School Board Meeting 11/11/2021 - 5:00 PM

001pretty fun let's do it um yes good evening i'd like to call to order this november regular meeting of the bedford county school board on veterans day ms johnson would you please call the roll johnson here mrs kirby here mrs harrison here dr higgs mr hill here mr leeming dr maylie here mr chairman you have a forum great thank you ms johnson do we have a motion on the agenda this evening mr chairman i'd like to amend the agenda to include a um since we just it was finished recently the soq report okay all right so we have a motion by dr maylie to amend the agenda to include item on the sfp report okay um where would you like to staff reports i guess staff reports okay somebody get 3.05 so we have a

002motion by dr mealy to amend the agenda accordingly we have a second second second by miss harrison any discussion call for a vote on the amendment or the the proposed addition to the agenda who's in favor please say can be if that will be added to the agenda as item 3.05 so do we have a motion to approve the amended agenda so move a motion by ms kirby to approve the amended agenda with the addition of item 3.05 okay do we have a second second all right have a second by ms harrison any discussion on that i have a question is staff prepared to give a report on soq i'm happy to answer questions from what i know from the memo that i said earlier if that's all that's needed yeah i just want to

003understand i said i said i think so just you sharing the memo and answering any questions that you may have okay all those in favor of the approving the amended agenda please say i i you post all right so the amended agenda is approved do we have a motion to go into closed session mr chairman i move that we go on to close session pursuant to the code of virginia section 2.2-37-11 a-1 to discuss the assignment appointment performance discipline and release of contract for specific school board employees and also pursuant to the code of virginia section 2.2-37-11 a8 for consultation with legal counsel retained by the school board for legal advice concerning regulatory requirements for workplace health and safety so we have motion by ms kirby to go into closed session do we have a

004second second hey all the seconds at the back all right hope for both all those in favor please say i i can you post the word will now go into closing ah oh hmm just for the record dr hicks join us at 506 pm all right we have a motion to come out of close up the board is now out of closed ms johnson would you please certify the closed session 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 positions of the virginia freedom of information act where section 2.2-3712 if the code of virginia requires a certification by this school board that such close meeting was conducted in conformity with virginia law now therefore being resolved that the bedford

005county school board here by certified staff to the best of each member's knowledge only public business matters lawfully exempted from open meeting requirements by virginia law were discussed in the closed meetings 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 step reports 3.01 cte and workforce readiness dr trosper and dr woodford good evening members of the board the instruction team has been very excited over the last three months to share the work that is occurring every day in bedford county public schools and tonight dr trosper and i are going to share some information on career and technical education efforts and our work towards workplace readiness for all students while cte and workplace

006readiness are heavily entwined i want to talk about each one in a little bit more depth career and technical education are as we often refer to as cte programs and virginia public schools serve more than 640 000 students in one or more cte course offerings in grades 6 through 12. these programs are designed to prepare young people for productive futures while meeting the commonwealth's need for well-trained and industry-certified technical workers research tells us that students taking cte courses are more likely to graduate from high school on time enroll in at least a two-year college be employed after high school and be better compensated in that employment it is important to share the message that cte pathways are embedded in readiness for career and for college there is no longer an either or mentality but that

007a student can have all opportunities cte opportunities and college opportunities cte courses for bedford county students are offered in a variety of formats we begin introducing students to cte experiences at the middle school level and we offer cte courses through suzy g gibson science and technology center at each of our base high schools and through cvcc at the stem academy and the cte academy virginia acknowledges the importance of career and technical education to students and the commonwealth through diploma seals awarded by the board of education by recognizing industry credentialing in its diploma requirements and through the use of career pathways as an integral part of the newly required academic and career plan all students are required to take one cte course as a graduation requirement and are encouraged to take sequential cte courses to attain

008a completer credit bedford county schools receives approximately 171 thousand dollars through the carl perkins career and technical education funds each year to support cte programming there are 17 identified career clusters in virginia and a career cluster is a grouping of occupations and industries based on commonalities career clusters are used to organize curriculum design and for career counseling within each career cluster there are multiple career pathways that represent a common set of skills and knowledge both academic and technical necessary to pursue a full range of career opportunities within within that pathway ranging from entry-level management and including technical and professional career specialties based on the skill sets taught all cte courses are aligned with one or more career clusters and pathways while all of our available programs i'm sorry with all of our available programs which

009i'm going to share with you on on later slides bedford county public schools can offer a variety of courses that are part of each cluster and you'll see that there are 17 career clusters and these are some examples of them agriculture architecture finance health science we also have hospitality human services marketing so there are a variety of clear career clusters and we offer different courses that fall within those career clusters i've provided in the slides here a link that you'll have access to once the presentation is posted if you click on that title career clusters information you'll see more information about specific career clusters and courses and pathways under each one for instance when you click on architecture and construction it will open the career cluster that covers architecture design maintenance and operations so if

010you want to explore a little bit more you can see all of the different career clusters and then different opportunities students can take under those pathways virginia's workplace readiness skills are a set of personal qualities people skills and professional abilities identified by virginia employers and educators as essential for employee success in the workplace developed and updated over the past 20 years to adapt to changing workplace trends and needs these skills are incorporated into the curriculum of every state career and technical education course they not only give students of diverse backgrounds the opportunity to develop the personal resources they need to get and keep good jobs but they also help employers by providing them with entry level workers who are well prepared to deal with a variety of workplace challenges in addition to supporting both student

011and employer needs virginia's workplace readiness skills also benefit industries regions and the state as a whole there are 22 workplace readiness skills as you can see here on the screen identified by educators and employers that are developed in our cte courses these skills are embedded in the instructional content and in the workplace internships offered at all three of our high schools at suzy g gibson science and technology center and in our cvcc programs i'd like to share with you a little bit of information about our current course offerings in all of our different programs so first with our suzy g gibson science and technology center right here in bedford all students in bedford county are eligible to apply for a cte program at suzy g gibson science and technology center cte courses do have class

012size limitations due to the hands-on elements of each course and for safety programs at gibson are for juniors and seniors only with the exception of intro to health and jrotc which are available to freshmen and sophomores it is also important to note that we have six cte courses that are offered as dual enrollment courses that means that students who take these courses at suzy g gibson also receive college credit through cvcc programs offered at suzy g gibson are our most popular programs between the three high schools and they require high levels of specialized staff to teach these courses having a central program allows us to offer opportunities to more students as teachers for these programs are harder to find and because the equipment required for instruction is so expensive and specialized so you can see

013these are the cte offerings that we offer the programs at suzy g gibson suzy g gibson science and technology center also has the distinct honor of housing one of nine governor's health sciences academies in virginia each governor's academy for health sciences incorporates academic content with career and technical instruction and implements the five career pathways related to therapeutic services diagnostic services health informatics support services and biotechnology research and development governors health sciences academies actively partner with employers to design and provide high quality dynamic programs these programs are delivered through comprehensive courses of study that prepare students for successful transition to post-secondary education and careers these specialty programs include partnerships with public school divisions business and industry health care institutions higher education institutions and often local government including the local workforce and economic development development entities all

014programs include significant work-based instruction and training beyond the classroom using cooperative education clinical experience job shadowing and service learning here in bedford we partner with centra health to provide on-the-job training opportunities for our nurse aides and our nursing students i also just wanted to point out all of our current business partners that we have with susie g gibson science and technology center each of the programs has a variety of business partners that have been developed over the years we have lots of partnership with the chamber of commerce who helps to connect us with the business alliance and so you will see we have lots of support for our programs and recently we've even had more workplaces reach out to us wanting to build partnerships with us and to offer places for our students to go

015do on-the-job training so that they will be able and ready for the workforce as soon as they graduate each of our middle schools have introductory cte courses to provide opportunities to engage students in hands-on career and technical opportunities prior to going to high school as they begin making their academic and career plans our high schools provide a variety of cte courses at this time jefferson forest high school has 16 cte courses liberty high school has 27 courses and stanton river high school has 33 courses currently our schools offer a variety of cte course based on typically student interest and teacher certifications these six courses are offered at all three of our high schools computer information engineering analysis and applications engineering exploration marketing principles of business and technical drawing and design there are 38 other cte

016courses offered between the three high schools 20 others are offered at at least two schools and 18 are singletons most of the courses offered are part of a career cluster and the certified teacher in one of the core programs has room to offer other courses within their certification so for example when we hire agriculture teachers they come with a variety of certifications so some of those ag teachers can do vet science courses some can do horticulture science and so often once we hire the teacher they talk to us about what their expertises are and their certifications and we can often open those courses up to students at that high school so some examples of career clusters that we have in our schools liberty high school has a very strong agricultural food and natural resources and

017manufacturing career cluster stand river high school also has a strong agricultural food and natural resources and stem career clusters jefferson forest high school has very strong stem career clusters and information technology career clusters we are currently working and excited that dr trossa is going to share more about our new supervisor of cte and workforce development we are looking at ways that we can offer uh courses at more than one high school or if there's a career cluster a student is interested in but may not have access to at their high school can we do that virtually can we share staff so we're looking at opportunities to open those up we also have our cvcc partnerships our accelerate and cte academies lynchburg regional governor stem academy is the 16th regional governor stem academy offering programs in

018science technology engineering and math subjects known collectively as stem for high school juniors and seniors in virginia's region 2000 lynchburg area located on the campus of cbcc accelerate offers academic and technical training related to careers in engineering mechatronics biotechnology health science and cyber security cvcc has also just opened up a cte academy and in that cte academy they offer courses in six career clusters and those are here on the screen information technology manufacturing and trades business administration health care public safety and hospitality and culinary arts these programs will help us build some gaps that we have in our current programming there are some that are similar like we offer a culinary program so we would encourage our students to stay here for the culinary program but if our culinary program were to fill to capacity

019which is 20 students in a cte program then we would look to see cvcc to see if we could get those students in that also while we're working to develop our hvac program um we would also reach out to cvcc and look at their cte academy to see if we could partner with them to get some of our students in hvac they offer other courses such as emt criminal justice welding and cyber security which are becoming very popular fields in cte um i am going to pass uh the baton over to dr trosper and he's going to talk about a little bit more about what's happening right now good evening i'm going to discuss some updates on our cte and workplace readiness program since starting my role first as director of secondary instruction and cte

020and then currently as director of curriculum instruction for pre-k through 12. so recently we hired a supervisor of cte and workplace readiness mr trevor haas i'm proud that for the first time in many years we have an individual whose job is to solely focus on cte and workplace readiness currently i'm working with mr haas on transitioning to his new role he will be assisting the new council at suzy gibson and as they transition then he will begin working with the instruction team full time mr haas will be introduced by dr bergen later in the meeting but i do want to share a little bit about the work he will be doing the cta supervisor is responsible for the career technical education and workplace readiness programs of bedford county public schools in this role mr haas

021will provide leadership for all schools and academic centers and will work collaboratively collaboratively with the other school division leaders to achieve the school division strategic goals a major part of this leadership is to generate interest and awareness of our cte programs so that students are more knowledgeable and are better prepared for college and or career course enrollments you will work with school administrators on creating additional opportunities for cte and elementary and middle schools in fact mr haas has already met with or he has scheduled a meeting with each elementary principal in an effort to discuss ways our students can be exposed to cte offerings at an early age he will work collaboratively with the administrator at suzy gibson science and technology center to monitor and implement cte programs he will serve as the main conduit

022between the base school and susie gibson you will rightly oversee the carl perkins grant while monitoring expenditures during the school year he will serve as the liaison to the business alliance the chamber of commerce and other workforce development groups as we seek to produce qualified individuals who can meet labor needs in bedford county you will work to develop partnerships in our community and it's going to be a major part of our success of our cte programs in the coming years so we do look forward to him joining the instruction team and to the great work he will do for our students since i assumed my role in july i've met with numerous community leaders and organizations to learn about and to discuss strengthening future partnerships some examples include the bedford one program which links high

