funding gap if if that project we're
138going to move forward so agreed and i so so i think charles answered the question correctly we certainly can do more extensive work we wouldn't we just wouldn't feel responsible spending money on something that's going to be addressed fairly soon anyway but we can't agree if the money's going to be there but did i understand you say you know it's a it's a funding gap so right where are we planning to get 11 million dollars it's frosted that's for us to figure out yeah i know but that's gonna we need to do something about this auditorium as well i just want to say one more thing uh i really appreciate this book um i i who who was involved in all this well a lot of work of course goes into this work i think
139i did most of the typing and picture gathering but certainly the whole maintenance staff um other all the consultants we use contributed uh mr hagler you know copying a lot of numbers from his work into there as well so team effort well thank you all very much the maintenance people for this um this is the first time um again since i've been in bedford county that we've had something as detailed as this i really appreciate the schedules in the back the the completed projects page the looking into the future i think it's a really great document it's certainly a place for us to start and um and explaining everything that we would normally be asking at a meeting so just thank you so much for your work involved in this oh no thank you mr
140chairman did you have something to say um i guess i'm i'm just wondering at this point um looking at this area this this list that we have here aboard making a decision and the topics that have already been discussed us moving forward i don't want to beat a dead horse here or continue to bring this up but there are areas here on this list one that i mentioned and hearing from other board members too certainly i think there may need to be somewhat of some tweaking or further discussion on it i think we have other needs and if you look and in this document and you look at year 24 further on there may be some projects that we could certainly move in in place of some of those that are not shaded blue i
141know dr dewis has talked about the shaded blue but i i certainly would like for the board to to really give some thought and consideration um particularly to the painting so mr hagler i want to understand this as far as from a budgetary standpoint so if i calculate correctly we're in need of about 25 million dollars per year over the next five years to fund all of these projects it's currently slated for 13 million next year what are our options for the other 12 million if we wanted to go approve 25 million dollars in projects is there a way for us to go get that funding from the board of supervisors what are our overall options for that other 12 million dollars good question other funding sources that might be available in the future hard
142to tell there may be some federal funds available for school you know there's been a lot of talk at the federal level about the condition of school systems and stuff so you know but nothing has passed yet so there may be some funding that comes down that way um in the two different versions of the how of the house and the senate version we built our budget off the house version was the least favorable in the senate version there was 4.2 million dollars available for school construction there was zero in the house i don't have that built into the budget they're still working out their budget so there may be some more state funding i think when you look long term though with the very large number it's not going to all come from the
143federal and state it will require board of supervisors to request money it may be cash that's on hand in reserve or borrow to fix some of these so we've done renovations and we've done additions to gyms and other things and they've and we've borrowed from that in the past that that depends on the debt load they're willing to take on what is the debt service and how much is that going to be how much debt service is coming on so i think it's a combination of those uh depending on leftover funds and the little bit that we're putting in we'll not get this accomplished it's going to be federal state and also either borrowing or some additional funds from the board of supervisors and that's going to probably take work with this board and and
144the board of supervisors working together to figure that out um i'm just being realistic on that you know if we're going to funnel a million into here each year a million point five it's just not going to get it all done so we do have the option to go after additional funding should we want to approve you know there could be a request just like when uh the forest middle school you know edition right it was a request by the if i remember correctly the school board voted that they wanted to expand forest middle to meet the needs and get rid of all the mobiles the dollar amount was requested from the board of supervisors that was debated on how much was how big of a project were they willing to fund and then they
145told us how much they would fund and then funds were borrowed the funding mechanism is really they do the borrow they could take a combination of reserve or borrowed funds to pay for the project but they they approve of the overall project so this board would request the doctor so let me make sure i understand so we if we as a board and i'm not saying we're approving all these projects but if we say we wanted to go after we wanted to say yes on this 13 million dollars but we also want to go rebuild or renovate two theaters at liberty high school and stanton river we can do that get a an appraisal or not appraisal but uh estimate of what it would take to build those two auditoriums and go to the board
146of supervisors and request that money yes sir and before and once the project is approved in the total amount then you go out for bid and you have to decide okay we went out for bid it came in a little bit higher what do you cut off the project what do you not what can you accomplish to stay within the budget that the board of supervisors that's how it's been done in the past um so that in my time here it's been a request the school board usually makes the initiation of that saying we'd like to do this the funding mechanism whether they borrow or take it from other funds is up to them but they approve the overall project and what they can support yes sir i definitely think that's something we need to
147consider i mean we've heard it loud and clear that the community is expecting us to do something with these two auditoriums so the other thing and i'll be the one that says it the funding i think we need to be very careful how we have the funding laid out for what schools as we've heard repeatedly our numbers are not growing and so there comes a time where do we need all of these schools now i'm not saying i'm not naming names or whatever but i think we need to make sure we're looking at it long term not to go spend a million dollars on a building that we're not going to be in in five years but if we can if we start to see growth that's a different story but if we continue to
148see decline in student numbers we don't need to be spending millions of dollars on buildings we're not going to be in in five years i think you make a good point there absolutely um i am optimistic that we will see growth and i know that one of the things that our community and our families who move here is that they move here because of our elementary our small schools our populations that we have our neighborhood schools are very very important to families so i would hope that our that as a division that we would still maintain that but if i could get back i hate to beat a dead horse here or maybe it's not quite dead yet because i keep trying to bring it up this list that we have here before us is
149one in which we certainly are going to need to discuss further i feel or maybe i'm the only one here that thinks we need to make some adjustments i i feel that this 13 million dollars mr hagler we do have this money right the 13 million is uh mr hill said earlier you got over 13 million in the budget next year a lot of that money is the uh the covert relief money for hvacs we've already launched on those we haven't launched on all the projects so if you keep those overall projects to about 13 million yeah you can move those around move one in from you know in a future year in move one out that's the board's prerogative there but i think for uh dr dewis's team and the maintenance staff the sooner
150the board can decide which projects are priority charles santor and sheldon cash there's a lot of projects going on right now and there's limited capacity so we want to kind of time those out where one's ending and we're going into another one and getting things done so it's the board's direction on which ones are the priority so we'll go ahead and spend the 13 million next year okay um when you look at year um that list there huddleston elementary school's floor towel is at 164 736. i i would like to recommend that we remove forest middle school's painting at a later date and place huddleston elementary school floor toweling to be done in four year 23 yes i have looked at huddleston elementary school's floor tile i don't know if any fellow board members have
151visited huddleston elementary school but i have and it's it's a need of repair and i understand that it's listed here in year 24 uh but i think it needs to be moved up madam chair if you could help guide us on on this yeah we'll we'll get there i i still actually have questions i was waiting for everybody to go first thank you um the structural listing here for susie gibson at 102 000 what is that that involves mainly repointing masonry on the building it's very visible at the front entrance and in a few other selected places where concrete has just eroded um i i you know i worry that eventually some of that will crumble um you know it's held in okay however um we we had a uh some structural engineers take a
152look at that uh two or three years ago um and and estimate that um this would be the type a rough amount of money that it may take to to do that kind of repointing and support of brickwork um i think it's more than cosmetic so it is structural you've it's been prove your who you had an engineer go in there and look at it and we did mr santore you you remember working working on that when i came into my position one of the things i noticed was there was significant cracking in the masonry at susie gibson to the point i had some serious concerns so at that time we hired wildly wilson's structural department to come through and did a complete study on the building i also spent a lot of time going
153through drawings one of the things we found through our files is a student in 1982 in the drafting program those cracks have been there since then and the drafting teacher had that student go through document everything draw it measure it and the cracks hadn't moved since that time based on that and the other information that the wally wilson engineer studied they felt that what we had at the time was fine the building was structurally sound which is what i wanted and i got that in a letter in writing um but they made some recommendations to address some of the masonry like the brick veneer when you walk in the front it looks a lot worse than it is structurally however if we don't address it it could get worse because you're allowing water infiltration whenever
154you're dealing with water and masonry it just doesn't get along so it is not a critical critical thing which is why we didn't immediately take care of it at the time but it's definitely something i think that we need to get taken care of in the next couple years but but we haven't had any further damage to it in 40 years yes well in some of those cracks yes i think that brickwork's got worse yeah the brickwork on the front but that's just a veneer and not a structural member however there were cracks in the structural members but they were based on basically settling after the initial construction or within the first few years and it hasn't moved since now and mr nelms actually mentioned this um susie gibson is on the historical registry does
155any of the grant cut would any of the grant cover that you take yes don't disappear no he won't go far um he's quick yeah qualifying um any qualifying expense to to a building on the registry could can um allow 20 to 25 of the cost to be covered with historic tax credits so is this 102 dollar figure that you've given us is that covered it it could very well be i would have to do a little bit of homework on that but i think so okay so so this number isn't a valid number then without the homework on it it it's an estimate at this point from a study three years ago so um we've been we've adjusted it upward a little bit for inflation so it's a placeholding estimate at this point and
156we'd certainly have to have you know folk folks who do the work come and look and tell us how much how much it would cost but but yes it surely wouldn't cost 102 000 right i've had the entire avenell house was ground out and reaching for a third of that i mean you know unless it was something structural you know what you said it wasn't it's mainly just the structural issues that the engineers still felt they were comfortable with what was there was some deficiencies when it was built where wire wasn't put in block like it should have been there's also no expansion joints which is really the main problem there aren't any expansion joints so i'd have to it's been a while since i've looked at the recommendations but i believe it was re-pointing
157based the brick veneer and then getting in and trying to add some wire and adjusting cutting in some expansion joints to try to give if it moves anymore which it shouldn't right but give it some allow it to move without wall separating right but it's been there since when 1930 so that no the original structure was in the 50s um and that's where we've had most of the issues okay um the to go back to my questions um the carpet removal that is coming out of coveted money uh that that can i believe right now is that how you have it figured out here for the code money for air quality purposes and what we've done we did a lot of carpet removal last summer that was mostly done with covet money i'm not sure
158if we wrote up the rest of the covered money for conditional carpet but once again as bids come in as we spend down the money on covid if if we don't spend as much on you know in learning loss or you know i've got too much estimated they're removing this and we'll spend all the money down by uh 24. we're gonna have to move money around so if there's additional money that we haven't used on other things we can move that around and use it for other projects so that's kind of like we have to wait for the bids to come in on some of the larger projects that's why we had to pull back on some of them because we were planning on using more of the covered money but the bids came in