023school students with local businesses based on their career interests it is a partnership between the bedford county office of economic development and bedford county public schools and other area businesses in july i attended the workforce and education summit hosted by the lynchburg regional business alliance the summit consisted of local community leaders business owners and educators to discuss solutions to issues such as a lack of qualified applicants coveted recovery retaining the best and brightest employees and other issues confronting what they described as the current workforce crisis as i learned local school systems like bedford county are vital to our local economy and our cte programs play an important role in economic development across the region i've met with leaders from cbcc to discuss not only our early college programs but also the accelerate stem academy dual

024enrollment course offerings and also their newly formed cte academy mr haas and i have attended local and regional cte advisory meetings to improve collaboration with other cte educators in our region and to address issues of concern among our cte educators and recently mr haas and i attended a conference given by the virginia association of career and technical education administrators which focused on training of new cte administrators and finally in august i met with administrators and cte department chairs to discuss financial needs for the year and together we developed a budget that utilizes local state and federal funds that are available to us not only are we using these funds to support our programs as dr whitford shared we do have over 30 business partners at susie gibson alone from our community and that does not

025include partnerships with our schools and they all have been very supportive of our cte programs so as we do build on these past successes and continue the work already happening in bedford county the instruction team has established some goals for the future looking ahead our cte teachers continue to look for ways to expand their programs we want to increase the number of cte certifications offered as well as opportunities to take cte dual enrollment courses later you will hear about three new course offerings proposed in the program of studies each new course request represents the efforts of bedford county principals and cte departments to offer courses that are relevant and engaging to students as they seek to gain skills needed for post-secondary success one way we are supporting cte as a division is by developing better

026processes to help students complete their academic and career plans the virginia department of education regulations that have been established by the standards for accrediting public schools in virginia include provisions for each middle and high school student to have a personal learning plan and a course of study that aligns with the student's academic and career goal the academic and career plans must include but they are not limited to a program of study for high school graduation and a post-secondary career pathway based on the student's academic and career interests to align this important task of bedford county practices we've been using a program called major clarity an effort to create awareness of programs available to students and to create courses that are relevant to their future our schools will continue to use this valuable program students will

027complete academic and career plans and major clarity take an interest survey to help them discover potential careers provide the opportunity to explore a variety of careers based on their interests and project future courses that can help them achieve their post-secondary goals while this is not the first year we have used this program one of our goals moving forward is for classroom teachers to fully engage in the registration process when students begin to register for courses early in the second semester our counselors are usually the only staff who discuss courses for the next year this year we want all classroom teachers including those in cte departments to have conversations that assist students in linking course content with future interests and aspirations these conversations will help students make more informed choices about course offerings that are appropriate

028to their skills interest and future goals the academic and career plans developed by students allow them to make an informed graduation plan and not only help them see the benefits of courses in which they are enrolled but administrators will also have information to help them develop a student's plan of study for a pathway with the career cluster they will know not only current course enrollments but also have information about anticipated courses and these course progressions will establish a link between the career cluster they've selected the pathway and specific course selections while schools plan to meet future student course requests as we look ahead to the future of cte in bedford county we have already engaged in discussions with school administrators and teachers about how to increase access and availability of course offerings to all students

029across the division while we have a variety of courses available to students and school schedules are based on student enrollment requests we are still exploring innovative ways to provide opportunities for students from a variety of career clusters even if these courses are not available to them at their base school so we're very proud of the work of our teachers and staff at suzy gibson we want to continue to increase the number of course offerings and programs available to these students and so for example susie gibson would like to increase the number of virtual course offerings that are accessible to students at the bay school currently we have five courses we have intro to health and medical sciences medical terminology biotechnology forensics and pharmacy tech another program we are actively exploring is creating an hvac program

030for our students so our hope is to begin an hvac program in the next school year there are a number of steps that will have to happen and it's going to make this a challenging task the first step will be to gain approval for offering these courses through the bedford county program of studies which i'll share about later next we will need to complete an application to the virginia department of education to offer a new cte course this often takes months to get approved because of the depth of information required to obtain prior to completing the application for example students must be surveyed to determine course interest and evidence must be presented that new industry openings in our area will hire for the skills taught in the proposed course upon gaining approval to offer this

031course we will also need to use cte funds to invest in the equipment needed to run such a program and the final and probably most significant obstacle will be to find a qualified instructor upon program of studies approval to offer hvac the ct supervisor the susie gibson principal and myself will begin to take necessary steps to lay the foundation for an hvac program in bedford county finally we hope to expand community partnerships as we seek to support our local economy of providing qualified graduates who can meet local workforce needs just last week we had two businesses reach out to us about how we can work together to provide employment opportunities and career internships for bedford county students so as you can see we have a very strong cte program in bedford county but we also

032have a lot of work to do this is a field that is growing there's a clear demand in our local businesses and we have a lot of work ahead of us with a solid foundation in place we can partner with our families and community to create more and better opportunities for our students in bedford county so this time we'll be happy to take any questions from the board all right mr lamy um i think i know the answer to this but i'm asking anyway just for confirmation purposes uh are all the high school based schools on the same schedule class schedule uh on the same bell schedule no sir okay does that cause the problems for the cause problems for those kids that want to take cte courses at suzy gibbs actually no it it

033actually i don't think it does but we try to work around them and we do have to get creative with it but is it is it a problem it potentially could be and we just have to get really creative with with how we come up with solutions the feedback i've gotten from susie gibson instructors is that it is in fact a problem okay and so that's i think going forward that's something that we need if we're going to take this seriously this is something that we need to address and we need to address it sooner rather than later agreed and we've we've talked as an instruction team and we actually broached that with high school principals recently and middle school principals at the program of studies meeting to say one way we can share staff

034and one way we can ship equity of programming is to be on similar schedules so that we can share staff and we can have the same hours you know at susie gibson and things like that so it's definitely something we will be exploring because i have had some instructors come to me and express frustration that you know there are some students that would like to be able to take their courses and this this is you know several instructors um across the different disciplines uh that have expressed frustration that the different class schedule bell schedules that the high schools are inhibiting uh the best student participation in the programs at susie gibson so we need to we need to fix that yeah and and i would love if you ever feel comfortable sharing like specifics we

035definitely want to address that one of the things we did do this year is you know for cbcc dual enrollment and governor school they set their hours and then kids come and then they stay there for the full hours susie g gibson was doing a great job of trying to work with all three high schools and they were running three different programs of hours to meet you know all the needs of all the high schools and we said this year that can't happen but these are suzy g gifts and hours and now we need to work courses around them so that they're not trying to adapt to three high schools so very good point and we will be looking into that so i think the easy fix is put put everyone on the same you

036know schedule problem solved that's that's all i have oh okay so dr bewley is harrison um i i agree with mr leaney i think that i mean there are other issues also that impact different bell schedules and i think if you could have people on the same schedule in all three high schools it would really open up opportunities for our high school students do we have just i don't think we do i'm just asking do we have any issues with regard to students getting this one cte credit it has we run into anything that's um i don't know about issues i i think what we've got to do is really think about what student interests are and so for example it's a limited data set but it's it's something there's a lot of interest in

037the health and health and medical sciences field and so we really need to think about the next three four five years how can we really provide opportunities for those students so they're so they're in courses that they see as relevant and that are interesting to them um and so certainly an obstacle would be just just courses that that students maybe don't find relevant to them and so so the more we can offer the hopefully we can take care of that problem um and what are you mentioned that the one of the issues is going to be finding qualified instructors what are we doing to try to fix that problem i think a really important part of that is is community partnerships with businesses and and i've already talked to mr haas and that is one

038of his first tasks is to set up meetings with local businesses there are needs out there there are needs for employees and i think they would be more than willing to work with us potentially find instructors we're going to have to advertise early and so again as soon as we can get approved approval to offer this course from this board then we start that search and we and we start to talk to our communities the other thing i'll say about mr haas is he has also reached out to regional cte directors ct directors from the doe and and he's just establishing those relationships and what we can do is use our resources and use their input just to try to find someone who's qualified to do that and so again if we can if we

039can put the word out early we can work with our community partners i think we have a good chance but that's i think that's always going to be a challenge but it's still worthwhile to pursue programs that are relevant for these students i have one more question um i was very impressed with all of the business partners that you had up there that it really was um and i was also very impressed with the the dinner that was provided to us by the culinary students um are they able to use any of those business partners for additional practice doing that or is it is their ability to do that just very limited and why is it limited no do you mean specifically with mitigation or just in general as no just you know i think

040they did such a great job and it would be great practice if one of these business partners would allow them to prepare a lunch or whatever they needed yeah i'd like to cook for us every month personally but we've used them for student teacher lunch and learns and things like that to kind of um when we meet with new people coming in and things like that we frequently use them they do a fabulous job and i do think some of our community partners use them in different ways i think um the cove and mitigations have definitely been a challenge for all of our cte programs and all of our internships and workplaces but um yes i think that all of our programs but especially our culinary i've been to some actual community events that they

041were assisting with and so that's been fun to watch yeah thank you so much mr chairman uh dr tomsper you had mentioned that mr haas is um going to be meeting with elementary principals just to kind of have some dialogue and discussion at the elementary level i would like when he does do that if you would certainly report back to us sharing what uh that dialogue has been what he's learned from the elementary principles in terms of needs and and uh ideals that maybe the principals uh have shared with him i do think it's a great idea that he's gonna begin that dialogue with the elementary principles just laying that foundation and and just giving our elementary students the um possibility of what they could do in the future as a career so yeah i'd

042like to hear what his uh ideals are and what that dialogue was or um any of the uh cte courses the cte academy or or any of the courses offered at the bedford campus are they all in lynchburg campus you know i have to look into that i i i think most of them are at lynchburg but i don't want to say for sure it's a no to memphis i need to check into that i'm i'm 100 sure it's all at the lynchburg campus um the nice thing is we already take a bus to the stem academy and the hours of the cte academy are the same so that that has kind of worked in our favor there and um uh which six courses at suzy gibson are julia's role of courses pharmacy tech medical

043terminology the early childhood education courses and the culinary arts courses and then the agricultural fabrication and emerging technologies which are at the base schools that's also dual enrollment okay and one last question what's the difference between the early childhood education and the teachers for tomorrow early childhood education focuses on preschool before before five years old i mean they actually run a reduced cost preschool for our own teachers here in bedford they have a small group of students that go there for part of the day teachers for tomorrow focuses on elementary teachers and dr calvert and her team have been working with university of lynchburg to start a secondary teacher program at the high schools and so we're trying to get that off the ground so we have some some pipelines for secondary teachers also good

044grow your own trying mr yeah so i just wanted to make a statement i know it's easy for us to sit in here and say well three different high schools three different bell systems just change them but i would certainly want to understand the impact to each school if you were to make those changes not saying no but we need to understand the impact for that school and those students the second comment i would make is i would like to encourage susie g gibson to go to other schools so i understand like auto needs to be at suzy g because they have to have that equipment but if there's other classes that allow us to travel then if we have the numbers let's go to the other schools we can still represent suzy g but

045we would go to them in order to give them those classes so just let me throw that out um you mentioned that you were on an event or there was an advisory board that you met with what did that board consist of um local business leaders um they're the lynchburg region of economic development just just it's really an opportunity just to kind of meet and talk about certain issues uh the one that led up was the cvcc uh cte coordinator who really just kind of brought us all together so i was i was a part of that i didn't believe that i was just a part of that and um was region 2000 part of that too they were a part of one of the conferences i went to in lynchburg and they are yes

046they were a part of this too okay i don't know but they typically are they are a part of most apartments i've been i don't remember specifically that but they were a part of then are we doing any because i know i've heard them speak numerous times on different things they said that they could hire all the welders and all the masons they could get straight off the bat so are we doing anything to get those programs good well we do have at liberty high school we do have actually a dual enrollment uh welding class right now oh i wanna go about masonry or even works for masonry uh we have not explored that yet but part of what we have to do is we have to look at local industry demands and think about