159higher so we had to put some of those off um this can covered wood would apply to carpet removal um and would qualify because we did a lot of it last summer okay well while you're here then out of this 13 124 13 million hundred twenty four thousand three hundred how much of that is covered money uh pretty close to a million of that so we're looking at so it's in the nine million range it's closer to me i believe um i'm just thinking when i was putting the budget together i don't have it in front of me but yeah the gym floors what's wrong with them this is just um beginning a cycle of refinishing that just has to be done every so many years to keep them keep them playable keep them from
160buckling keep you know just uh yeah i mean can i right there he might talk more about gym floors but um we did one high school um or we did or we did we did one last year this was a approximate price for that at stanton river this we thought that that same depth of sanding down and refinishing and all that would be needed however the folks who looked at it did not think it needed that level of it and so they were able to we were able to look at both stand river middle and high on a you know not the complete refinishing but kind of a mid-range one and get both schools done for roughly that same amount of money it's just a it's a maintenance cycle we really need to be on
161okay so it's you're basically just stripping it or setting it down refinishing it okay i can handle it yeah and um the general painting for a hundred and two thousand dollars we we have not established at this point a schedule for what exact schools would be in 23 24 25 we certainly will need to do that and and can to get at the question you know miss harrison was asking about which which schools may need it the most or parts of schools may need it the most um the idea here with asphalt with painting with lighting was to just begin a cycle so that there's an amount of money every year to it so that we don't so we have a plan and so when this you know if this is approved as a concept
162we'll make our schedule for for what schools would need to be painted what what we would get for a hundred and two thousand dollars and um initially set a hundred thousand dollars a year we we just escalated it two percent every year in the in the budget for an inflationary factor but we painting is painting has sometimes been an afterthought or something that has been done locally by staff who get together to do it and that's all good and it helps schools to look a lot better when they do it we just need a i just think we need to set aside a professional cycle for doing that so that we can just maintain the buildings we have well um and since miss harrison was beating dead livestock earlier i'm gonna i'm gonna beat that
163dead horse too um i don't see anything about the water fountains on here that is true um they are not um and as other projects that had been um started already this really is really is a look ahead in the next year after we discussed water fountains at the last meeting and tried to examine why the cost was what it was we found out that if we were able to buy water fountains directly ourselves and then later work to hire local folks to install them that we would save a considerable amount of money bringing it down under that level where bids are even required and so we we went ahead and moved ahead with that coven money that had been set aside for the purchase of those after um you know hearing the board's discussion
164at the last meeting so those are on order and we'll have local folks installing those and it will be i don't know what we haven't gotten all the quotes yet i don't think on our install but um it's gonna be a substantial amount of money less yeah so if we're saving that much um could we have done more fountains well good point i think those were those were items that had been come through the you know the process for public input through the covet uh relief funds we we may we'll we'll see how those how those uh prices come in and for install certainly we can yeah with this it's really some of these haven't been been out and if we expand any projects now that we take money away from future projects so as
165we do things and as the board commits the things it's like okay let's do some more of this that factors into our expenditures and it's like okay what's our new balance to work with and that's each project has to be you know we have to go forward making sure we have the funding for it so that's where i'm watching over the funding before we bid anything out making sure we've got enough funds to go forward so we could expand that if the board wanted to it would reduce probably the ending balance that i would show going into the following year and reduce available funds for other projects in the future but we could expand that if you wanted go ahead mr james not to be the dead horse on the water fountains but you know
166we brought it up at the last meeting it was going to be over 200 000 and now we're coming back and saying hey because we kind of got involved now we're going to save a hundred thousand dollars i know that the bid process says anything that's 200 000 and above the board has to look at anything under it doesn't matter we've had discussions both of us in this you said in the past it was a lot lower is it possible to evaluate what that is and then maybe just you know help help everybody sharpen their pencils is there anything that we can find out and um address at the next meeting possibly looking at that policy or whatever it is oh the procurement policy for where the level of um board involvement for um approving
167where you set where that level is set yeah [Music] that's definitely the prerogative of the board to set that level wherever you want okay um the two hundred thousand is i can't go any higher than that stay calm so um you could pull that back if you wanted what that is saying is that we go out for a formal bid above that uh if the board wanted ha to have more involvement or the committee had wanted more involvement in the the quote review process i mean you know you could do any of that uh through policy yes sir it's just hard to turn one dollar into two so if we can get it to go further yep that that helps us get more projects done too i had a couple other questions on the carpet
168um is that just is that removal and replacement of carpet or is it just removing or putting vct in it's probably going to be a combination depending upon where it is in office areas we've tended to replace carpet with carpet tile just because it's an office setting in library media centers we have some of both although that quieter carpet tile is something we are um we have in in the most recent projects we've done um in other instructional spaces we've certainly we've had carpet in hallways we used to have it in some cafeterias even and then we've replaced all of that with with vinyl tiles so really just depends upon where but um where are you how much high traffic and then right you don't want to entertain someone can trip over and the type
169of environment it is so um most of what's left is in library media centers yeah and some selected other spaces okay there's not a lot we've done a lot of this in the last five to ten years with a lot of success and i think it's i think it's one reason why the paint at forest middle looks so good because because the the older darker carpet is now out the hallways are much brighter uh just because of the tile flooring and uh makes a big difference so then the last question i had was on the fuel tank by putting that fuel tank here does that help offset fuel cost well what it will do similar to the one we have just recently completed at huddleston is it it's going to be a much bigger tank
170than what we currently have and so it's going to need to be filled less often we'll have less less critical times when you know if if a company can't get there that day or the next day to fill it that that we just have more more uh more gallons to spare you know there so um it's it's going to be a big improvement um i i don't know that it well and if and if tanks stay full drivers don't have to drive to another school to fill up so that could very well and in that respect could could save fuel yeah great dr dewis around the asphalt for bedford primary please tell me that it's a expanding and b it's adding additional handicap space yes yes we have to look at that site to see
171how much it's actually expanding the parking lot that is such a landlocked area the the roadway in front of the school is our responsibility that's not a vdot road and it's in dire need of replacement and resurfacing that's why it's first on the list and then the whole parking lot would be looked at at the same time certainly when it's restriped we will address any ada issues that that we need to any more questions i want to make sure we have yeah i don't have a question just uh if i make a summary comment or two on this particular topic okay so first of all we really appreciate the engagement from the board in this which is what this was designed to do so i also want to thank as one of our board members
172did dr dewis and our maintenance staff for preparing this this hasn't existed prior i don't believe uh we'll make this available online or is it already well it's in it's in board docs tonight and we certainly can post it to our other so what what the board has traditionally done as many divisions do is they've gone a year to time you know you've approved maintenance projects for the next year what we're doing is signaling to you and the community our needs over the next decade we already knew these needs because the board did an elementary study in 2016 and revisited in 2019 that's where most of these projects come from and so these dollar figures are our financial staff's best guess based upon that 2016 and 2019 evaluation you know inflation goes up and prices
173are crazy right now with building materials and construction but we're signaling to the community we have well over 100 million dollars in needs if we want to maintain these buildings for another generation and so there's a great question asked here earlier do we have this money no this is advocacy work that we need to do we need to identify the funding streams whether they be federal state or local so that we can accomplish the needs that have already been established so that's the main purpose of this document is to lay out the needs and give it some order so what we'll be asking you to to take a formal vote on is just on fy 23. we've had a lot of conversation about what are those items in fy23 we'll ask you to to approve
174the the staff and moving forward in those projects and then the following year we'll vote on 24 but you're also voting on the concept of the layout you know these these are the needs and this is the the order that we're going to establish for the next 10 years so a year from now we'll add on uh fy33 and then we'll add on fy34 and this will always be a 10-year plan moving forward so ann i also want to thank the board for moving forward with establishment at the committee level because really this is we can't get this work done without the board leading in this way so the facilities committee has had several meetings now right miss sessions i think we've had two we'll continue to meet as mr holbrook and mrs harrison will
175meet regularly with the committee to to look at the fine granular detail of the plan uh good questions here from mr daniels about you know where do we want to set that threshold for more conversation with the board we certainly talk about that the committee level perhaps and then bring it back to the full board but uh thank you dr dewis and uh to our to our other staff for your work and putting this together into the board for all of your your questions i'm sure the community is going to be very interested in wanting to read up on this in an ideal world folks we would accomplish everything in this plan in one year every school is going to want to be next year no one's going to want to be 10 years out
176or 8 years out but what we've tried to do is take a measured approach so that if we can identify those federal state and local funding streams if we can accomplish somewhere in the area of 12 to 14 million dollars each year over 10 years we can ensure that that these fine schools are being maintained for the next generation and beyond that thank you i'm chairman yes it's now a good time for us to at least i'd like to make a motion that we make some changes well that's what i was getting ready to ask all right um because it does sound like there is some disagreement here as to the priorities especially with the forest middle school painting versus the huddleston floor um the price of of the city of the susie gibson structural
177brickwork um you know because it's hard to for us to say to go ahead with this if with this because if we get 25 off of a hundred thousand dollars that's pretty substantial um and and a quote might come in and more for that or for any other of them too yeah and so we'll certainly work within the budget we have um do you want do you guys want to come up with a consensus to move forward to make substitution to make substitutions and move forward or do you want to go back to the drawing board and have it brought back to us yeah i think it can be i think we worked on a little bit further and brought back yeah since since we're not really asking for approval this until next month it
178does give some time for us to revisit the painting priorities i think um uh and to determine a schedule that might be appropriate and it might not be whole schools at a time it might we just might look at the the most needy portions of some buildings to do that so it'll give us more time today and we certainly can and then if in the meantime you all have questions or things to point out um call and you know let me know and we will study those and work those in as well and we might have a um we might be able to recommend some um some tweaks to the order of some of this and and some current numbers too and figure out um especially with susie gibson and how much of that will
179be covered and what would be the new okay all right um and we may have we may be able to have a mason just take a look and give us and that would be wonderful if we could do that too yeah um also too it was kind of come up within that conversation do we want to put the procurement process on the agenda for next month to look at that as well yes okay so could we put that on there ms johnson thank you very much um yeah let's let's have this come back to us next month he said we need to vote on it next month we would ask for you to adopt the cip yeah that would be that okay yeah so information this month okay so we'll we'll adopt we'll look at
180fy23 next month if you get that out to us as soon as possible we have time to look at it and also don't forget we have miss harris if you can't don't want to reach out to dr dewis with all due respect um ms harris and mr holbrook or our facilities committee so you can reach out to them as well correct yes absolutely okay yes ma'am also get on um next uh month's budget the approval of uh the exploration of the solar panels and the leds i was going to hit that here in just a second because it didn't you want to consensus on procuring about because if if you have general consensus that us issuing a request for proposals is okay we can issue that um begin to gather information and then we wouldn't