047course offerings and so that's part of what we do with mr with mr haas is to see what are the industries out there and then over the next few years how do we get those programs built up okay um and then you listed in somewhere in here that manufacturing now when i think of manufacturing i think of a factory but what is this and telling so i think you're talking it does entail welding um it it has some of the i might need some help from my high school principal some of the mag manufacturing courses or agricultural courses do you know john so a lot through our tech ed classes so it leads into advanced manufacturing um there's a lot of laser printer use those kind of things in that also just they make projects

048out of wood woodworking lays thank you well that was a very impressive lineup i know we've had a lot of interest in our cte programs lately and i don't think a lot of people in the community realize just how much we are doing and i appreciate the continued focus on doing more and being more responsive to the needs in our business community so thank you and look forward to hearing that conversation and look forward to hearing more conversations about changing bell schedules uh to have one system county-wide that's gonna be a very interesting discussion all right since i'm guessing we can probably not discuss assessment in five minutes [Laughter] then let's go ahead and break early for dinner and we will resume that discussion at the appropriate time after 7 o'clock is [Music] okay um

049[Music] is [Music] all right i'd like to resume this meeting of the bedford county school board would you please rise for the pledge of the united states of america into the republic for which it stands one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice for all recognition of students and or staff mr brian edwards um mr chairman dr bergen would you please come forward tonight we recognize a teacher from liberty high school who has gone above and beyond to help make our school division what it is earlier this year liberty high school english teacher matt husselton became the latest bedford county teacher of the year it's a high enough honor in itself close to a thousand teachers in bedford county winning teacher of the year is a big deal osselton wasn't finished there he applied

050for and then was awarded virginia's region 5 teacher of the year region 5 is the largest region in virginia and this made mr esselton one of only eight finalists for virginia teacher of the year they're somewhere in the neighborhood of 90 000 teachers in virginia one of the final eight is way beyond a big deal tonight we recognize bedford county and virginia region 5 teacher of the year mr matt husselton [Applause] um [Music] this is mr husselton i wore my liberty mask tonight just for you all right we will now move into the public comment portion of tonight's meeting public comment portion is limited to 25 minutes individual speakers are limited to three minutes while anyone representing an organized group will be allowed five minutes provided they are the sole speaker from that group or

051organization speakers may not give their time to another speaker speakers are asked to state their name address voting district and organization or group if applicable the school board is here to listen to your comments but will not engage or respond to speakers during this 25 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 bill will ring indicating a person's three minutes have expired mr edwards will also serve as timekeeper for our cumulative 25-minute period when mr edwards three-minute timer bell rings please discontinue speaking and allow the next person in line to come to the podium

052should you be unable to finish your comments please send them or give them to mrs johnson and she will give them to board members mr edwards mr chairman we have seven speakers that are scheduled this evening dave dietrich rachel cooper joy carey on behalf of moms for liberty wendy dunmeyer amy snead benjamin briscoe on behalf of bedford county patriots and christina childress on behalf of the bedford county education association thank you mr dietrich thank you ladies and gentlemen critical race theory is embedded in culturally responsive teaching a euphemism for the former under the deceptive guise of social justice diversity and equity crt systematically deconstructs and repudiates the vision of our founders what was the founding vision it can be seen in the preamble to the declaration of independence all people in all places and at

053all times are entitled to god-given natural rights there there are no exceptions under any pretext this makes the united states of america a nation based upon an exceptional ideal it is the responsibility of government to protect these inherent rights including through facilitating education educators are the stewards of that sublime american ideal when government fails to protect natural rights it is being unjust and tyrannical today we are racing toward a dangerous precipice under a seductive mirage the american ideal is undermined by an ideology that employs condemnation redistribution and imagine redress by rigorous censorship student access the real story of america is also denied all of this is done with that parental concurrence for consent of the govern is inimical to crt crt cannot educate and unite but only indoctrinate and divide crt does so through so-called

054social justice diversity equity and multiculturalism these are cultural marxist concepts under them we are no longer united around the sublime ideal of god-given natural rights for all and equality for all under the law we become a people separated promoters demand special attention and favor for some others are condemned uncritically and without forgiveness and compassion history is rewritten mostly the common bond of liberty is weakened by the dictates of those granting themselves special powers that determine unique subcultures real or imagined also threatening the vision of the founders in the process is this the education we want for our children thank you mr dietrich rachel cooper hello my name is rachel cooper i live in district seven and i would like to thank all of our military men and women who have served our country tonight as

055well as a veteran's wife my husband's right back there and our son goes to bed for primary i like to address why my son's medical records were released from the school without permission why his medical records were also lost he's been unable to take his medication until his actual nurse was to come back in from the nurse she was stepped in it was a hipaa violation it is under investigation y'all will get a report from his doctor when the investigation is done because they sent several times his medical records i sat down and so is his father they were lost they have no idea where they went or who had access to them it makes me very concerned that my son was told he would not get his epipen if he had to work reaction

056because they didn't have it on file when it was sent to them they even had his epipen but refused to say that he could have it if he needed it i also will say that i do not agree with children who cannot wear masks with disability or any other medical reasons to be punished and told you will not be able to participate in the contest of wearing a mask and get a reward at anything i do not agree with that because my child is one of them i know it is okay to teach our children to lose but not like that because there are several other children in fact county schools to captain mass and to tell a child you're not going to participate it's wrong because how is my six-year-old supposed to feel when

057he's the only one in his class who cannot wear a mask and get told you want to sit this out that's not okay at all and that needs to be addressed miss amanda is a wonderful nurse she got the paperwork right away put it on file it's been giving my son his medicine every day when it's needed and she also has a subject that said it will be kept safe it's sad to say that we had a nurse in our school system this is the second time that nurse was hired in upper county that was hired for better primary that was lost medical documents that's not okay that's why i love nurse amanda she called me right away when she realized the paperwork was missing and wanted to know why it was missing she also

058communicated with the doctor's office who also told her the document was that and they have all the proof of it i just need y'all to keep in mind that our children's safety their medical documents need to be kept safe at all costs because if it gets out and our children are in danger or need their epiphan and can't be administrated to them it's very sad my six-year-old can give it to himself and i understand that school wasn't loving but he was taught how to use it in case he ever needed to and that's all i have to say father [Applause] my daughter was an active young healthy vibrant college student who was voted to be team captain this year she's a junior in college and she was going to be the starting guard my daughter's

059university required that she had to get the vaccine in order to return to campus and in order to participate in her sport after receiving the second dose of the vaccine we had to rush my daughter to the emergency room she felt very ill i want to share a few words with what my daughter went through because of the vaccine she says after taking the vaccine i started to throw up blood and poo blood it was so painful at times i felt like i was dying i lost 35 pounds in two weeks i had to quit my job i was bedridden i had to quit the one sport i played my whole life i was failing in school nothing felt right i never thought a simple shot would take everything away from me you are a

060burden why can't i see your rib cage you're so skinny you might as well quit you can't even run down the court this is what people told her because of the vaccine you must be on drugs every single day her mind just got deeper and deeper away she felt like she was ugly she felt like she was worthless and she felt like she disappointed our family i'm here because now they're saying that there's going to be a mandatory vaccine for children 5 to 11. my son is in that category and he attends becker county schools and i do not agree with that i already watched my daughter suffer we had a family member die because of the vaccine not covet the vaccine we had several family members that got sick because of the vaccine and

061i'm standing here for all the children of bedford county because they should not [Applause] [Music] [Applause] wendy dunmeyer hello as you said my name is wendy dunmeyer i live in district 4. thank you all bot for your service here as well as our veterans um our be bold bedford movement started this september and i said from my i said to myself from the beginning if i could just get face to face time with the board members that voted for masking i would ask them what is their line that they are not willing to cross for the safety of these kids and on election day i was able to spend the day in monita with the johnsons and also the holbrook family i happened to ask jason that day what would you do if the experimental

062vaccine was mandated for five to 11 year olds and i'm glad i followed your speech here his answer is we would have to see what the law says and that was all i needed to hear to know that what we have been working on since the election season began was worthwhile and as we heard from thousands of voters on november 2nd this mandate is there lying in the sand they are not willing to cross it on october 7th my husband and i dropped off a handful of petitions to each of the board members here as well as in the mail to wendell walker bob good steve newman kathy byron all of which support our efforts this petition was drafted on behalf of the supporters of bedford county patriots because of your lack of response to

063prior requests to move the meeting location and lengthen the speaking times your own board members have asked for the same in previous meetings and it has been ignored it's a shame that it required a petition to see any movement on this topic i think it was mr hill that brought up the idea to rotate the meetings into each district with which after talking about it with several people we agree that this would give each school an opportunity to showcase their building talk about problems that are in their specific areas etc finally why are your teachers addressed and what is an immediate action that you can take today um we would ask that you would please reconsider the ban of parents in your building your teachers and our children need their support i've been a volunteer

064in two different schools for four years throughout the library in the classrooms doing bulletin boards for teachers doing things outside for the teachers i was there one to three days a week between thomas jefferson and forest middle school who is helping the teachers fill in where the parents are not there anymore let back the parents in to have lunch with their younger kids let them help plan and facilitate upcoming holiday parties there is no logical reason that parents are being kept out of the classroom any number of parents and their kids could show up at target and the next day they're back in school and they have masks on and parents aren't allowed in the building is this about safety or the governor's compliance let the parents back in the only thing that it's going

065to cost you is a little bit of [Applause] you mrs dunmeyer courage snead good evening my name is amy sneed and i'm in district 7. i also am a part of the organization moms for liberty and our organization does seek to work with school boards and parents i want to draw your attention to some concerns regarding reading materials that are available in our high school libraries for parents and families that are listening here or maybe watching online i will do my best to keep my talk at a pg-13 level but please know that adult subject matter will be discussed so if you would like to ask your children to step outside for a few minutes please feel free to do so it's gotten to my attention as you've heard nationally as well that books are

066available in our libraries that are appropriate inappropriate excuse me at various age levels for example the book the kite runner by khaled hussini which has been found at all three high school libraries in bedford county details and graphic explanation a homosexual rape in beloved by tony morrison rape and bestiality are described in horrible detail there are eight references i can tell you from my own experience that i attempted to read that book when i was in my 20s and i actually stopped because it was so disturbing you've been provided a list tonight by miss johnson of the books that i'm recommending be removed from the library this is in no way any attempt to suppress the freedom of speech in writing or censorship however simply to remove language and imagery that is not appropriate at

067this age level for example i will reference the book the glass castle by jeanette walls you received a copy of several different pages and quotes from that which i will not read for the very reasons i'm discussing why it should not be in our classroom if any one of these lines from that page i gave you were texted from one student to another or written on a note or left in a locker they would be a violation of the code of conduct rb5 located on page 30 of the 2021-22 code of conduct as well as rb8 and rb9 that's classified as a level 2 violation and would be result in detention or in-school suspension so my question to you is if that can be if that can't be said or texted why is it available

068in our libraries if you aren't sure what i'm saying is true choose a book from that list read it and tell me if you would wrap it up and put it underneath the christmas tree of a teenager you love i please hear me out i am not faulting any member of this board for the presence of these materials but they have made their way into our bookshelves of the libraries in the last couple of over the years excuse me but it's our responsibility to take them out and i am requesting that they be removed immediately and an audit of the school libraries be conducted i do have a local children's librarian author and member of the classical conversations education committee who has volunteered her time to replace the questionable content with books that still handle

069tough topics but without introducing such language and imagery to our students a few years ago i read the book the hiding place by corey tenboom she details the experiences of her family in concentration camps during the holocaust in a purple excuse me particularly memorable portion she asks her father about sex sin as she calls it she doesn't understand what that means i'll finish in just a second i'm almost done i promise he tells her excuse me her hand her father hands her a very heavy suitcase much too heavy for a small child to carry he tells her i would be a pretty poor father who would ask a little girl to carry such a load it's the same way with you corey with knowledge some knowledge is too heavy for children when you are older

070and stronger you can bear it but for now you must trust me to carry it for you i'm here tonight to tell you that while i personally find many of these topics completely inappropriate at any age with reference to our school-aged children the knowledge of these things is much too heavy to bear [Applause] briscoe with the bedford county patriots has five minutes [Applause] good evening my name is ben briscoe i'm in district two in bedford county i have six-year-old twins that attend bedford primary school thanks to a zone change request that i put in just before last school year my little girl has an iep through the county because of delayed speech and issues with learning regarding that and this is something that i have very actively been attempting to address even as early as

071age two i have brought in speech pathologists and speech therapists to help coach her to be able to pronounce words correctly something that has been hugely helpful at home is her ability to look at my face when i speak to her and for me to look at her face when she speaks to me my little boy has a newfound and growing fear of the world that we live in due to unsolicited explanation of current events that others believe he should be concerned with that is an ongoing discussion that i needed to have but not in the way that i'm forced to now as i look around me tonight i see both people donning masks and those without and i understand that that is due to an individualistic response to the input that we receive regarding

072our own personal health and the impact that new and rising trends may have on it however i'm not here to talk about an adult's ability to choose what is right or wrong for them i'm here to talk about a parent's ability to choose what is right or wrong for their child i for one did not send my children to public school so that they may be indoctrinated or so that they would be taught to be bound by fear or damned to a life of servitude all in the name of the greater good we all have the ability to think for ourselves as to what is or is not okay but the moment that we begin to force our opinion upon people that are too young to decide for themselves is the moment that we step

073into something truly unforgivable it is a parent's responsibility to bring up their child it is a parent's responsibility to teach them the difference between right and wrong but most importantly it is a parent's responsibility to protect the liberties given by god and promise at birth to their children part of developmental growth and social understanding is based on body language facial expression accounts for 55 percent of the understood meaning or conveyance of a message and that means that you are by default disadvantaging both of my children one of whom already has issues with communication and the other along with many children in the county is now functioning with a mandated handicap and flipped it upon him by you on this board to touch on the other half any teacher administrator official or public servant that works

074to strike fear into the hearts and minds of impressionable young children by telling them that they need a mask for protection against what i and many others in the county believe to be a ploy for removal of rights should be out of a job effective immediately there is too much misunderstanding politicizing profiteering and propagandist rhetoric revolving around this so-called pandemic for any of you to undermine a parent's right to decide for their child and for you to cause them inescapable fear regarding something that quite frankly is a lie and a sham is grounds for legal action additionally the isolated child because they don't fall in line as loyal subjects is to punish those brave enough to think outside the box that their government so gracious graciously provided them much like what happened to socrates or

075even giordano bruno who both resisted and brought about new ways of thinking in long-standing fields of science until sentenced to death you are condemning them because of disagreement with the new social norms prescribed to us by our lovely government that surely isn't corrupted by monetary favor and backroom dealings certainly doesn't have a history of overstepping their bounds directly onto our sovereignty as free citizens and without a doubt doesn't want to profit off of the fear and division that they create amongst different classes and demographics to respect the rule of law is an honorable thing to be able to determine the difference between rule of law and mob rule is a requirement to live freely in society to bow to the will of tyrants is to be a coward to allow children to be subjected to

076the rhetoric of those put in place by trial or election who vehemently despise individual liberty is a curse of the american way of life make the right decisions respect individual liberty before rule of law honor a parent's right to decide and keep fear-driven propaganda out of the mouths of those that we employ in the ears of the new generation being taught by them that's it thank you [Applause] thank you mr briscoe christina childress bcea five minutes good evening tonight i speak on behalf of the bedford county education association after a rather bumpy start to the 2021-22 school year tonight i just come with some words of gratitude a thank you note if you will we as staff have noticed decisions that bcps leadership is making to help our staff and we just want to say

077thank you thank you for extra compensation for ell teachers who have been spread way too thin across the division thank you for extra pay for covering classes now both for teachers and for paraprofessionals whose days are interrupted by emergencies thank you for overtime pay for custodians who are understaffed and have to work extra hours to keep our schools safe and sanitary thank you so very much for five extra teacher work days one of which is tomorrow and they will literally help ease the burden of time loss that extra money cannot cover thank you for trying to hire site-based substitutes who would be available in buildings with the lowest job fill rate we are so excited to see these people and we're kind of wondering if a parade would be too strong or appropriate we as

078staff see the central office instruction team covering classes in our buildings when no substitutes can be found in my 20 years as an educator that has never happened that we have seen and it speaks well to the value that you are placing on instruction so the bca would like to thank you for all you are doing and we see your work firsthand we are still tired probably more than before but we are cautiously optimistic that you are listening and that you are trying and that everybody has the same goal in mind there's still more to do we have plenty of suggestions for anyone willing to listen we have suggestions about library staffing and social worker caseloads and nutrition staff compensation substitute teacher pay and even that pesky copier toner which is now literally gone in

079three schools we're always ready with suggestions but tonight we just want to thank you we hope you will continue to listen especially to the results of the pending salary study that the division is undertaking and ultimately we just pray that you will prioritize staff over stuff as we enter a new budget cycle so for real just thank you [Applause] okay do we have a motion to approve the consent agenda mr chairman i knew that we approved the consent agenda as listed okay we have a motion by dr miele to approve the consent agenda as presented do we have a second second second by mr lingard agenda is approved unanimously so now we will go back to the staff reports that we did not get to before the dinner break and so dr now that you've

080had some time to prepare so assessment update dr woodford and mr blankenship we're going to start with mr blankmanship and then pass it over to me but we do want to share just some assessment updates from the virginia department of education and just give you some data information from first quarter and talk you through a little bit of that and then also share what the instruction team is doing to address the data concerns and so we'll turn thank you first of all let's start out with where we are now which is where we were two years ago in terms of accreditation ratings because we have held the same accreditation ratings that we had uh in 2019 20 and that was based on the data the testing data from the 2018-19 school year so just a

081quick rehash of where we were or where we are liberty middle school is credited with conditions and all the other schools are accredited and i just put some notes there of where we had some issues with liberty middle school was in the achievement gap in english and and those gap groups uh just to cover those there there are some based on race ethnicity uh there also are students with disabilities english language learners and disadvantaged students so those are the gap groups i'm talking about they measure in those groups also from that data from 2018-19 there was some other areas of concern in other schools that had level two or something one had level three uh that is the rating for how these groups performed on the math and in and english tests at that time

082just a couple notes so there were no tests administered in spring of 2020 because schools closed down and we didn't test uh in spring of 21 as you've heard probably the scores were not great some of that was due to the fact that our participation rate was down students who were out of virtual some of them chose not to come in to take the test or were absent so we had a lower participation rate that year and also in bedford county the students who did take the test and who scored in that normal range where we would give them an expedited retake or retake right after the test we didn't give those because of uh time and you know the mitigation strategies and bringing them back in for another test so we we did not

083uh do those exercise retakes so if you look at this we're basically right now rated on a school year in which in most of our schools the majority of those students have moved on from elementary to middle middle to high and some of our high schoolers are out in the real world now so that's just some notes on where we are as far as ratings going forward this school year for the 2022-23 accreditation year the state has informed us that we are going to be measured on the 2017 18 2018 19 and then this current school year 20 21 22. those would be the three sets of testing data that would be used in the three year average you can make accreditation through the one year which would be this school year or the three

084year average and so also you can show improvement and that one improvement would be from the 2018-19 data to this year so that's what's going to be used for accreditation calculations this school year so something that happened fairly recently was that the general assembly mandated a common growth assessment for all students in grades three through eight in reading and in math so we have been we've completed that for the fall this this common growth assessment is required and it will be over a three year period it's going to build up to a three test per year this current school year we've just been testing in a one time in the fall and then again spring so this test is also going to have a parent portal uh available now that will become available on monday

085the 15th of november we probably won't be rolling it out on the 15th of november because we have a lot of planning to do but that parent portal is going to allow these students parents of students in grades three to eight to see their child's summary of student performance and see how they did on these tests and and that would allow them to work with these students at home if they choose so this is kind of a a guide here so this is the first year of these growth assessments and as you can see we're gonna we've given the fall and then the the spring sol will be the full length sol on these growth assessments it's basically a shortened version of your sol the sol contents there it is based on last year's sol

086so a fourth grader this year would be assessed on third grade sols in the fall and then in the spring they would have the full fourth grade sol test so that sol in the spring never changes it's always going to be the full length sol and that is what's going to be basically your pass or fail for your sol the growth assessments that are administered right now in the fall and next year in the fall and the winter and then the sol in the spring those will be used to measure growth on students who do not pass the sol so if a student does not pass in the spring we can look back to their fall or winter scores and and determine whether that student even though they failed showed growth throughout the year so

087basically the other thing about these progress assessments would be we can show or tell right now and teachers that's why it's so important for teachers to have this data what students have mastered and what should come next it's kind of a measure of how they are the students are are performing at this point and so they can design and plan for what they need to teach what they need to re-teach the actual report is called a student description descriptor by question report which has each sol listed that's assessed and the teachers can look at those reports and tell you know if certain sols the students did not do well on they can also go back and and work with that um these these growth assessments don't have a passing score so it's not a pass

088or failed test and there is no summary report by division so we can't say that 70 or 80 percent of our students are passing these because it does not have a pass fail on there so there's no summary reports for this it's basically meant to be used by teachers and parents and all staff to determine where these students are and to work forward from that at this point i'm going to turn it back over to dr woodford for her assessment data thank you mr blankenship um as you can see there have been many updates to state requirements and the instruction team implemented a plan this summer to gather assessment data to ensure that teachers had the information they needed to address learning laws after receiving feedback from teachers i do want you to know we

089have adjusted that schedule for the second nine weeks uh for and for the rest of the school year and i'll explain a little bit um why we are doing that um so just to give you an idea we have state assessments that are required and then we have local assessments that we were using to kind of fill in the gaps so our state assessments our kindergartners take the vkrp which is a virginia kindergarten readiness test it measures social emotional skills some reading skills and math skills the state is also giving growth assessments in math as mr blankenship said for grades three through eight in reading the state requires us to give the pals literacy screening in kindergarten through third grade and then the pals plus in grades four and five which is also a literacy

090screening of sorts a reading leveling tests and then also growth assessments in reading for grades three through eight based on what state assessments we had available we as an instruction team went in and tried to think about local assessments that could give our teachers some data in those holes and so we started with using ixl which is a math program it's online giving the diagnostic math test to grades one and two to give us a little bit more math data and then our instruction team began to work on benchmarks our we do have benchmarks that are ready to roll out at the end of this nine weeks we wanted to be sure that we had adjusted our pacing guides this summer to address learning loss and to address the skills that we knew were high

091level that we needed to review and we also wanted to get teacher feedback about the benchmarks because we knew that our teachers who are giving those benchmarks and teaching the content to give us some really good feedback so those benchmarks are coming out the second third and fourth quarter um for reading for um grade levels we wanted to use our basal series and give what we call the hmh reading assessment and we were going to give that grades 2 through 12 for the entire year but after some feedback from teachers we realized that adding that reading assessment in addition to the pals data that we were already getting for k5 um that we really needed to back off of that and then we will start to use our own reading benchmarks that have been created

092by our instruction team and our teachers so hmh you may be hearing some about that we've got some baseline data but we won't be using that again it'll be an optional tool if teachers feel like they need it locally we do require a writing sample from kindergarten through 12th grade every nine weeks we feel like that's important to ensure that we're monitoring writing instruction and then we do have select schools that won't be doing benchmarks this year they're going to be using the map assessment the map assessment is a very skill specific test we were able to get that specifically for our schools who are in school improvement liberty middle school who is a school that's accredited with conditions and then our schools who had some of those tier two and tier three indicators um