181move forward on any of that until we had approval and i don't i don't know that that would be may it might take us two to three months to really sift through all of that and we're looking at free proposals we don't have to pay for these when you request proposals we're saying we are interested in anyone who's interested in doing this work for us what what can you do what structure would you use how would you finance it all of that how much would it cost and we're sifting through all of that and moving forward so um no just doing that process does it doesn't cost it costs firms time to do it and i don't think we want to be in the habit of just doing that on a whim because folks will
182get tired of sending the proposals to us if we do that so but but if but if there's consensus we on those limits those couple limited items starting with solar i would say and then potentially looking at lighting we can we can do that over the upcoming months a couple of months well then how how do y'all feel about going ahead with getting the solar proposals might as well yes okay so you have consensus there what about the lighting and that way we can just go ahead and let that get get that ball rolling too lighting anymore just what we would do we would be looking for ways to install led everywhere and using the savings to finance to pay for it and and hope and potentially using the savings in for other things when
183that's done right it's it's a it's pennies on the dollar of what we're spending on electric for lighting so i think there are various mechanisms of doing that does ap have a program for that pardon me they do have a program aep has a program yeah yeah and that's what we want to look at what does the power company have what other firms have so this would just give if you all agree allowing us then to just get that information in and and start to look at it would be what we're asking for my only request is we have specifics right when it comes back this is what it's going to cost this is what they're doing this is how much money revenue we're going to get right does it make sense that's right are
184there any risk how is it fenced off from our kids at school right we need all of that information to make a good decision versus having to go into detail and spend an hour right so we need time to prepare those documents to request the proposals to make sure they're specific enough and ask for all that information so that but we can go to work on that if that's if that's the consensus okay so we got the consensus for the solar you dr maylie had a question well after you're finished well i was going to do what so we had consensus here from through here for lighting are you guys still on board for just getting the proposals for the lighting and learning more about it i think it's only we only move forward with
185win-win types of proposals here that's that's what we're looking at so and i i mean why would we not already be doing that well we have been replacing our own electricians have been replacing every fixture that breaks with led as we go absolutely we're just this would just be a comprehensive effort to take a whole school or a whole kind of a building or something you know that way so i'm good with that yeah i would just like to throw out two um going after mr hill the process of of possibly starting to get together information for the the renovation of the two auditoriums how do we go about starting to get that information together for possibly asking to borrow money from the board of supervisors or have them borrow money actually well then let's
186go ahead and because we have the study um ms johnson would you put the auditorium study back on next month how are we looking for next month's agenda are we getting heavy already take a quick peek i can tell you well let's pencil it in for may to look at that auditorium study again because what we're going to have to do we're presented with options we're going to have to look at it again have a discussion to decide on what we're asking for before we just go asking for something so so we'll we'll let's let's put on pencil it in if the dog if the agenda gets too heavy then maybe we can move it to june if we need to okay so we'll leave it there and then we'll look at that again yeah
187look at it again and figure out what option we want to go with it will be it will be at minimum and 18 month lead time to start work just for planning and all of that see where we are okay okay anything else no ma'am no okay we've gone off on a lot of tangents here let's get back good work thank you okay thank you dr dilles policy updates dr bergen yes ma'am at the last meeting i asked the board uh go ahead and move forward with another committee that could could look at policies before the policies came to the full board and uh we made a rapid decision with the board leadership that we already had an intergovernmental affairs committee established and that we would just tap that committee to go ahead and look
188at policies at the committee level before bringing policies forward for the full board's consideration so that intergovernmental affairs committee consisted of mr daniels and mr hill we did meet we started with the packet that we had brought forward to the board at the last meeting and we went through that packet rather meticulously and looked at uh line by line word by word and had some very rich conversation uh with those two board members so what we're bringing forward tonight are two uh policies with some minor star two policies with some suggested changes in wording and the elimination of uh two regulations that are being incorporated into one of those policies and before i get into those specifics just like to share with the board what i shared with with that committee this board has done
189a really heavy lift on policy work in the 10 months that i've been with you so we have just about 250 policies online and this board has looked at 96 of them uh 40 almost half of the policy manual in one year now the reason that we've we did such a heavy lift is there were uh because of uh like many other school divisions during the last several years with the distraction of of the pandemic policy work didn't happen regularly or routinely as it should so moving forward we'll make sure that we have policy on the agenda regularly we just won't have to look at 10 12 and 14 at a time because we've already done such a heavy lift so you can you can look forward to fewer policies moving forward as you have
190tonight so tonight we're bringing for the board's consideration vddh public participation at school board meetings the board had already established back in january that she wanted to increase the amount of time for speakers from 25 to 40 minutes and from three minutes to four minutes for individuals but it hadn't been codified in policy so bddh now would codify those changes that the board had discussed back in january because we incorporated that language into bddh we can eliminate regulation that corresponds to bddh as well as kdr it's just redundant in unnecessary language and then the other policy coming forward from the committee is jeca admission of homeless children and in the previous version it had been suggested by the vsba a striking some language about foster care placement um and at the committee level dr woodford
191i believe we had some conversation that that was already accomplished in another policy it was fine that we leave it in this policy if we took it out it was already covered in another policy so we just err on the side of caution we're leaving it in this policy does that sound accurate mr dams from our conversation so uh tonight for information we're bringing bddh and jeca for adoption as as presented to you in the google doc and then a month from now we'll ask you to take action on those two policies if you have any questions i'm sure that mr daniels or mr hiller i'd be happy to entertain those questions now any questions okay we have no questions okay let's see so let's move on to 10.01 carl perkins cte grant do i
192have a motion to approve madam chairman i make a motion that we approve the carl perkins cte grant presented by dr trosper as presented and as in the for docs don't have a motion but dr mealy do you have a second thank you second button mr nelms any discussion all those in favor signify by saying i i opposed motion passes [Music] fingers don't want to work on my computer here do i have a motion regarding the textbook adoption madam chairman i'd like to make a motion that we approve the textbook adoption as presented to the board by dr shawn trosper i have a motion by ms harrison do i have a second second second by dr maylie any discussion yes ma'am yes sir i have a concern that we are still waiting on information from
193vdoe regarding some of the additions or retractions of some of these textbooks and so my preference is to wait until we get that information from vdoe and i apologize i thought that i had read that they said that was they were going to put that on the list yeah that it only impacts the k5 ela curriculum we're not waiting on information about any of the others just the k5 ela and so what we've been told is that there's going to be a conditional curriculum list that's based on the virginia literacy act that was passed after the most recent board meeting so what we're asking for that is we came to our top three so we're asking you to approve any of the top three should they be on the list so our first choice would
194be benchmark second mcgraw hill third hooten mifflin in that order so for example benchmark is not on that conditional list and we would just go to mcgraw hill and so we're asking that we move forward with that approval because we've got to get moving with training ordering a material so it's going to push us back if we don't so you will only order it if it's on that approach correct correct only 15 if it's not it will come back to this board correct we'll we'll have to come back to the essentially to start the process over three order is that what i'm understanding your top three yes and if any of the top three then we would have to go back through the process again so we're hoping that doesn't happen but any more questions
195okay i have a motion in a second all those in favor signify by saying aye aye opposed motion passes do i have a motion regarding the annual special education plan and funding application presented by ms jennings go ahead okay madam chairman i make a motion that we accept the 2020 annual special education plan and funding applications as presented by mrs jennings i have a motion by dr miele second second by mr daniels any discussion call for a vote all those in favor signify by saying i i opposed motion carries bid for approval of school administration offices do i have a motion no no not right now may not be may not be emotion um these are pretty high yeah would you mind if i share them a little bit please do anything that will save
196us some money from this yes please do be happy to um because of the nature of this item and and where we stand with it um in the summer of our staff began work to ensure that all staff in the school administration office had a dedicated workspace that allowed their job responsibilities to be carried out in an efficient and effective manner we initially made improvements to two of the three buildings we work in to create environmentally safe professional welcoming workspaces for for many of the members of our central support team the third and largest of our buildings in the complex the historically recognized bedford training center requires more extensive work due to environmental safety concerns and quite frankly its age the building was constructed in beginning in 1927 and is on the national and state
197historic registries at this time despite the status the building's been maintained on limited budgets for a number of years and as a result they're regular numerous roof leaks and other water incursions they're stained and worn flooring it includes asbestos exposure where it's been worn failing hvac units and some masonry issues the presence of asbestos and water inside the building requires that we make improvements that keep our employees safe but unlike the improvements in those other two buildings i mentioned the smaller buildings the costs for this work are more substantial than what our operating budget can support so we'll need to use maintenance project funds for these necessary improvements mr hagler has budgeted for this project prior to considering this upcoming work that we were just looking at in the capital improvement plan that was that
198we talked about earlier a work plan has been completed and was put out to bid by dominion 7 a local architectural firm to address these needs and so we're asking the board to consider approval of the the low bid and the lower bid i guess of the two we received uh jamerson lewis construction for uh which and their bid was 874 206 dollars this is a high number and it's higher than we'd hoped um if this work we're not so important to the well-being of our employees and to our historic building we might recommend just rejecting the bids and just starting over again trying again when the economy is maybe a little more stable however there's some serious environmental concerns in that building and we just have very few options for relocating staff or allowing
199teleworking of that many people in the jobs that they do if conditions continue to get worse projects in older facilities require more labor for demolition renovation abatement than we'd spend on new construction so to keep his costs as low as possible we've just really kept the scope of this project limited to basics roof and hvac flooring paint and some minor space reconfigurations just to make sure that each employee has a dedicated workspace we haven't included window replacement plumbing electrical lighting ceiling replacements they'll all need attention at some point but we haven't we knew that that was too much at this point we also have the opportunity to take advantage of the state's historic tax credit program that ms kirby mentioned earlier to offset some of these costs we will work with the architect the contractor
200if this is approved an attorney and some investors that would be recruited to do the legal work necessary to apply for those historic tax credits that the former the building we're in the former school building qualifies for and i estimate that could offset approximately 20 percent of the overall costs or about if if this is the amount we spend about 170 000 um which is also a large number um and i was glad to see that um so once this works completed we'll have a facility that while it's not everything's addressed it does address the hazards of asbestos and water intrusion it preserves that historic building and centrally located in the town of bedford and it'll have that work space that 32 staff members who support all of our schools need this is a difficult