093in the liberty zone um and some in the stanton river zone so we do have some select schools that are using map testing exclusively and we're not going to ask them to replicate that with a benchmark test so i just wanted you to understand some of that because we do have a variety of assessments that we're looking at this year so i want to share some of the data and i tried to stay a little bit more high level and more division-wide even though we have schools that are using some specific tests and those very specific tests like map testing and hmh or diagnostic testing the teachers are using that very well to figure out what skills need to be remediated in their students so i'm going to give you a little bit higher level

094data for our bkrp math our kindergarteners coming into kindergarten scored a 77 percent passing or at benchmark for math which is a very strong start for our kindergartners we were very pleased with that um in our ixl diagnostic math for grades one and two seventy nine percent of our first graders and seventy percent of our second graders um were able to meet the the benchmark for the beginning of their grade level again we felt very good about that that those students were coming with some pretty solid skills um and thinking about as they move forward in their grade level for pals again our kindergarteners um their beginning benchmark 75 percent net benchmark we're at grade level our first graders 71 percent met the benchmark um that does not mean that 71 at the end of

095the year will still be where they need to be that just means they're ready and they have the skills at the beginning of the year and we will continue to work on remediating their weaknesses our second graders were a little bit lower with 63 percent of our students meeting the beginning of the year benchmark our teachers have been using pals k5 for many many years there are lots of smaller assessments our reading specialists know how to use pals to remediate and work with students so we feel good that that gave us some really good data for our students our pals plus um well i'm sorry pals for third grade 72 percent of our students at grade level fourth grade with our pals plus 85 percent and fifth grade 77 so we feel really good about

096our elementary reading data and for the most part math data um we don't have um any other specific math data other than our growth assessments which i'm going to hit on in just a minute and as mr blankenship said there's no pass or fail with the growth assessment um so in looking at our growth assessments in particular as mr blankenship said our growth reset growth assessments are now required in reading and math and there is no pass fail um to compute growth the virginia department of education has given divisions a table that contain ranges of student scores from a level one to a level four and beyond the ranges are used specifically to show growth between grade levels at different times of the year it is very a very confusing chart and we have practiced

097as an instructional team multiple times with mr blankenship trying to read those charts and determine growth and so if any of you would like us to go through that privately with you we'll be happy to we felt like it was a a little bit much for a good thursday night at a board meeting but we are happy to share those tables with you if you're interested in learning a little bit more um we did take the ranges the instruction team to work and try to predict the percentage of content from last year's sols that our students may be confident in i want to be sure to say that this is our educated guess at this time and it's not information that we're receiving from the virginia department of education we are basically looking at student

098scores who appear to be in the higher ranges of those tiers and we are saying we feel pretty good that here's where our content is it's not an exact science so i say that as you're looking at these scores for instance i'd like you to look at the the third grade reading if we were to use in our educated guessing on these ranges we would say that about 51 of our kids we feel confident understand the second grade reading skills from the year before in math our third graders we only feel really confident about 23 percent of those students now i do want to give a little caveat here because these scores appear low these third graders are coming back to school they've never had an sol test they've never had sol testing practice which

099we do a lot before we give a spring sol for many of them it was the first time that they took an online test in a test nav program because remember last year we didn't really have those programs we had a lot of students virtual we were just getting them back this fall and we just didn't focus on sol testing practice like we did these are first graders these third graders so did not have a normal school year last year and also left in march of their first grade year so we know that we have a lot of work to do there um so we're we're saying that as an instructional team we see and we're almost expecting some deficits there again educated yeses for math and reading in fourth and fifth grade very happy

100with our reading assessments um we have some concerns with some math deficits that our supervisor of math has been hitting hard since before school started and i don't think that that is a whole lot different from what we saw in some of our spring sol tests our kids scored rather low in math looking at our six um through eighth grade growth assessments again just the caveat we are making predictions this is not a pass fail you will see that just as we saw in our sol data that we shared with you two board meetings ago our our eighth graders 35 percent that we feel confident that kind of mirrors that seventh grade sol test that they took in the spring and those scores were very low so all of those things we've addressed we came

101kind of we hit the road coming in kind of fast on those and we had trainings for our teachers our math teachers are very aware we built into our pace and got extra support in math and so again in our predictions these are pretty low but i want to assure you the instruction team is is working on that and so to hear a little bit about what the instruction team is doing i am going to pass it over to dr trosper so previously the instruction team gave updates to the board on work we are doing to support teachers and students as we begin the school year and so the team shared our goals of supporting schools and addressing unfinished learning from the previous two school years and then giving our students the knowledge skills attributes

102and experiences identified by employers by higher education and the state board of education is critical for our future success so now all core subjects now have access to pacing guides curriculum resources and division assessment calendars our goal has been to collect common data across the division so we can provide strategic supports to schools whose data demonstrates areas of need so now that we have a clear picture of where our students are in their learning i will be updating you on how we're supporting schools and meeting the academic needs of their students since the board approved the restructuring of the instruction team we have continued to work hard to support schools and their efforts to recover from the pandemic in addition to the work done in the summer and i share with the board in september

103the instruction team is engaged in the following supports since the most recent update we've made it a priority to be a visible presence in schools we have intentionally visited each bedford county school to be in classrooms meet with teachers and administrators to discuss data to share teaching resources attend leadership team meetings and even cover classrooms and substitutes cannot be found our goal has been to serve our schools in whatever way schools need during this very challenging start to the school year our team has developed a collaborative culture with other departments in bedford county so for example we collaborated with the supervisor professional learning with sherry wiese to provide professional development to schools based on individual school needs some examples of professional development offered include unpacking the standards objective writing backwards design process canvas training for

104new hires best practices for strategies in reading and student engagement and strategies for hands-on learning as an additional support for new hires our team has also met with them individually as needed and as a group supervisors have been available upon administrator's request to assist in lesson planning and implementation moving forward we will continue to collaborate not only with schools but with other directors and their teams at the school board office as we have visited schools we have conducted classroom walkthroughs and provided feedback i have personally conducted observations with and four principles not only in schools where we have concerns but also with some of our new principles as a means to help them grow as instructional leaders every year principals along with their leadership teams create comprehensive school improvement plans this process includes a rigorous

105analysis of data creation of goals and developing action steps to meet these goals the instructional team has collaborated with schools to disaggregate the data and to develop plans of actions to meet individual school needs after plans were submitted dr cornett and i provided feedback to administrators on their csep for their school improvement plan including meeting individually with new principals as dr woodford shared in order to collect meaningful data and that's relevant on student learning schools have been given a variety of assessments there's the instruction team has supported schools by training administrators and staff in our new division assessment platform master connect as well as other programs assisting schools and implementing these assessments and meeting with teachers departments grade levels and even schools to analyze the data at a principal's meeting on november 9th administrators were

106given additional training on using student learning data in our schools principals were challenged with the question are you a data collector are you a data user they were given tools to support the implementation of data cultures in schools and through a continued effort to support students in recovering learning loss from the pandemic by using data to inform practices within their schools additionally members of our teams have met with school leadership teams departments reading specialists and individual teachers to support them in implementing these data-driven strategies that lead to student achievement and moving forward the division we'll have common math and english benchmarks as dr woodford shared at the end of each quarter so we can continue to monitor student progress and develop plans of support in addition to the assessment supports we've already discussed our team

107has been involved in creation of an implementation of alternate assessments during the last presentation we shared that in 2014 the general assembly amended the code of virginia to replace five history standards of learning tests in lieu of sol test this legislation required that each local school division administer a locally developed alternative assessment consistent with the virginia department of education guidelines they give us some flexibility they give some autonomy to the local school divisions and they allow for multiple assessments throughout the school year rather than one test at the end of the year and so we do have some alternate assessments in english science and social studies social studies having the largest number to prepare the team has created videos explaining the process as well as how to score assessments using the new common rubric developed

108by the doe letters were also prepared for schools to send home to each grade level that has an alternate assessment these assessments were designed by our bedford county teachers graded rubrics were sent home to parents so they knew how their students performed and our emphasis continues to be on skills that align with the five c's of the profile of the virginia graduate critical thinking creative thinking communication collaboration and citizenship skills alternate assessments are an excellent way to develop these skills outside of traditional classroom assessments earlier mr blankenship mentioned the school quality profiles and their role in reporting school performance the instruction team has also used these profiles to develop strategic supports to schools especially our schools who have been identified as level three in any category because they have been classified as level three they

109are also required to undergo a monitoring process with the virginia department of education this process involves three coaching meetings during the school year where principals share school data smart goals and essential actions in follow-up visits they share updates on implementation and impact to students the first monitoring meetings took place november the 4th and our principals received positive feedback from the office of school quality for the work they are doing and we are very proud of how they represented their communities their schools in bedford county as a division we are supporting these schools by attending leadership team meetings conducting observations walk-throughs facilitating observation collaboration among these administrators and really supporting the unique needs of each school most recently dr woodford along with various members of the instruction team and other staff led an academic review of

110liberty middle school we spent two days immersed in the school going into classrooms evaluating lesson plans and assessments and interviewing teachers we developed a comprehensive plan of essential actions and expectations designed to improve student academic achievement in the area of english language arts i've attended webinars offered by the office of school quality on topics such as conducting a comprehensive needs assessment key components of a school improvement plan how to improve graduation rates and reduce dropout rates and understanding the monitoring process principles of level three schools will attend with me as we work to improve concerns over student achievement in our level three schools so moving forward the instruction team plans to be very intentional in our response to student learning needs we are committed to remaining a visible presence in schools while collaborating with principals

111and division leadership to develop solutions to the challenges associated with recovering learning loss from the pandemic we'll do so through our commitment to promoting professional growth providing targeted intervention to schools and maintaining a school a focus on our mission which is empowering learners for student success so this time we'll take any questions questions to the board it's harrison yes thank you um dr chauffeur um just a question for you um the academic review that you just mentioned um that was held at liberty middle school where you guys were engaging the teachers and talking i would like to know a little bit more about that and i don't expect for you to share that with me tonight but if you could certainly prepare um in the next a week or so an opportunity for you and

112i to just really discuss a little bit more in depth sure okay what that discussion review consisted of um i just want to say kudos to these kindergarten through second graders um and then to the parents and the teachers and our staff here that's really amazing data that we have here and i think we have a lot to be proud of and i'm curious in terms of the growth data how the teachers are using the growth data so if dr woodford you could just expound upon that a little bit for me so what is really exciting for the first time um mr blankenship has set every third grade to eighth grade teacher up with their own pearson account so they get immediate sol data when their students take these growth assessments and it is broken

113down as mr blankenship shared by skill and question and so teachers are using their their planning and as they're preparing they're looking at the skilled deficits that were noted on that that growth assessment and they're using those specifically for remediation um and to target any type of weaknesses they may see any content that was missed and in some cases where you see a a very low um um being able to understand the content prior sorry my words are leaving me i turned up the heat to move things along and i'm so sorry because you i know this dr dewis fixed that um so they're looking at any skill deficits from the grade level prior and they are doing whole group lessons to uh fix that content and to give the students what they need you

114know our goal is to have students in school as much as possible so that we can make up that learning loss but i do think this is a a great time for teachers having such quick access to data that we've never had before and i don't know if there's anything you want to add to that because feel free but doc mr blankenship got that out very quickly some school divisions haven't even rolled it out and he got that and i'll also say a thank you to the school board for helping us get testing coordinators in our elementary and middle schools because they have been working with teachers to look at data they have been running reports for teachers and all of that data collection and that data dissemination takes so much time and mark's team