201situation because the numbers so high but it's clear to me that this work needs to be done in a location on bridge street in which several investments have been made to preserve historic buildings up and down the street the school projects and restaurants as well as the town's hilltop housing project that's going on right around our offices we just don't want this building to deteriorate to the point that it's not usable and we have to relocate folks due to the asbestos or the impact of the water which as as you know we don't we don't want it to become mold um so we just don't have another facility that could house this number of staff members or our servers right now that run our entire district internet service we don't also we don't currently support
202teleworking and quite frankly many of the jobs wouldn't really make sense to to be telework type jobs anyway of the folks in that building and what i also worry about unfortunately is if we did decide to address this later on our experience tells us that deferred costs are often higher so almost always higher and we've just seen examples of when buildings aren't used these historic buildings are not used what happens to them we've seen it locally even unfortunately so again sheldon and charles are here we can talk through any questions you have concerns about this it's a high number especially in light of the fact that we all understand there are needs in every single building that we have i'd put this one at the very top of the list as far as it it's
203or the bottom of the list depending on how you structure the list of just the condition of the facility it doesn't serve kids directly but everyone who works there does so um be happy to address any questions concerns talk help you talk through this after our last or our budget work session mr hill mr daniels and i went through the building with you um and i agree that that the building does need some tlc um however these numbers are a whole lot higher than than what you told us that they could possibly be um and and if we were looking at the number that we were originally told um that that was still high but that could have been workable these numbers in my opinion are not workable right now what i would like to
204see and i'm not sure if anyone else would agree with this i would like to see an itemization of what this entails have it line by mind how much each thing is going to cost and maybe we can chip away at some of it um but there's no way that we can do or 9 962 000 i don't have my glasses on 590 when we're looking at all this for our schools right i mean granted it and bless y'all's heart it's a pretty dismal workspace workspace right now um but we need to keep priorities in line and we need to address everything we need to spread it so i would like to see i would like to see this brought back with an itemization well i certainly can explain some itemization right now i i
205would like to see it in a document and and line by line give us time to look at it and then we can ask you questions when that comes back if that would be possible yes sir and i'd also like to which i didn't have time and i had every intention of getting over there and looking at the roof with sheldon or whoever i had to but i would actually like to lay eyes on it because you know no offense to you or anybody yeah i'm not going to take these men's people's word for it you know they're the ones that benefit at the end or a million dollars in their pocket you know so and i and well me and you took the tour you know like like miss kirby just said it does
206need some tlc and the roof is leaking and you know the first floor as far as the basement floor i think that could wait but the first floor you know it looks like crap you know the carpets all wrinkled up and right and you know as far as dividing that up into usable office space i agree with that part but i don't know that the building needs an entire new roof you know or you know i would just like to do some further investigation on that before yeah sure and and i think i think charles can can talk to a lot of those issues tonight and and and we certainly can can put this off right when bids come back to us they're good for 30 days and so our next board meeting is outside
207that window and so um we we would need to rebid it and perhaps in a different way historically they are higher the longer you wait but i don't think that would be the case considering where we're at i i don't know you know what i mean far as inflation and how things are now i think if you waited you would be yeah yep and and i can and i understand the push and understand the 30 days um but i don't think this is this would pass anyway tonight um am i yeah i would agree with you uh madam chairman i um i think i recall please someone correct me if i'm wrong that the it was like around 500 000 we thought this was going to cost and this was kind of shocking to me
208so i would like to see an itemization and then i would like to also know what specifically has to be done in terms of environmental issues at this time for example my understanding i don't do this for a living so it could be totally wrong someone just correct me you know and i'm not saying it's the best thing to do i'm just saying if asbestos is left undisturbed it's okay so are there places in that building where like we have to say for the safety of our employees you know this has absolutely got to come up so i would like to see the list like this best as well yeah there's best so that we know these things absolutely have to be done and i'm just picking something here but painting you know could go
209down here type of thing because that might help us as well decide what we can do um and i would also like you when you do this for us is to um is this painting being bit out for example i mean the whole the whole job was okay do we not have people who can do that you know our maintenance people if we paid them safe saturday or sunday i think i think there are portions of this job that our staff could do um if if there's time or other local contractors that we could you know bid separately for what i don't want to do is uh but but the general contractors who who put in for this already did some of that work um by by getting their own subs subs you know lined
210up for this so what i what i don't want to do is something like uh go in there and paint to make it look better on a plaster wall that's going to continue to leak water because then it just doesn't make sense so the roofing the roofing uh by itself is um about 150 000 of that now a companion project to the roof are the larger mechanical hvac units which are on the roof now one of we have one unit that's fairly new that we had to replace just because it was failing so that's not we're not that's not included here but the hvac the other hvac units which range in age from about 12 to some close to 30 years are 226 that's the largest single portion of the work now we can keep
211the existing hvac units in place we have to take them off to do the roof and then put them back on and then we would just replace those as you know as they failed i guess um as we do it and then we're you know we could approach it that way but you know together the roofing in hvac is is clearly the bulk you know the largest single you know portion of that the flooring um total is about 165 000 and um the abatement portion the safety portion for the asbestos is 61 000 of that um so there are some places in the building where the asbestos is not disturbed what we don't know is when we take carpet up will it disturb it so some of that's going to be work that's done you
212know when we're in it um downstairs it's been disturbed already and um needs to be needs to be addressed so charles do you want to have that come on yeah still yeah i still want the line-by-line invoice like a item organization with i think uh focus on how can the priorities yeah what our cte classes could do yeah let that be a learning example for them learning opportunity for them i'm sure they can come in and replace windows they could yeah are there are there some specific parts of this that that off the top we can look at as lower hanging fruit that i guess we can begin to think about i'd like to make a request about this for the board and obviously it's your program shoot me down um shooting but i guess
213before i make the request i'd like to explain the scope and how we got to where we're at and why we're there originally we were approached because of the concerns with the flooring in the basement in the first the lower level right there is what we call 9x9 tile or act hot tile it's as best as tile that was put down years ago i believe sometime in the 50s at some point later a sheet material for lack of a better word we'll call it linoleum that was put down that's got asbestos in it so i've got asbestos on asbestos downstairs there are places where it's peeling up there's places where it's come apart that material if it's undisturbed and in the condition it was when it's installed it's safe it's when it starts breaking up
214and coming apart that becomes an issue that is what we have now we don't if you don't eat it and it's the i don't think that we'll know him as asbestos i have a report saying it is in the report that's part of the yes i had ei group come in that that is it's not a right that's i've got documentation saying that so putting off the flooring downstairs from a liability perspective for the board and public the before county schools that work needs to be done um so that's one part of it that was how this all got started with me coming in and looking at it originally got pricing and then as we got into that it was like well what about upstairs because now we've got this carpet that's a trip hazard
215under the carpet and a good part of the building is the same 9x9 hot tile so if the carpet comes up easy which if you look in places it is in terrible shape it probably will come up easy but what i don't know is when you start pulling it up will the tile come up with it so at that point went in and figured okay we need to get rid of the asbestos tile upstairs the complicating factor this is there have been walls added since the original that covers up so the only way to get rid of it all is to do a full renovation which we knew we just don't have the budget for so part of me telling you that is we have dialed this back as much as we thought we could
216then on top of that is the roof that is in terrible shape you can ask dr trosper about the leaks over his desk and there's leaks in multiple places i can't remember whose office it is but mr hagler will tell you about the damage to the window in his old office that comes from roof leaks so the roof is in terrible shape where i think this got blown up from the estimate that we had originally had from jameson lewis a year ago was that once we got to looking at the roof and the roof had to be replaced what i didn't realize at the time until i got up there was how that shape the hvac was on the roof so we have to pull those units off to replace the roof and put them
217back it's hard to justify putting back a 30 year old hvac unit when you're replacing the roof so that's what got added in and because of the economy we're in now the numbers have jumped what i would request what we'd like to do is to i think i can get right off the top with just me going through the documents and talking with jameson lewis i think i can get 10 to 20 000 off the top i know that's a drop in the bucket compared to the number you had we also have the possible tax savings what i would like to do is to have a number that you guys would accept and then i worked down too knowing that we would have to cut scope um the problem with or not the problem the
218concern i have with what you would like to do to put it off till next to next month getting someone mobilized initially in may the work that we have to do is tight because we have to do this abatement if we do it in a small window during the summer when we can send the people who work in the building to one of the other schools to work if this work happens if the abatement work and the interior work has to happen during the school year it creates a lot of stress on where we're going to work where are these people going to work at in the meantime so the goal was to get it done this summer my fear is if we kick this down a month three weeks from now i don't know
219if i can get everybody lined up the contractor can get his subcontractors lined up to get the work so what i would request or ask is that is there a number that you are comfortable with if i can get the project to that number let me have the ability to go ahead and assign a contract or a motion to the in some way stating that you know if maintenance can get this number to x amount they can proceed if not we'll table this at another time that's what i would like to in the request i'm sorry i've been so distracted walking hey i have a question actually from ms harrison if you don't mind sure okay i downstairs yes ma'am that area um are you suggesting that all of that towel be taken up yes
220ma'am so what the entire area is i mean i'm not an expert but i did take a look at the report that dr dewa sent us regarding the aubestus and i i don't believe that i recall it saying that that entire area uh so we're at a high level of investors there wherever you see the 9x9 tile has asbestos in it what i didn't realize until i got into the report was that sheet material that's over top of the tile has it in it also so we couldn't put a floating floor on on that and it would still be safe it is already unsafe now it's already unsafe okay um looking at some of the numbers here the abatement if we just did that and the roofing and then we looked at possibly using our
221cte programs to do some of the small minor stuff to get everything back looking good what i mean do we really need to like the wall work and the plumbing we we have programs that can handle this yes and that's so one of the things peggy back on to my request i've got a list of things that we can i can kick out of the scope gotcha and i can go over that now if you'd like um but for instance so right now the bathroom downstairs it's only for males it's we don't have a female bathroom downstairs so part of this work was making that bathroom to have two separate unisex bathrooms i think if we eliminate that work and leave it the way it is i can kick out twenty thousand dollars if we
222get rid of the painting that only on the walls that we would be adding in the two or three offices we're trying to split up i think i can kick out thirty thousand dollars um there's ninety thousand dollars in allowances now those are allowances i don't know if we'd actually spend that amount of money but there's ninety thousand dollars in that with the 870 874 for masonry repair we can take that out now with the masonry what that does is we have water infiltration coming into the mainstream it's not necessarily coming into the building but what it's doing is causing the plaster to peel off the wall because it's it's effervescent coming out of those solid measuring walls we can take that out and i think i can get around 90 000 off of that