115has i'm sorry mr blankenship's team has really been working with the testing coordinators to get that out to teachers and make it accessible because if you have the data then you can use it so absolutely um well thank you mark for doing that i mean those test coordinators are working hard yeah schools they really are and they're working with the data which is good because so many times they're just testing students but they're going beyond that and working with teachers and those principals administrators on data fantastic i love the fact that you guys have shared and talked about each of you regarding the teacher feedback really seeking out um and encouraging that download between the teachers so i'm curious as to what some of the maybe the top three concerns um from this teacher feedback

116this dialogue that you've had with them what were some of those concerns well in particular the feedback i was talking about with the assessment pieces was that um they were the assessment calendars we put out were a little overwhelming for teachers and and the reason was when we created those assessment calendars we were thinking like everyone that we would be coming back into school or you know everything would be okay and then what we saw happening was we were struggling to find teachers we were struggling to get our parents working in small groups and so our teachers were trying to make up tests they were trying to test by themselves so the amount of assessment we were asking them to do was too much so they were doing assessment and then unable to really do

117anything with that so the feedback that dr bergen received and i received was could we re-look at that assessment requirements and only give what really would help them make more effective data decisions and so that is what dr trosper's team worked on to tweak those calendars and they're going out as far as instructional needs dr trosper may know more a little bit more the assessment we we're going to share that with the administrators i'm actually ready to go i haven't done it yet so just want to make sure we have heard those concerns and we'll be communicating those plans um you know it's interesting because we talk about using data to drive your instruction and perform what you do every day and you know i i just think the for the beginning of the years

118has been challenging when we made that counter we anticipated lack of a better word a normal year teachers are covering a lot and that is hard to take that planning time where you should be using data to drive your instruction when you're covering classes and you know it you know yes top three that that is just one we hear a lot they're being asked to do above and beyond what they've been asked to do before and i think they're just tired um and that's something we have to recognize so the the other thing that i've heard and this does impact learning students in some cases have been out of school since march of 2020 and they're having in many cases hard time getting used to school again and along with that is is inattention inappropriate

119behaviors and we're working on it and we've got good support plans but that's not easy when you have so much learning to recover and we're just trying to get kids used to school one other question this is my last one um we talked a little bit about the third grade math okay that 23 percent right there it's concerning so i'm just curious and i could talk to you later about it that's fine with me but i really want to know some of the specific steps that we're taking to help this this grade level in particular this subject area that's that's a really low low percentage rate there that's very concerning and and i i just want to say that was my educated guess and trying to figure out this you know so um i think

120we would probably um you know probably mrs bowyer and the third grade teachers could give us a better guess and i don't know if if you specifically talked about third grade are ready to talk about that or if we we hook you up with mrs beard to design because i'm i'm really very concerned about that and i understand that it's an educated guess but i put trust in you guys that your guest is pretty active okay all righty that's all that i had so in the order of hands that i saw dr neely then mr hill um i just want really to comment thank you so much for this information and i just want to remind all the teachers and all the staff that we continue to ask you to do things that are beyond

121unusual right now they're unique fun to this situation in which we all find ourselves so i actually looked at this data and was really pleased with it because i expected it to be a whole lot lower and i agree i am concerned about third grade math and you know second grade pals was a little low but when you're talking about again kids being out of school uh for so long we all know that the virtual option uh across our country was not the best for most kids not all kids but certainly most um i really am pleased to to to see this i think it's it's it's not nearly as bad as i i really anticipated that would be so kudos to everyone who's working on that and and i really want to say something

122about that as well the the the visibility the intentionality that you all have is is going to be key to these kids being successful um i i love the fact that you're really working on data you and i worked together for years on data and i agree you know lots of schools collected data and put in this 19 little notebook and put it on the shelf and never looked at it again and how many times we've talked about disaggregating the data and understanding what's wrong but then more importantly even knowing what to do about it and i think all of these discussions that you're having with principals and teachers are just going to better inform them in terms of what to do with our our students who are struggling and using that data for targeted

123remediation and having that access is is phenomenal that's just a huge thing i can't say enough about that i really appreciate too the targeted pd that you all have talked about in each school again i think that's critical to each school community because a blanket pd in most cases certainly not all it can apply to some and not others so getting in there and understanding that i just really think is great and thank you so much for the academic review at liberty i think getting down to that level and being so specific and intentional is again going to help with that learning loss and the depressed student achievement there um so i just want to say thank you i think you know i do have some concerns about the the spores but overall i i

124didn't think they would be that as good as they are they're not where we want them to be certainly but you're better than than what i anticipated that would be so thank you for all your work on that i certainly think we're on the right track to help um reverse that learning loss and improve student achievement and i would be also interested in the math yes and i'm also interested in trying to understand those charts i knew you would be thank you mr chairman mr hill my turn yes sir so maybe i'm looking at the numbers wrong but i don't think third grade is the problem appears to me that first grade if numbers continue to go down starting after first grade until we're trying to make up in second grade and we're missing out

125on getting them prepared in third grade so did i look at that wrong i think this particular third grade group because the fact that as first graders school stopped short second grade was very different for them i do think that plays into some of those third grade weaknesses these are definitely skills that were taught in second grade and first grade that teachers are trying to to recuperate for sure so i do see what you're saying so what are we doing to address the math issues in first grade and second grade for upcoming third graders in the next year or two well not only that but our students are obviously showing us they're struggling with our current policies that the majority of this current board continues to enforce such as mask and these mitigation strategies where

126we got our students out of school every other week because they were possibly around the positive whatever so i would encourage that we continue to look at that and get rid of that so we can start focusing on educating customers [Applause] about and dr i really appreciate you putting that together but i didn't see you mention relationships as a concern every time i talk to a student and a good majority of the teachers and staff in these schools we've killed the relationship between that teacher and staff and our students so our students are not interested in what our teachers have to say they shut down and so i think we have to come to a point how do we help build those relationships back and it's not the teacher's fault we again this board has

127forced our teachers to be the mask police students are sick of it they don't want to hear anything else that that teacher has to say because we've driven that negativity between those two people that's right that's a concern and so i think we really need to focus on that and i'm really i can't believe that relationships didn't come up as a major concern in our presentation when it comes to what's going on um the numbers what's the norm i mean because when i see 66 of our student population is retaining what they were taught the year before it's a major concern so what are the normal numbers so we know what to compare these two because again a year and a half of dumbing our kids down and again it's not our fault it's the

128policies that we've got in place and missing school what are the norms so we know how to compare how big of a gap do we truly have i don't think we know the norms this is the first time growth assessments have been given so those numbers on the growth assessments we never had that tool we've never had that data to look at so i think we will have a much better handle on it when we look at our common assessments that are going to be given at the end of this quarter um and as we progress through the year and we see our first round of real i would say real sol testing again in the spring i think our teachers individually know their kids and they know their their children's data and i know

129that they are focused on the individual class differences and student differences in the classroom and i would just like to say something about the relationship i think you know we were definitely focused on we were asked to give updates on data we have a whole team in instruction who looks at social emotional learning our ids program is doing wonders in our schools and i would be happy to make that our next instructional update and all of our social emotional learning because we are really working hard on that because you're right it is an issue and it is an issue it's not just our teachers and our students it's not just mass it's the climate of the community and it's the climate of things that are going on the things that they're seeing in us as

130adults and the things that they're seeing on the tv and we are trying to build those relationships back with kids and it is very important to us because we all know as educators that real learning happens with relationships so i'm happy to bring a presentation next time from instruction on everything we're doing in social emotional learning because it's big mostly happy to do it and then i want to see how it impacts these numbers that you just shared with us because i think they correlated dr richard i would just say i appreciate the proactive approach that the instructional team is taking this i remember two years ago some of our other schools that were struggling with accreditation it seems like this time we're working ahead and not playing from behind and i do appreciate that

131looking forward to seeing what the data from the pearson uh study can do and allow our teachers real-time access to data to make instant changes to instructions so and i just want to say that thank you back to dr bergen and the board for supporting instruction with supervisor of cte and supervisors of content because they are doing outstanding work that there we just didn't have enough people to do before so i thank you for your commitment to kids and learning thank you all right 3.03 options for board meeting locations follow-up dr dewis thank you in october at the school board meeting there was an additional discussion about the board request some alternate locations for board meetings and as you may remember we discussed possibilities of holding meetings in school locations at susie g gibson at

132the town council chambers and at the town council chambers and then uh after that discussion or at the end of that discussion there were some specific questions about finding some more information about uh specifically the town council chambers as well as approaching the county about the board of supervisors meeting room and i want to share that information with the board tonight um with i think we we discussed that link the school based options so with regard to the town council chambers um what what i found out is that the town would certainly allow the school board use of that facility on nights that town functions are not happening and so those don't seem to to conflict um based on the the town's council and planning commission meeting schedule that i can see they also said

133that we could use any existing infrastructure in the room or we could bring our own av equipment in or some combination of that they said that for six months or so the talent manager could just allow us to do that on that kind of short-term basis if we were going to go much you know longer than that term the the town does have a facility use policy for rental of various town facilities and the town council chambers are you know there's some specific logistical agreements but the cost is 100 per use so that's the detail about town council chambers and they're happy to work with the school board if needed i also approached the county staff about the use of the county meeting room and the county staff was equally as willing to help they

134did not offer any any cost structure or any requirements of us they did say that they have recently renovated their meeting room and are still working out some logistical issues with their audio-visual equipment streaming equipment all of those related parts and so county administrator i think would certainly feel more comfortable with another group coming in and using that room after they have some more chance to iron those those issues out and use them so um it may be more accessible in a few months but both rooms certainly are possibilities and i'll be happy to answer any questions or take any other information from the board and for follow-up if needed jim did the county provide uh anything more specific than several months in terms of when their ap upgrades will be completed he did not

135um the county minister did not give a specific date i think um i i just in reading the conversation i think it two to three months is what he you know what he said so we certainly can approach them again about how that how that's all functioning what's the room capacity at the county at seat 75. and of course as you know is on the third floor of the county administration building and there's parking of course on the street and in the rear of the building elevators um you know available for access and then council chambers can you refresh my memory on what that capacity is 154 is the stated capacity of that room questions what direction would we like to give doctor to us at this point but i think we need to we

136need to install something permanent in one of one or more of our facilities um the issue i have with susie gibson upgrading that facility is we got right now we've got two auditoriums and two high schools that are from fred flintstone era that need to be upgraded i think before we go and upgrade city gibbs i agree with that i think we need to keep it in our facility as i'm sitting here looking at the seal that's on the board we are three separate entities and we need to have use our own facility and work under our own seal and not the town seal or the county seal but we are on board and we need we have the facilities we just need to figure out which one to use it so keep you know

137what my thoughts are i want to be in every zone and i think that's a great idea that's a great idea i think going forward upgrades to the two uh to stant river and liberty we need to build in that av capability so that we have the flexibility to go to any one of those three high schools you know we draw it out of a hat i mean it once we have uh once we have those capabilities permanently in place then you know the world is our oyster we can move around um basically it will but we need to get those we need to get those two auditoriums updated exactly yeah mr truman i i agree if we had that we don't right now and um and i'm all forward redoing those auditoriums if there's

138any way we could do it but just moving around i mean it's maybe something we could think about doing very occasionally but my concern is it takes away the staff from the school we're at and or our technology staff from the people that need them way more than we do which is our students and our staff in our schools they are constantly busy they are constantly trying to keep everything running smoothly and to take them away for a day each time we have a meeting is a lot not only them but other staff as well to set up wherever we need so i would i think we need to do something more permanent as well um i i agree with you as well i think you know we we have space we should be in

139our own facility um i am forced you know trying to repair susan jacobson each high school needs to have permanent av facilities that can support a school board meeting that would minimize the need for any kind of i.t staff to be pulled away other than the night of the meeting if we have that infrastructure in place then we're not going to be you know we're not going to be pulling these folks in six or seven different directions to hold a meeting at a facility that they have to jump through hoops to set up a b infrastructure for each time we have a meeting that's let's upgrade the three auditoriums to handle that permanently and with that you know that takes the stress off of the i.t staff i certainly think taking care of the needs