223um eliminate the flooring upstairs i think i can save 45 000 but the the downside is we got a trip hazard that's there now and it looks bad but the trip has it's a safety thing is the main thing um if you if we did replace the floor we could take the chance on taking the abatement out from upstairs and not trying to abate upstairs but you run the wrist that as we pull up if we pull up carpet and one of those tiles starts to come up i have to abate that now not necessarily the whole thing hardwood floors up there it's it is hardwood floors on the original section with the 9x9 tile over top of it on top of that right and the car and then the carpet over top of that
224the goal was to now in the what we're going to call the addition the classrooms and the edition they have carpet over hardwood floors okay so that's just a matter of pulling up the car them up now the money we saved by waiting on uh the water fountains and saving costs on that can that money be reallocated to the hvac yeah with what he just said we're down to around six hundred and eighty thousand right there from the highest bid from from there it's one big part of the code money that's budgeted right if i use any of that for this we'll see how all the bids come in and what comes in later we could allocate it to this but what do i pull we got other projects that we you know that we
225couldn't go forward with that we're hoping with leftover money and some other money pulled together we can get one of the other schools we couldn't go forward with you know so every time you know those other projects were like two million dollar projects so a hundred thousand dollars here and here you know it is possible that anything for air quality and things like that could qualify yes sir mountain chairman how much historical tax credit are we is that figured in here i'm so sorry so yes the 874 000 would be reduced by about a by about 170 000 um leaving us the cost of around 700 000 um with with that and and so if we reduce the scope of the project the amount of tax credit would also come down because it's a percentage
226so you know by whatever factor depending on how much the scope lessened so you're you're saying if we get it down around 700 thousand so we'd get a hundred and forty thousand dollars in tax credit that's right is that correct that's the math we'd have to do yes okay so that's going to leave us 560 000 and then you said you could take 20 30 100 another 140 off of it and so that's going to be 420 000. but when you take it and you take off that's more right so if you add so if the project is not 874 000 then we're not going to get 170 000 of taxes correct right so correct so you have to take the scope off first and then we can do the math on how much the
227tax credit would be so what percent what actually happened to the half a million dollar estimate well i mean i i'm just i'm just yeah that's a huge number that's a huge jump in my opinion that that half a million number was based on a contractor coming in and saying i think i can do this for this i can do this for this and gave us a rough number it did not include hvac okay because at the time when when we were talking and having a look i had not put my eyes on the rooftop units and realized the shape they were in it wasn't until we were i was instructed to go ahead get an architect get this designed out that got up on the roof of the architect and saw he's like you
228sure you want to take these old units off and put them back on because we have to take them off to do the roof so that's when that got in what i didn't realize was how bad that was gonna i knew it was gonna add scope and add cost i didn't realize it was going to be 226 thousand yeah that's a my number how big is the building i can't remember square foot 20 20 000 square feet okay 12 000 and how many unit hvc units do we have i think there's 11 or 12 it's i think it's like around 11 units there's 11 units they are it was done after the it's not like a what's up there now is similar to what you have in your house yeah madam chairman since we were
229i think feeling that the 500 000 was something we could all live with if we shot for 600 000 as a number then we would get that 20 of the 600 000 so then you're down to 480. i mean what if we just said he's asking us for a number how do you all feel about saying six hundred thousands the top number and are these the only two bids that came in yes sir and i reached out to more the problem in this market is everybody's busy they don't need to work with them i and i had to make concessions in the scope of there aren't liquidated damages in this job because one contractor said we won't bid it and i knew i need it after hearing what happened with water fountains i knew i
230was going to need competing bids so i i did not i fought and argued and basically just said we were not going to bid if you don't if that's in there so i took it out luckily these are two reputable contractors in the lynchburg area it's not like it's some big company out of town that's you know would do the county wrong jefferson lewis did the delivery middle school correct yes ma'am and forest middle and okay which is also they did the original their original estimate that 500 000 came from jameson lewis but it was about a year and a half ago oh yeah which is the other part of why that number is so high in this case i'm sorry i'm sorry uh does this include owner purchasing us doing the purchasing of the
231equipment no it doesn't but that's part of where i think i can get the twenty thousand yeah the problem can i just make a general request going forward that should always be our number one go-to and it's in my general notes that i add to everyone but due to the time constraint and the size of this project i knew it wasn't going to be a lot of money so i'd actually mark through it because i knew i didn't want it there is a there is it takes a while to get a contractor comfortable with that because while it is not unheard of it's not common um but because jamerson lewis has worked with us on the forest middle where we've done a ton i know they will work with us on this and that's where
232i think i can get savings and i'll just say too we we can do that and we'll negotiate you know if you all approve some level of something tonight we'll negotiate with them on that um on the hvac projects we have starting now we're we're buying the mechanical equipment straight charles is up over a hundred thousand dollars of savings through odp so you know we agree with you a hundred percent on that that's it's a it's a no-brainer for us that we will every chance we get dhvc you're not replacing any ductwork or you are there is a it's not replacing ductwork but there there's a little bit of ductwork realignment where we're adding one or two walls to create two office spaces out of one so they should have a new vent correct so
233there's and this will need new curbs and everything no so that's the they don't sit on well yes but it's not the curves that you're thinking of because it sits on the roof it's not it's not a unit that is blowing air through the duct if that makes sense it's it's literally like the unit that's in your house where you have the air handler like above ceiling and then an outside unit that sits you know on a little pad outside of your house what's on the roof now is that outside unit currently they're sitting on on each one sitting on two four by fours okay these walls that you're looking at replay are putting up were they the same ones that were tore down just a couple of years ago that i don't i don't
234know that would be frustrating i mean i'm serious it's kind of redundant that would be yes i understand no these are different configurations that make workplaces available for the people we need to work in there so they're not going up in the exact same places that they came down it's reconfiguring three three spots in that bathroom um that you know in places that had never been divvied up that way well can i ask a question actually um you're talking about the tile the asbestos style on that lower level um of course i've been informed over the years and i realize that a school project is different than your house project but my husband's first house had asbestos siding on it 12 years ago we were looking to replace the siding so we were told to
235put the siding over because if this business wasn't disturbed you're fine if we were to remove the siding we had to call in the evpa and that would cost like for our small house at the time over ten thousand dollars just to get them there so are we going to have to go through that same process and is that counted in these numbers so the demo company will take care of everything they're supposed to do demo wise um they're the only thing that we would have to work out would be the air monitoring after the fact to confirm that there isn't any dust in there that i can't tell you for sure whether that's in that number or not i don't expect that to be to me that's in two or three thousand dollar range
236uh and i'm just going to make a general statement here um i understand the push for time i truly do i understand your timetable i wish this had been worked on a couple of months before so we could have had time um i feel like i'm being pushed and my vote for this is going to be no but um until i see an itemization and a breakdown of more substantial numbers okay um because you have too many variables you don't know what cte could help you out with and cover you have you know this this this is the number unless this happens well let's let's get that more streamlined in my opinion let's get that more definitive what and and if you can get it down then i want to see the number that you
237can get it down too if that makes sense i mean that that's just my personal opinion now i i don't know what everyone else wants to agrees with could just ask a statement i know that we had 500 000 was the original amount listed in some documents that we all received there's no question that we need to ensure that the staff in that building is safe and that they are working in a safe environment um and that holds true for our students our teachers everyone and so with that said we were given a figure of 500 000 uh there was mentioning of 600 setting at least some sort of a a standard or an amount i think we should at least come up with an amount for dr dewis and his staff to work with
238uh tonight we need to do that for them so that they can have at least some ideal as to where they're starting with so i would suggest six hundred thousand dollars and i would certainly like the board to strongly consider discussing that further that tonight that we give them a figure miss harrison let me ask a question so the 600 000 would be the limit and then if we applied the tax credit process that would reduce that number down so 600 would be the amount prior to removing the yes doctor what what do you think mr daniels i still don't i still don't know if i have enough information to make a decision on this quite honestly i appreciate all the hard work and everything else but that hvac number is is is getting to
239me honestly i'm just trying to wrap my head around that because i i think that number could come down a lot i mean i'm trying to figure out how many tons we have that work how many tons we need and i'm just going based off of you know building locations with commercial hvac new ductwork and everything knowing how much that pretty much runs and trying to see if there's a better way to do it you know and and maybe there is maybe there's not but i just need to i'm just trying to get my head around it all and i i can appreciate that i guess i'll throw it i mean we can always take that out and then the only hvac work would be reworking duck i do know that and what we've in
240dealing with the hvac with the four projects we've got going on this summer the their numbers are their supplies out of this world there is a warranty issue in their supply chains it's carrier they they won't they the contractors are telling me that their suppliers are only guaranteeing their prices for 10 days not 30. now what's the price per unit i don't have a breakdown per or you're talking about per hvac unit we don't get that breakdown in a bid i can ask for it um but i don't we normally don't get a schedule of values this quick so but i knew because the numbers were so high that we were going to have to do some work and justify and have a tough discussion tonight i have what i have and a lot of
241contractors wouldn't turn it around that quick but jefferson lewis does like to work for us and with us and that's why i was able to get that but i mean again i can take that out and get a good i mean that right there is a big chunk that gets us down the the risk we're running is you know a year from now they start one starts dropping but and we have and that's the approach we've taken all along with this building is when something breaks we just replace it and so it's been one at a time that's why there's a range and age of those units and so that's what we've been doing um you know been piece meal but you know generally it's kept kept the you know the air the air flowing
242there so madam chair well i would say at the very least if we can take those off of there and limp the old ones along for a little bit longer it's surely got to drop some i mean because like you said it's ridiculously high if you buy if we buy the units ourself you know a lot of people don't want to warranty the work correct you know and that's part of your questions about what can we get cte and to do that those are some risks and things that you do deal with is from a management standpoint it's much simpler to have that one general contractor responsible everything the counter argument to that is you guys paid me for that headache so that's what you paid me for and if that's what you guys decide
243that's what i'll do but i would say hypothetically if you guys were to prove us to move forward if we can get it down to the top number being 600 000 the first question i'm going to ask is i'm jefferson lewis what are your options for value engineering get what they think they can do like right now i know the pro there's the way the doors are specced out in the current specs are commercial doors all the other offices are residential type doors they're not great but that can save them money that can save money there's little things like that i know i can go after that we can get out but then once i get to that then the next question is okay what do we do if we take out the hvac on
244the roof and then i think i'm fairly certain i can get to the 600 number i'd like to save money as much as possible but right now we're looking at either put the cap on it of six hundred thousand for now because i mean like mr holbrook said i mean two years from now that number's gonna be way down well i mean i'm not even comfortable spending six hundred thousand on the building i wanna look at i think it just needs to be looked at yeah that's my personal opinion i mean i i agree that it does need to be looked at because i know y'all working looking at it you know but a lot of people well i know you have i know you have but i'm you know we're the ones making the