140of these high school auditoriums certainly should be first and foremost for us for just our students purposes as well that should be first is that we're taking care of this because the school needs it and it's going to benefit our students and certainly i have agreed and many of us as board members have agreed that it would be nice to provide our community with an opportunity to participate in board meetings at various school sites that's been on the table it's been discussed for some time now i know when i first came on board that was a topic that we discussed and certainly i agreed with it but i think right now at the very right now presently what our focus really needs to be on is giving attention to those high schools and the needs

141that they have and the upgrades that are needed and so currently we have a place and i say let's continue to use this place until such time that the needs are met at the various high schools and just for a little clarity we have the architectural study complete for liberty and stent river high school auditorium and you're going to be receiving a presentation on that at the december meeting correct yes sir okay so we will have options and numbers but uh for those i realize you're going to present just for my identification um is this going to be just architectural in nature or is it going to be infrastructure as well a good presentation is going to talk is it going to discuss you know audio visual capabilities that will be incorporated as part of

142the renovations or is it just we're going to make it look a lot nicer and have nice cushioned seats yeah i made a note to ask mr dos we'll go back and examine to see if there's the detailing about av based on your comment there were different options i mean it replaced the entire thing there's an absorbent cost versus there are degrees of improvements but we'll we'll be sure to incorporate what would be required to upgrade the av so that we could stream from any of those auditoriums when we're doing the renovation so we'll look back at the information we already have an answer should we incorporate that well it sounds to me like we do have and i understand the whole we had the seal and we need to be in our own ao

143our own uh area um but we do have options short-term options with the town council chamber to meet there with a higher capacity uh while these renovations are taking place sure i'm sorry my question would be do does it take paint new seats to add an av system can't we go ahead and do that already knowing that we're going to come in behind and add those renovations and do whatever but why can't we go ahead and look at cost for the technology and just go ahead and install it good i think what the architects are providing for us is a really a feasibility and a pretty high level cost estimate of what it would cost to do various degrees of renovation and a replacement of the auditoriums they haven't done any design work to to

144know how to integrate you know the technology into a system at this point um which means what i don't know is if money's spent on a system now and then in a year or two there's much more spent on the overall renovation would would that be money well spent up front or what is it better to integrate it later on but i'd have to we'd have to look into that and see that's a good question and i don't really know the answer but uh at this point we'd have to we'd have to think through that um we know that we have had a meeting at liberty high school in the recent past i'd like to go ahead and request now that we move december's there and figure out what we need to do in the

145but we can do liberty we have done liberty let's go ahead and move december's meeting there mr chairman we've also had successful meetings at the town council chambers so uh i would suggest that we have our december meeting there okay so we have competing proposals ms d long since you're here do you happen to remember when the um yes and and uh charlie brown will be they're the following they're not the same way okay so all right so we have two competing proposals liberty high school for december town council for december um and this is just a staff report so would we be able to just operate based on consensus for this one sure we would refer to the board wherever you'd like to go we should i need clarification did she say the presentation

146of those two shows is the week after the week after the word so the stage is already set yes and they're having performance rehearsals so we for liberty i mean that's that's technical does jf have anything going on well i mean they have cool yule i believe going on that night as well yeah all right well that sounds like top councils yeah well i think one of the problems too i mean i was you know i participated virtually but several of you had mentioned that the quality of what was set up at liberty was not satisfactory it was difficult to see i know dr bergen has also mentioned that so if we can do something at town council chambers that's going to be a better quality for us in terms of our ability to see

147it is probably the best thing to do so in light of the upcoming programs and the rehearsals with the board be amenable to moving the december meeting to the town council chambers and then going from there i'm good with that yes [Music] i'd rather be in one of the schools but we do need place bigger than this all right and what what i'll do is to make sure that there are no stand no already scheduled town council events or town government events of other there are other groups as well um on the the date that the school board is scheduled and we can confirm that and over the next couple of days that'd be great okay thank you sir all right strategic planning process dr bergen well good evening board members um you're all aware

148that i have two goals that i created to hold myself accountable to you over the course of the school year one of them around revisiting the strategic planning process so this evening i wanted to share some more information with the community about what that would look like what we planned for that to look like over the course of the school year so that's the purpose of this presentation before i get into that topic though i have just today published a post entry report that is available this evening starting this evening on our website and there'll be a link to that post entry report on our facebook postings as well so i'd like to give you all a preview of what you can read in more detail online when you have an opportunity to do so

149prior to my being selected for this position last winter the school board worked with the hya associates consultants to determine the characteristics that you desired for your superintendent of the school division a few of the qualities that were identified included an inclusive style of leadership with an individual who was eager to engage and collaborate with board members staff and with the community at large someone with adaptability in developing a professional presence as well as high visibility and accessibility to the board members the board of supervisors other locally elected officials teachers and staff parents and the community at large an individual who had was visionary and would cultivate a positive professional climate of mutual trust and honesty transparent communication with the board and all of our stakeholders at the school division including the wider community and

150forward thinking to ensure continuous improvements for the school division knowing all of that upon my arrival in june of 2021 i published an entry plan to serve as a blueprint for helping me to learn more about our schools and our community being new to bedford county the entry plan included the five goals that are listed on the screen the first being to establish a collaborative relationship with each of you members of the school board to build connections with all of the citizens of bedford county to strengthen the culture climate and trust across our school division to model the use of data and decision making at all levels and to continue to empower all of our students for future success through innovative student-focused priorities over the past six months i have prioritized my time to listen

151learn and connect with our students our teachers our support staff our administrators families and community members i participated in dozens of face-to-face and virtual opportunities throughout the community including open forums at each of our public libraries i've met with everyone who works for us in staff meetings at all of our schools and centers and i've had one-on-one sessions with all of our locally elected officials and have been a guest presenter for numerous civic organizations and other community partners when i've been out in the community and in our schools i've been asking the same two questions over and over in order to gain a better understanding of our stakeholders perceptions of the school division the two questions as they're listed on the screen are what is it that you love about bedford county public schools because

152i would characterize those as our strengths that we can build upon what are some questions or concerns you have for our school division because those would be opportunities for growth that we could address together also in order to gain a more complete understanding of our school divisions past practices i've conducted an extensive analysis of the available data including a review of student data by school on local and state assessments as well as critical publications such as our division policies employee handbooks strategic plans at the school level curriculum documents safety plans and as i referenced earlier the hya survey which had extensive data available to me through the superintendent search process i've also reviewed with the members of our executive team the existing processes and protocols are in place that guide the development and the execution

153of the annual operating budget in our facilities planning and i've reviewed our recruiting and hiring practices and our ongoing commitment to high quality professional development opportunities after gathering and reviewing all of this information i continue to be inspired by the work of our teachers administrators students families and community members well what we do is important how we do it makes all the difference in the world after reflecting on all of the data that i've collected from these conversations and observations and review of documents i want to highlight three key insights that i believe capture the strengths and the aspirations for our students and families first i believe that bedford county public schools serves as the beacon for this community there's a very strong sense of community throughout this school division as was described in nearly

154every one of my conversations that i've had with community members i repeatedly heard statements such as our schools have joyful and welcoming environments where everyone takes care of one another the generations of families and staff members who are graduates of bcps make our school division unique and create deep connections within the schools and across the community our community is charitable giving and caring our teachers and staff members genuinely care about one another and are committed to the success of their students and finally our students are hard-working and respectful towards one another and their teachers a second noted strength from my conversations have been the dedicated individuals who serve our students our teachers and support staff our administrators our central support leaders our community members words that are often used to describe our bcs bcps team

155include valued collaborative supportive creative passionate gracious caring reliable and dedicated in my very first few months i asked the board for their approval of a major restructuring our central support team and since that time as you've heard from dr trosper and i think maybe you've heard these comments yourself that you've been at the community our teachers and our principals have noticed and are very appreciative of the restructuring and the increase in visibility of our support team in the schools i've also heard wonderful things and deservingly so of our partnerships with the education foundation as well as our parental involvement through ptas and boost eclipse the third strength i'd like to highlight involves the rich learning opportunities that have existed in bedford county across the division i've heard many comments about how well-prepared the school division

156was with remote learning at the start of this pandemic given the commitment of this board and the previous administration in past years for acquiring devices for students training teachers in the use of that technology and the reliable support of our fantastic technology team in addition to our strong academic course offerings the community is also extremely proud and appreciative of the wide array of extracurricular activities available to our students in the fine arts athletics ffa academic competitions and other character building opportunities for our students and as we've talked a lot about in our outstanding presentation earlier tonight about the suzy g gibson science and technology center where students are able to acquire career credentials in preparation for entering the workplace as i've reflected on all of the conversations and review of this data including our strengths

157i have identified five key focus areas for this post-century report and i believe are not only areas of strength but also some areas where there's opportunity for growth in order to help us reach our full potential for our students those five focus areas as listed on the screen are the need to better invest or invest more deeply in our people the importance of accelerating the unfinished learning that we've just been talking so much about the opportunity to expand upon college career in workplace development which we just talked about so much earlier the urgency for social and emotional supports which came up in our conversations here again tonight and the desire to boost equitable educational opportunities across all three of our high school zones as you've heard me say many times your zip code should not

158determine your access to coursework and workplace opportunities i'd now like to elaborate a little more deeply on each of those five areas in order to continue to move the school division forward we must continue to invest in our people it's paramount that we prioritize the recruitment development and retention of our staff and engage everyone in the decision-making process we also need to continue to offer high quality professional development within the content areas as well as for our cte teachers our administrators our classified staff we need to protect instructional planning time to ensure teachers have the necessary time they need to analyze the student data and design those high quality lessons and lastly and perhaps most importantly we need to ensure that we are properly compensating our staff our high quality teachers administrators paraprofessionals bus drivers

159cafeteria workers custodians maintenance workers office associates everyone on whose support we rely in order to move this school division forward to continue greatness the second focus i believe is critical is the need to accelerate the unfinished learning we need to remain committed to high academic expectations for all students and through the leadership of our restructured central support team we need to continue to adapt and implement consistent curriculum and instructional materials throughout the school division so that we can maximize our ability to collaborate and provide professional development using the student achievement data we need to increase our implementation of evidence-based interventions and targeted intensive tutoring and continue to invest in effective expanded learning time including before and after school learning supports and finally we need to remain committed to using pacing guides and common assessments as

160another resource for our teachers students and families thirdly one of the topics that's been a recurring theme in my conversations with just about everyone is the desire to expand upon our college and career readiness opportunities for all students it's not college or career it's college and career readiness for everyone we need to ensure that every student has engaging opportunities for career exploration beginning in middle school to access access to education and training environments that are designed with their needs in mind we particularly need to enhance our workplace development opportunities for students by expanding upon effective pathways to graduation that lead to real-world job skills industry-based certifications apprenticeships and occupational licenses in order to ensure economic growth for our county and competitiveness within our community and finally we should continue to increase the course availability for

161students in all three high school zones particularly with advanced placement and dual enrollment courses including those in cte the fourth focus area that i would identify from my past six months here and all of my observations is this growing urgency for supporting the social and emotional wellness of our students and staff we need to continue to focus on providing trauma-informed and mental health specialized services remain committed to building strong partnerships between our schools and our families and the community we need to continue to promote interpersonal and interpersonal coping skills and finally support students in their continued development with communication like negotiating conflict and managing their emotions and lastly another hot topic throughout the community has been the need to boost equitable educational opportunities for our students throughout the county this will include the continued need