245decision before i say yeah here's how hundreds of dollars you know what i'm saying i would like to i want to i would feel more comfortable looking into it for you i mean i'm trying to get a consensus here so that way i don't want to shut down a motion so that way we can still work with it i don't want it to die here it's not it's not yes or no i just want to i i understand the work needs to be done but i'm not comfortable with the price so would we like to have an itemization um get these numbers reworked and get more of a definitive figure is that i think this team deserves to have an amount from us i do um and i think that amount should be six hundred
246thousand dollars that's where i stand on it what it's going to be hard to negotiate on on any item with any comp within any firm if we don't we don't identify the firm we're negotiating with and so i think what charles is trying to say is that if a the low bidder can be approved with a cost not to exceed some amount then we go to work with them and we do exactly what you're saying to do delay the hvac if that means costs will come down um adjust adjust yeah adjust other um yeah right and check it out so so but but we can't negotiate with someone unless there is an approved low bid or so um and that's the that's the risk we run so there's gonna there's gonna have to be some
247amount of trust that that charles can um can get that done within the budget that you do set and with these contractors i would assume that they would be in in this for the long haul it's not just one project and done right well right so now they've already done two very large ones so if they're going to do even more for us maybe they can sharpen their pencil even more go back and say you know this is not exactly where we need to be can you work with your subs a little more because we have a lot more we have 100 million dollars worth of other projects that you could be right in line to get with forest middle school the bid was over the budgeted amount and the first step was to value
248engineer that with them and that was 750 000 that was negotiated within a meeting or two with them this is a much smaller scale but it the same process we've worked with them in that fashion before so yeah chairman i just think it's important you know we have an onus of responsibility to ensure that our employees are in a safe working environment and we were i i said i think my feeling from people was that that that 500 000 number was you know something that we felt we could do if we give them a six hundred thousand dollar number and we get the historic tax credit from that six hundred thousand that's a hundred and twenty thousand bringing it down to four eighty um so that gives us a little bit of play room even
249with a 500 000 uh you know top line but i i think they've done so much work i'm really concerned about the abatement i i do agree with you that um if we don't get that done in the summer months it's going to be extremely difficult to get that done i think it's even going to be difficult in the summer but you can farm people out to different places so i'm i'm just concerned that if we don't at least give them a number that we feel we can work with um and and i i do agree too with dr dewis there has to be some element of trust here they know how we're feeling they wanna you know we wanna get the most bang for our buck uh but let them get on this so
250that we can hopefully get this finished before our employees have to return for next year but wait what what what are you okay we have two do you want to tell you i want to take a motion on it and see how it goes for consensus i guess you know dr miele makes a good point if it was six hundred thousand not to exceed and then we got the 20 that's 480. you know i hate to bring this up but i get nervous with the asbestos stuff i definitely want it's like i want to go after that stuff because god forbid something happen we got sued it's going to cost us a whole lot more money so i i you know i think if we can do something like that i think that's something that
251could make sense so what do you want to set the cap at i think i think 600 and then you get the 120 back now we're under what we originally thought it was going to be what do you think about that mr house can we guarantee we can get that 120 that would be my only concern i mean i'd have to have some type of yeah i'll tell you what i have done i've talked with folks in the department of historic resources at the in the in richmond i've talked with um a firm who works with non-profits to do the work and i've talked with our architect about the process the consensus among all those folks is the type of work we're doing would qualify okay the building has been designated as a historic property
252we have not done this work before but others in town have that they're doing it right now with the two school buildings that are being turned into hotels and apartments um and so you know i i think so i mean you know i haven't done it before but that's what i'm going to go to work to do all right no 600 with the 120. but let's go ahead and call for a vote then seems like we're going to have the majority to have a motion yes madam chairman i would like to make a motion that we authorize uh dr dewis and his team to work with jameson lewis construction for the renovations to the building not to exceed six hundred thousand dollars i have a motion but dr mealy do i have a second second
253second by ms harrison we've already had enough discussion but is there any more i would just like to say if we have a building where we think there are major health hazards we have other buildings for employees to work out of we also have an option of remote work that that is you know popular today and so if we have employees who have a concern about being in that building i would absolutely recommend that you go to your supervisor and ask for a special request until something is done um but six hundred thousand dollars and we don't even know what we're getting is what this board's getting ready to approve so we're just writing a check for six hundred thousand and we're like well we might get this we might get that well let's let's
254see so we're throwing a dart at a dart board for six hundred thousand dollars so does he is he providing us the itemized list i can well i and we we can provide that list directly what what is on before you on the screen is what i had emailed earlier regarding the breakdown generally of those categories so um it shows the largest at the top and works down to the smallest chunk of work i have a motion and a second on the floor all those in favor of a six hundred thousand dollar cap signal father say nine i opposed no miss johnson will you pull the board please to daniels yes i'm sorry sir yes thank you ms harrison yes mr hill no mr holbrook no mrs kirby no dr maylie yes mr nelms yes
255the eyes have it with yes thank you ms johnson okay now we're gonna move on to the superintendent's comments dr bergen finally all right well let's do some celebrating board members you uh we had some students with us here earlier tonight that we were celebrating but we have many more who have had some amazing accomplishments since we were last together so we'll kick it off with some students who were recently recognized at the central virginia regional science fair for their research knowledge and skills we had two students from bedford county at the two students who will now represent bedford county and the region at the 2022 regeneron international science in engineering fair which is being held virtually those two students are burke bankston for physical sciences and justin kim for biological sciences and abby wyatt
256will also be serving as an alternate for biological sciences so congratulations burke justin and abby and all of our students who participated in the regional science fair if you didn't have a chance to get by liberty high school it was basketball for a great cause and a lot of great people came together to make it a big success liberty high school recently hosted the hoopin with heroes it was a fun-filled evening of basketball featuring liberty high school's unified students and teachers playing against the local law enforcement officers and all of the money raised that evening went to support lhs unified programs and bedford county special olympics a special shout out to sheriff mike miller and all of our sro officers for their support and their very good natured sportsmanship during the basketball games i believe
257we we met a couple of these individuals earlier tonight jefferson forest high school put on a great performance at the state deca competition deca or distributive education clubs of america encourages students development of their business and leadership skills through academic conferences and competitions and in the state competition for the category of impromptu business abby beard and amber trent brought home first place for their presentation and were also selected second place overall in the state congratulations abby amber and all of the other regional winners after the votes were tallied one of our own has been named top teacher by lynchburg living magazine beth eisner pe teacher for bedford elementary school was nominated by one of her colleagues marianne thurman because she always goes above and beyond for her students beth has high expectations for each student
258regardless of their athletic ability and while she is a pe teacher at heart she's also a reading teacher and participates in the school-wide sfa reading intervention program and in addition she's collaborated with her resource teacher colleagues to support numerous events for the students and families at the school congratulations beth and thank you for all you do to support bedford elementary school we saw uh graham up here on the stage graham a seventh grader at forest middle school was the top speller at the regional spelling bee which was held virtually and sponsored by the roanoke times graham competed against students from 17 other school divisions for 33 rounds when asked graham said the experience was difficult but pretty cool so as the regional champ graham will now have the opportunity to particip to participate in the
259national spelling bee which will be held in washington dc on memorial day weekend congratulations graham and our thoughts go with you speaking of champions we officially have a national champion at bedford county to brag about jefferson force high school's hannah petty john won the women's pentathlon at the adidas indoor track and field national championships which were recently held in virginia beach she had a total score of 3237 points which was 200 more than her nearest competitor congratulations to hannah we can't say enough about that awesome season that stanton river high school girls basketball team just celebrated but we just have to give one more shout out an individual accolade to jenny levine who has been named to this year's vhsl class iii all-state first team congratulations jenny congratulations to jefferson forest high school's abigail williams
260who placed second recently at the lincoln douglas regional debate competition abigail successfully provided a resolution to the notion that in a democracy a free press ought to prioritize objectivity over advocacy well said and well done abigail the overall aim of high school forensics is to develop the confidence and skills needed to research a topic and then speak to an audience we know our teachers do an amazing job building that confidence in their students and teaching those skills and now we have some of the best in the state to show for it at the vhsl state championships marissa parikh from liberty high school placed first in the category of original oratory and jahim leftwich of stanton river high school placed first in pro's interpretation and jefferson forest high school's paul reed was also state runner-up in
261pro's interpretation congratulations marissa yahim and paul the nike indoor nationals bills itself as a wide selection of the country's top athletes competing for a chance to win hardware and national championship recognition and we couldn't be any prouder that we have one of those athletes receiving that national recognition in jefferson forest high school's zoe lamanna who received all-american honors at this event held in new york by placing third in the 1600 meter ladies event congratulations zoe at the recent capital district key club leadership conference liberty high school's key club received top awards competing with key clubbers from across the capitol district which includes virginia west virginia maryland washington d.c and delaware lhs's team won first place in single service silver and non-digital poster as well as second place for major emphasis the team now goes on
262to compete at the international convention this summer two of those students received individual honors bethany duncan for outstanding club president for the capitol district so bethany for that honor has now received the ellis h stroup key club leadership scholarship in the amount of two thousand dollars and alyssa goodwin has been named outstanding webmaster for the capitol district membership in the virginia pta provides the opportunity for students to participate in a national pta reflections art contest students in grades pre-k through 12 are invited to create theme-based artwork in a variety of categories and we had no shortage of winners from bedford county public schools placing first for their entries including carolyn wedemeyer from forest middle school for dance choreography aubriana white from forest elementary school and ben messier from liberty middle school for film production andrew
263hebden for musical composition from forest middle school claire reynolds from force elementary school along with autumn edwards and alina price from forest middle school for literature abby white forest middle school for visual arts and lastly forest middle school gavin harrington for photography all first place winners jefferson forest high school finished in second place at the odyssey of the mine state competition just recently on april 1st they accomplished this with an overall score of 339.25 points out of 350 possible missing first place by only 2.7 points they've now qualified for the world finals which will be held this may in iowa congratulations to the jf team members of jack coleman molly ellis riley ferris olivia mcavoy emily jacoby sanchez katie rodriguez ramirez and it's that time of year for us to celebrate our teachers of the
264year we just couldn't be any any more proud than these teachers of the year representing our elementary schools our henna saint claire from bedford elementary from bedford primary katie clark big island elementary school ellen angus carrie adams from boonesboro elementary rachel padgett from forest goodview elementary holly milton huddleston elementary laura pringle menida's teacher of the year is beth warren lori parr for montvale katrina grooms for new london lisa taylor at otter river amanda ergenbright stewartsville and thomas jefferson's teacher of the year is kim jacobs for middle school congratulations to teachers of the year for forrest heidi hackworth brian mcdougall at liberty and alan short for stanton river middle school and our high school teachers of the year are debra woodson at jefferson forest jessica nash at liberty high neal mustard at stanton river and for
265susie g science and technology it's zac shupe so it was a tough to pick but from all of those outstanding teachers our three finalists for bedford county public school teachers of the year congratulations to new london academy's teacher katrina grooms forest middle schools heidi hackworth and liberty high school's jessica nash and lastly as you may be familiar april is traditionally designated month of the military child a time to pay tribute to military children and their parents virginia of course is home to several of the nation's largest military installations and has more children whose parents are either active duty or serve in the reserves and national guard than any other state in the country in fact virginia has more than 69 000 military connected children enrolled in virginia's public schools 77 of them 77 of those
266children military connected children are right here in bedford county so to honor those children and their parents and all of their family members for their service and their sacrifices i'd like to encourage everyone to purple up in two weeks from now on wednesday april 20 and again thank you to those families for your service and sacrifice to our country madam chair that concludes my remarks thank you dr bergen um item 12.01 um school board discussion for legal counsel um the reason we asked for this is just kind of i want to comparative shop again and see what's out there and um check into that anybody have any suggestions any disagreements my thought is i would so kindly ask dr mealy since you've done it did it the last time that we looked at this i'm
267sure you still have numbers and contacts um let me look and see if i do i probably do um if you would go call around get us some get some ideas okay there are others that are interested how do they signify so by saying they're interested oh if looking just kind of and we might not even have to put out i mean i'm just kind of thinking um and i'm not even sure that they would give you their fees because a lot of law firms won't but instead of putting up i believe we we uh didn't we advertise yeah we advertised we got we did yeah um the board issued an rfq request for qualifications or proposals so and then the board and some staff interviewed those firms i believe you know virginia law does
268not require that it's the one instance you can go out and hire an attorney and the board can choose to do that any you know on their own well they don't have to issue something on that unlike anything any other service you might legal services are the exception so you can go that direction it's what we did before or you could just uh solicit and call and make a decision are we are we unhappy with the services we have or not we're unhappy i think we've spent a lot of money and if someone can give us the same service for a much greater fee i think it's the right thing for us to do is to go out and look and see what's out there well how about if i do this how about if
269i look and see what those numbers were because as i recall they were you know we were talking not very much money like twenty dollars an hour or something but i'd have to go look again i'll see if i have that information i think it was a little bit more than twenty dollars an hour that the board at that time agreed to increase the fee to so yeah if if yeah if and like that they may not get their hourly rate um that's why as for it the engagement agreement to be attached all right so so you just want me to call firms is that what i'm understanding they're the ones that the school board law right that i've already contacted yes ma'am okay and any that are interested who should they do we bring
270that to the table wait we can kind of look at that next month before and then we'll we'll go move forward i just want to kind of get a preliminary run on this for right now just to get it and in our mix would you give me your your yeah just tell them that we're trying to compare them shopping right now um and we don't want to we're in the beginning stages and we don't want to we're not sure if we want to issue an rfq um we're wondering if they'll give you hourly rates and retainers if we have to keep any if we have to put a deposit when does this one have to be signed i think it's on i think it's continually as long as we keep paying automatic renewal madam chair
271would you like us added to the may agenda yes ma'am same place like matters from the board thank you thank you committee reports ms harrison do you have anything else from the facilities committee yes i do i have the laurel school reporter okay with you guys um but the facility committee uh we've talked a lot about that tonight um met on the 15th and we went to otter river school which was really very nice for me to go back to my old school and mrs moore the principal she took us on a wonderful tour of the school and shared with us concerns and any future ideas that she had dr dewis and mark blankenship and some of the other team members there did share with mr hobrick and i some elementary capacity numbers so we
272are certainly looking at those schools that their capacity is in the range of 80 to 100 percent and so that is an area of concern for us and a path forward we want to take a look at how we can certainly lower those numbers and and we'll be bringing information back to the board regarding it i want to encourage you all to please reach out to mr holbrook and myself if you have any questions about the facility meetings that we've had and we'll be having in the future you can also access this information on board docs as well but don't hesitate to reach out to us so we will be talking more about uh really just looking at those those numbers the capacity numbers at these schools and i also chair the laurel school board
273meeting we had a very special call meeting on april the first it was a zoom meeting and the purpose of the meeting was to discuss the efficiency study report that i had shared with with the board previously that the laurel school wanted to take a look at a plan for expanding the services at laurel and a copy of the report was provided to all the board members to review and recommendations were made from dr asap and really the report addressed the declining enrollment numbers i've talked about that with you all in previous meetings it also discussed funding changes and also the lea and and also looking at other virginia regional programs the enrollment at the laurel school in the last 10 years has decreased significantly from 80 students to 32 students and as you know
274we only have one student from bedford county that attends the laurel school so one primary recommendation from the study would be to grow the enrollment of the law school by serving larger proportions of students and and expanding the programs to meet the needs of maybe some of our behavioral challenge students so that's in that population i'm excited about that opportunity but on may the 4th we are going to meet again and at that time the laurel school board will make a decision as to whether we will accept the study report or not in the recommendations dr burgin do you have anything did i leave out anything there you were also present at the meeting no ma'am i think we've had good robust facility committee conversations tonight look forward to more conversations in future meetings okay
275that's all that i have with such melee no no this is just committee reports do nothing from finance committee and you're do you have anything do you echo in here what'd you say okay all right um guff school uh we had a meeting this week there is no increase in tuition for uh the 44 students that we send for junior and tenure i had to look at karen to make sure i had my numbers right we did approve this week a very interesting table it's about the size of this table for anatomy and physiology students where they can go in in a virtual and dissect the body and they can make it sit up they can like cut the top of the head and then force it up look inside and look at every single
276thing that's there if they want to look at the hand they can remove the skin and go and look at every single i mean it is just amazing technology so that was one thing that we did approve the second piece was a robotic arm where the students will be able to program a larger arm but then also smaller i want to say it was 11 10 or 11 smaller arms where the class can still work on smaller projects but then go present using the larger robotic arm so lots of good things happening at central virginia gov school again tuition not going up all of our seats are taken which is very exciting um for bedford county so as far as the um inter-governmental uh is that right okay committee we had a very productive meeting
277a couple weeks ago my weeks are running together we discussed several policies which dr bergen brought to the board tonight there are several others still on the table where we will be discussing in detail dr calvert gave me some great information for me to go through in my spare time so i'll be working through that also we'll be talking about jhcd which is the incorporating cbd and thc under other prescribed medications so more detail on that dr wilford i appreciate you getting that back to me and then also more to come on book review and opting in versus opting out and some additional information that we're going to be looking at uh around that so uh did i miss anything on that okay so that's it for me don't you have anything are we on
278comments questions no we're in the committees oh committee i'm good okay anything mr damage committees we have a seat committee uh meeting april 27th so i'll be there since we started down here for committees let's start down here for comments lead us off i only have one comment and um it was good to hear from a lot of the staff tonight i i want to say this is probably the staff and the teachers i think that this was one of the meetings that i've said this is definitely the most amount that that we've heard from them and i just want to continue to encourage you know every teacher staff bus driver everybody we want to hear from you you guys are on the front lines and we really appreciate it so i i want to
279speak for everybody on on the board and in the administration that our emails and our phones are on and we're we're listening so just i just want to say thank you for that and we appreciate that and hope to see you at future meetings any stems cool um i just want to i got two comments one right now i think our major focus needs to be on the school bus shortage it is affecting many families and i think we need to look at how we're recruiting and then how often we're recruiting so we need to look at the frequency of when we're actually hiring bus drivers if need be we need to have saturdays or a couple saturdays and months to decide to where if somebody's interested in driving the bus they can come to
280this location get all the information they need so we can get these kids to school like they need to be my other only comment is getting these kids back into rooms i think that needs to be another priority because i mean they're still eating some some are still eating in the classrooms and with springtime approaching i know the custodial staff is going to be overwhelmed with trying to get the maintenance on the lawns and stuff like that they they need they're going to be overwhelmed with cleaning all these classrooms and you know um and then still focusing on getting their their regular work done so that's something that needs to be addressed and so basically just getting getting back to normal that'll be my biggest and biggest concern right now yeah so fms open house
281i thought was a fabulous turn out lots of students took an opportunity to bring parents in even though it was great that fifth graders took the opportunity to come and tour the school so they're not wandering around next year so again i thought it was a great turnout lots of kids so glad we were able to do that um i went to echo too i appreciate those who come out tonight that's what it's about that's why we've requested moving these meetings to different locations so we can have community participation i know we've got suzy g next and then i would recommend that we start with the middle schools make that tour and then go to the elementary schools and just keep going around and having these meetings in the different communities so we're able to
282hear from people happy national library week i thought the ala did a great job on their website recognizing that week and celebrating librarians i said this earlier if there are employees who have a concern about working in a building you need to be talking to your supervisor i see hr nod in their head so you know we do have work from home you know it's not something we encourage but it's certainly an option if it's something that you know you and your supervisor work out so be on the lookout for the parental rights resolution ms johnson i'm going to ask for that to be on the may agenda as well that should be coming soon for more review but we're close to having that ready a question around retirement dinners and teacher of the year
283dinners we used to celebrate are we doing that and if not why not i think i can speak for that mr hill i was uh put was put back into my lap this year um when we began the process the executive order the mask mandates we started in january and so at that time we evaluated everything and had to make a call right then and there and that was how the chips fell okay so we can count on it for next year though i would hope so okay uh and then last thing i'll be here afterwards for any questions conversations that anybody may have so thank you mr hill mr holberg i'll be here as well if you have any questions that's bailey yes um i have a couple questions uh dr dewis um where
284are we with regard to the fuel situation a bus driver spoke last month and during public comment about that and having to travel far away from where they normally would be to get the gas so have we resolved that issue is yes a much larger tank ten thousand gallon tank is now in place excuse me six thousand gallon tank is now in place at huddleston uh triple the size of what was there and so that's been used and to my knowledge i've not received reports of outages anytime in the you know in the recent days and as you saw on the cip we want to also enlarge that tank at stanton river middle so that we have both those tanks in the stanton river zone that can serve serve our drivers so um certainly we
285want to be communicated with if there are issues so we can address them but i think we've made some progress thank you um dr bergen can we get a report any maybe next month on grades i don't think we got any mid-year like how we had a report last year i know of how the kids were doing doing relative to the year before so just some report on where our students are standing at this point in time sure i'll i'll speak with staff involved with the board thank you um also i just like to also say thank you to our staff i i say this every month but um i just want you to know that your your presence does make a difference every day that you're there what you do matters um you often
286every day almost impact the lives of our children in a positive way and you probably don't even see that half the time because i've been a teacher and you're so busy but please know that you do and never forget that each one of you touches the future of america every single day so every single day you're here it matters and i want you to know that your your your work makes our future in america look brighter and i appreciate that i just want to give one more shout out about the cip book thank you for all the wonderful work on that as always you know mr edwards thank you so much for what you do to present awards to people you just make people feel special so thank you for doing that and i i
287have just personally got to say a hell uh a shout out to graham that's just amazing i wish i could go to washington d.c with him i don't think i could help him but you know it'd be great to see him madam chairman i'd also like to put on the agenda for next month if we could a review of policy iec and ieb that were removed from our policy manual and specifically the bill of rights and in god we trust so we could at least talk about that and understand why that was removed um and do we want to replace that those who need to come through us yeah absolutely take it through the through their intergovernmental committee and then notice to the interim government yeah can you put can y'all put that on your
288next meeting and then bring it forward to us after right after that i'm sorry say that again they'll review it and then we'll get it after that um i also want to speak just briefly about the continued concerns with um the books um i honestly believe that and i've been communicating with one of the members who who speaks about books and i will tell you our conversations i think have been very productive i would actually tell you that this individual and i have have come to a great understanding of each other so i think our talks have been very productive but i want to say that i really truly believe we've reached common ground here um i said this before but you know if you want your child to read the book any book they
289can if you don't want them to read your book a book you have that right as well you know liberty is the state of being free from oppression from someone else's viewpoints political views life behavior and i think we've done that here um you know as as miss ellis said libraries are ever evolving places and and certainly we've given our students their parents and the students the right to say i don't want my child involved in that that's okay and other parents who stood there tonight i think it was miss ellis who said i want my child to read these books so i'm just not sure that our discussions about um and this is just my opinion um that of the constant you know kids shouldn't be reading these books versus kids should be reading
290these books are very productive because to me i really feel like both sides have gotten something that helps them i don't want my child to read the book okay they can get another book no harm done i want my child to read these books no harm done just tell us what books you don't want to read will flag your child's account i mean i really think that it's just not we're not being as productive as we could be because in my opinion we've reached this common ground that everyone can work with everyone's rights are respected at this point and and and i hope that you know people speak of parent choice well they do have parent choice they have the right to read or not to read and and i just hope that we can
291we can find a way to to move on and just for a bit of information because i know people have have been asking about it how do these books get on lists and you know that all starts with the college boards and i gave actually mr dietrich a lot of information about that they survey 6 000 colleges and universities to find out what students in those colleges and universities are reading to in courses similar to the historical fiction that's read in these english literature courses and that's how they come up with those lists it's not you know any particular group of people that's doing it but mr d dietrich has that information i believe i still do if you want that information and and want to change it i think that you know certainly you
292can i'd be happy to share that with you um i just want us somebody also has spoken about i um the fact that we need standards and and again i say that we do have standards we have the standards of learning we have the standards of quality we have the entire virginia code of school law and you know our general assembly has said that education is the cornerstone upon which the future of virginia rests and the standards are laid out for us in the code of virginia everything is laid out for you it regulates the number of days and hours we have to go to school nurses uh record keeping discipline criminal acts the list goes on and on so the standards are there and i know some people have talked about the bible and
293and that should be our standard but that's not what we use in a public institution um and i think if we even went and stepped in that that realm you know and talked about holy books and what we should be using what to what holy book should we refer is it the christian bible and then what version is it is it the saint james is it the king james is it the new english is it the american standard to which one should we refer but then we also have to look at our the fact that we have a religiously diverse area do we need to look at the quran do we need to look at the torah do we need to look at the gita do we need to look at the book of shadows
294from wicca i mean it's a dangerous slope to me that we we want to bring religion into our schools so i hope that we can move away from that because constitutionally it's not viable the establishment cause uh prevents that and you know there's a very famous case out there i think it's agostini versus felton i'm pretty sure that talked about the lemon test all of these things that have already been discussed so we have standards they've been created by our general assembly if we want to use the bible i think that's called home school or private school but i think you know we need to we need to be to me more productive about how we're improving student achievement and not trying to change things that would take decades i mean if you look at
295the bill of rights for i mean the equal rights amendment it was started what in 72 or three and it just passed in january the last you know state just uh ratified it in january it took four decades um but if that's what you want and and i applaud you for wanting it that's how you have to go about it we need a constitutional convention which requires uh two-thirds of the states and then three fourths of the states have to ratify whatever it is that we're trying to amend so it's a very long drawn out process but we can't change that here at the board that would be something that has to occur at the state level so when you say you want a standard of a bible we're the wrong people to talk to
296we we can't help you there you'd have to start with the your your own general assembly so um i also want to thank the teachers that came out tonight i loved um i wish i knew the school board knew um i'm sorry that you feel that your voices aren't being heard please know that you know we are listening to your voices um we i think we all on the board need to listen and reflect on what was said tonight um because our teachers are leaving i am concerned about the the teacher who said i really you know i'm thinking about leaving um i would hate to see that but she is correct you know we're going to lose our very best teachers um and i don't want to see that happen and i know that
297you all love your students you said you know i love my students i know that we see that every day so thank you for all that you do um and and congratulations also to all the teachers of the year thank you madam chairman thank you dr emily ms harrison yes um i would like to echo the same sentiments that mr daniels spoke about in just giving um compliments to those who came out tonight our teachers and everyone who spoke during the public comment thank you so very much your voices are important to all of us here and they do matter so certainly continue to come out continue to voice your concerns we want to hear them as for the teachers i was so moved by every word that came out of the mouths of the
298teachers who were here i want them to know that i believe with all of my heart that every board member sitting here truly truly do care about you and your well-being and they want your voices to be heard and more importantly we are listening and your voices matter to us you're just so important to us i will never forget the words that were spoken tonight it really touched my heart to hear the young lady who was just brought to tears talking about second having to get a second job i know that each of us want to provide everyone with the best wages the best salaries so just know that we hear you your voices are heard you do matter you do matter i attended the forest middle school open house on the 24th of march
299and it was so exciting for me to see some of the fifth graders particularly at otter river that i'd known when they were kindergartners and seeing the families that i call friends there as well and i was so proud of the new addition to the building it's it's just absolutely beautiful beautiful and um and certainly the fact that we have provided our students with a learning environment like that is just really something that i think we all should be proud of and and certainly with that being said there are so many more schools in our division so many more students that also deserve and need to have a learning environment that certainly brings them peace brings them joy and is free of hazards and other issues and so i do hope one day that we
300will be able to provide all of our students in bedford county with learning environments that certainly mirror what forest middle school has and it is a beautiful addition and i'm very proud that we were able to get those students out of the mobiles and they're in that type of learning environment now i look forward to the further work that our division will do for other students in bedford county also i want to thank dr calvert for the report that she provided us with regarding our staffing numbers and the number of teachers who certainly are retiring or those who are submitted in their resignations i know we have a lot of hard work before us the hr team does and trying to fill those those vacancies and but i believe that we will it's not going
301to be easy um it is disturbing to see the number of teachers who have chosen to resign for various reasons um but we we've got some vacancies in math and english particularly at the secondary level that is concerning but i have all the hopes in the world and the faith in dr calvert and her team that these positions will be filled uh and lastly i just want to say to all of the teachers and to the staff and students i wish you a relaxing i mean relaxing fun feel have all the fun that you could possibly have chill relax just have fun doing your spring break because you deserve it you deserve every moment of relaxation so thank you all it's time to give my comments okay um i know and and i appreciate dr
302mealy and miss harrison always thanking the staff and that's always very kind and and sometimes we forget to do that but um i want to take a moment tonight and thank all of you guys um we've had a very very busy meeting schedule the past few months as if you didn't know um and and everybody is there and everybody's participating and and i just want to thank you for your time and your dedication on monday dr bergen mr hagler and i attended the board of supervisors work session um the resonant concern with them is the reversion money going away um that's concerned with all of us and they they asked a whole lot of very hard questions but they asked really good questions and you could tell they were really thinking of course we're not
303going to know anything until we hear from the state budget but they wanted me to pass on for you to contact your representative in richmond let them know and try to push for a good budget here mr nelms and i had our first town hall meeting saturday the attendance wasn't what i'd hoped for but it was very informative a a really it's a good opportunity for us to get things out there but it's also a good opportunity for us to learn and just to give you heads up dr calvert and dr woodford my schedule has been kind of busy and i haven't had the chance to call but i will be calling to follow up on some of the concerns that we've had um this has this is kind of breaking news just happened a
304little bit earlier this evening congratulations to dean young he was named the new volleyball coach at liberty high school look to look forward to great things happening and welcome to the minuteman family and this didn't make this is also something i got today um i'll be as quick as i can i promise um yesterday liberty ffa traveled to chatham to compete against 24 schools at the virginia ffa south ridge area rally some of liberty's ffa's big wins were adam witt first place junior tractor operator adam witt and wyatt jenkins first place tractor troubleshooting team wyatt jenkins andrew heiner caleb williamson zane key and landon adams first place senior ag mechanics team the vet science team of anna gross megan cash lala gibson kaylee lindsey earned third place megan cash third place vet science individual olivia
305esposito and natalie corbin second place extemporaneous and creed public speaking contest andrew heiner third place overall in the small engines contest the floor culture team of allison long ellie moser and kaylee lindsey third place while alison long earned second place individual in the contest and ellie moser placed 4th overall hayden wilson haley carhartt and brooke hodges placed 10th overall in apology congratulations liberty ffa and good luck at the state competition in june i also want to give a shout out to stanton river's own hunter brown i saw on facebook where he assigned with to go wrestle at emory henry i wish him great things and to echo um ms harrison i hope everybody has a wonderful spring break and a safe and blessed easter okay finally do i have a motion to adjourn so moved
306i have a motion by mr hill do you have a second second by ms harrison any discussion so sorry are we meeting on april 20th yes we have the um the bylaws yeah the bylaws the whole thing doesn't work we're going to do a work session on the whole nine yards okay all right thank you so so bring it with you i'm taking mine to the beach with me and going through them okay okay so i have a motion and a second let me call for a vote all those in favor of our journey please say i i opposed we're out of here you