162to investigate and recommend solutions for internet connectivity issues for families and teachers so that we don't have homework gaps research the advantages and disadvantages of multi-grade classrooms that are sometimes necessary in our smallest elementary schools identify and offer a core list of course offerings that would be available to students regardless of which place they attend ensure that there is affordable before and after school care for all of our students regardless of where they live in the county and continue to expand upon our pre-k services particularly for those families who live in poverty which is nearly 50 percent of all of our citizens over the course of the remainder of this school year and as an extension of these post-entry reflections i will continue to engage with the community to review and update as necessary our

163current division strategic plan i firmly believe the process is as important as the plan itself transparency and authentic engagement with diverse stakeholder groups will enable me to continue to collect data and feedback from the community about our successes and to identify solutions to the challenges that we identified together there will be many opportunities in the coming months for stakeholder engagement that will include surveys focus groups and community sessions and these opportunities will involve you as school board members as well as our other elected officials all of our parents all of our students both current and recent graduates school-level staff including our teachers and our administrators and our support staff our community leaders including those in business and higher education and faith-based and community members without any school-age children this process is already underway there is

164a survey to which everyone in the community is invited to participate we're asking the community at this time to review our current vision mission and core value statements to determine if they continue to be relevant for this community or if they need to be modified the survey is open through next monday november 15th so if you've not already had a chance to complete the survey please do so there is a link readily available on our school division website we'll also be checking in with key stakeholder groups such as the pta county council and the superintendent's advisory council if you're not familiar with that second group that is a group that is comprised of students and parents from all three of our high school zones as well as instructional classified staff members that represent our schools

165and our central departments at the january board meeting i'll come back and present the results of the survey and the analysis of the data that i'll be undergoing with these various groups and i'm going at that time in january to ask the board to either reaffirm our existing vision mission and core value statements or consider some revision once we've completed our review of the vision mission and core values will turn our focus to reviewing the current goals of the strategic window will be another survey in january again for everyone in the community to participate and in the month of january january we'll be conducting dozens of focus groups that will include school-based administrators teachers support staff students parents administrators from our central support team community educational partners mental health experts and many other groups the

166data from the community survey and from all of these focus groups will then be shared back with the superintendent's advisory council during their early february meeting and i will then bring that information to the school board and ask the school board either reaffirm our existing goals or consider new goals moving forward for strategic planning once we've agreed upon the goals we'll then turn our focus to identifying the strategies and the resources that will be necessary to fulfill those goals this work will be completed by design teams that will be led by our outstanding executive team members and those design teams will include our teachers and administrators and central support staff the culmination of their work will be shared in april first again with the superintendent's advisory council and then with the school board for your

167consideration and approval at your april board meeting after receiving feedback from the board in april on those strategies we'll then create and share a draft strategic framework at the school board meeting in may we will seek public comment on the proposed plan for one month between may 13th and june 6th after which time will ask the board to adopt the new plan at the june board meeting for implementation next school year as i stated earlier the process for creating a strategic plan is as important as the plan we would produce itself the process is intended to provide focus engage everyone in the community allow for broad ownership and ultimately produce a more dynamic plan i look forward to more opportunities to listen learn and engage with you and our entire community in the days months

168and years ahead i do firmly believe that by working together we can take bedford county public schools to new heights mr chair this concludes this particular staff report and i'd be happy to answer any questions this time mr leamy dr bergen you mentioned on one of your slides multi-grade classrooms would you care to expound on that please and uh schools that have smaller populations like big island where you have a certain number of second grade and third grade i'm going to make an example on the fly mystery where you have not enough kids for two classrooms at one particular grade and you need to group some second graders with some third graders you rarely do it we're going to do it because the only solution is to invest in an additional teacher and have class

169sizes that might be eight or nine kids you know that that concern i've not observed myself this year because we have we've used our pandemic early funds to overstaff the schools if you would but prior to my arriving here there were i was told we were multi-grade classrooms in some of our smaller more rural elementary schools that's correct um my son was in one at paxton elementary school it was a combo class third and fourth grade it was a complete total unmitigated disaster it was not fair to the teacher and it was not fair to the students and that's not something i personally can support based on my own personal experience with that potential particular concept understood dr mealy um yeah i would say to you dr bergen as a principal for you know seven

170years i i had that situation in a fairly large elementary school and i think we were very very creative about how we addressed a combo class and tried to support the students the best we could in there but ultimately i really feel like it's it's a disservice to the children because for instance if you're supposed to have you know by state requirement 60 minutes of math so if you have third grade math and fourth grade math then you've got two hours right there if you're supposed to have two and a half hours of reading or whatever it is two hours you you already used up your whole day and you haven't talked about any special areas or any lunch or anything like that um i just always believe that we have to avoid that it's

171it's just not you know people will say well you know third graders you can put them together third and fourth graders for certain things but those things are really so few and far between i mean if you could put them together then you know for all these years we would have done that so i would really like us to see to to walk away from that because we have done that extensively in this county i don't know miss harrison if you had any comment questions i was waiting my turn yeah it's um if i just reflect back i'm not advocating that we would have them i'm sharing what i've heard from our community and from you as you're affirming the concerns that i've heard i was an elementary school teacher for eight years an elementary

172school principal for eight years and the director of elementary education for five and 21 years i never intentionally created a multivariate classroom and i have no intention of creating one issue superintendent this was a concern that had been shared with me from previous administrations i just wanted to make you aware of it had been surfaced as part of the data environment thank you for sharing your concerns and affirming the community's concerns and you know dr bergen you're right that it has been a concern uh otto river was one of the first schools that had a combination class and it was while i served as principal i didn't believe in it then and i don't believe in it now and at all costs we need to avoid it because it's not what's best for our students

173not at all and mr chairman i'll just say one more thing just i would say yeah you're gonna have that class of eight or nine kids and at that point i think you really are also creative about how you can support those those children um but i always think that's better than at a combo class it doesn't it doesn't work i understand you're not you're just bringing it up again these are like things that we don't we're passionate about yeah we're not feeling passionate other questions comments concerns for dr bergen on this all right so just to clarify anyone in the community can complete the survey absolutely the link is on our webpage it's we want everyone in the community with or without school-aged children grandparents faith leaders community leaders business owners parents anyone because

174we all have stakes and what happens in our schools regardless yes i got an email from a member of the retiree group that was contacted to provide some input to the strategic planning process and this individual indicated to me that there was no place to put comments or notes um so i have the email that this individual sent me and i will forward it to you but i think that's something we need to look at is having a field where respondents can actually put comments and concerns and actually you know verbalize what their concerns are sure anything else for our next item soq report dr wittenberg it's really it's it's not a report we're going to address any questions that you all may have from the memo this was an add-on to the agenda um

175i i do have um a couple of questions um can you just tell am i understanding that we have a board member or members who didn't complete required training that then resulted in a thing on our soq report correct so there's a there's a standard of quality that requires each local school board to require all of its members to participate in annual professional development activities offered at the state or local level and as part of that basically the the question was have all board members completed their annual required training and for the spring report from from last year's data um not everyone had done professional development and so it caused us to have to reply no to that um and then what i had to do was basically put in a corrective action and that

176corrective action what i told the state that i would do would be to notify the school board of its requirements for each member to do annual training and then to make sure that each of you knew that you had to participate in training annually there are some required trainings and then there's some optional training specifics specifically excuse me the soq says personnel training evaluation training curriculum instruction data and planning and decision making current issues and so that's what i've done this memo was to notify the board as i said i would do in the report that each of you needs to participate in annual training and that training is school year specific so it starts in july and goes through the end of june um i will say one of the things that i've thought

177about and just kind of helping is i will check with the clerk of the board um kind of midway through and just see you know how we are with that vsba does give a report of anything you do with esba um and also mrs johnson keeps a record of things that you tell her you're participating in or if the board as a whole has a training and you're participating and then i will reach out individually just to remind anyone who may need that you know you have six more months you have seven more months and you know just i'll kind of maybe nag you a little bit so that we can check the yes box next year okay so let's go ahead and know you guys i was going to say uh just to help

178me refresh my memory and to remember this so this is a standard of a quality report this is a state report yes i am okay so it is a state report and and is it something that we do annually for our school division it is help me understand is it also tied with our sols with uh any sort of state data regarding uh sols or anything like that no ma'am it's it's standards of quality so it it has to deal with um you know the personnel personnel making sure people are endorsed in the right areas if they're not we have a plan for that um do we give the assessments that we're required to give so there's a variety there's actually a big thick packet and little print of all of the questions that are

179asked i will say the soq data collection has gotten a little bit more specific with the doe they've added some questions this year and next year they'll be asking um that we keep very specific data that if we were audited we can then show i will say and i should say this the reason that i caught this one this year is because of the pandemic because i knew that you all were not traveling so my question you know normally i know like if you go to a vsba conference or you know um and so this year with not traveling i had to kind of go to diana to say did we do virtual i knew you had done the norms training as a board um and so it was really kind of in that digging

180that i realized we had missed this soq um and so this was this is my report and so really my responsibility just to remind you all as a board just to do that training and if i can or if dr calvert can we will help arrange professional development so that you can all meet that soq well i certainly appreciate the reminder okay but i will say this that as a school board member it is incumbent upon each of us to uphold our responsibility and the requirements that have been given to us and that includes training that includes professional development i i'm really really uh concerned i find this appalling that members of our board who know fully well what the requirements are failed to meet them and now as a result of that we now

181have a state report that we have taken for like a better word a ding on it i think it's shameful thank you for following up and reminding the board members of what our duties and responsibilities are you shouldn't have to do that but thank you dr woodruff i want to ask is that the only ding on the report um the only other question was were all of our schools accredited um and so i had to put liberty middle was accredited with conditions it did not provide a ding though because it's still accredited but with conditions but i did report that as one of the yes okay so that's so and this report as i understand it i was reading some of the code after i got this that um this goes to the board of

182education who then gives it to the governor who then gives it to the general assembly for review and my concern is that um you know i guess i have another question too is this the only year this has ever happened um so i'm going to be very transparent with the board i in looking at um probably the information that we had as i was filling out the report i have probably answered that question correctly in prior years in the two years prior to that that i was doing the report um and unfortunately i think it was because i made an assumption that the the school board was really overseen by the school board and so i have reached out to see if i can correct that basically they said you've got a corrective action plan

183we're just we're kind of moving forward so make sure we do it right as we move forward and so um i there have been other things sometimes with personnel requirements certifications that we've had to say no we didn't meet that requirement and here's our plan either we are someone else's owner provisional and we are working towards a licensure or something like that um but it has the board member or members has this been something that's happened previously so say it's me i didn't do my training this year and i didn't do it last year or the year before um yes there are there are have been for some several years and at times a year here or there and what i what i have pulled together for this year and just looking back at when

184dsba sends you a history they'll send you a history of everything that's been done so well in part of my research um you know i hope this doesn't happen to us but the board of education shall have the authority to seek school division compliance with the foregoing standards of quality when the board of education determines that a school division has failed or refused or continues to fail or refuse to comply with any such standard if it's happened more than once i would say we continue to do that the board may petition the circuit court having jurisdiction in the school division to mandate other mandate or otherwise enforce compliance with such standard including the development or implementation of any required corrective action plan that a local school board has failed to refuse to develop and implement

185the timely manner they can also refer us to the court and you know i agree with miss harrison i i find this appalling i mean we took an oath and we swore before god i swear before god you know to hold the constitution to uphold the virginia constitution and to complete my duties and responsibilities as a school board member and i it bothers me greatly that we have a ding on this report that's going to be seen by our governor and our general assembly because we failed to do what we were elected to do i will say i think what will probably happen next is in the spring in our next report it'll it'll flag that we had to know and the question will be didn't did we do corrective action and did everybody follow

186through and i think if we had at that point anybody who said oh well i'm not going to do it then that becomes an issue i do feel like at this point every we just make sure everyone has professional development before june 30th of some kind and we we just make sure we work together to make sure that we follow through on the corrective action that i've said that we'll do so thank you i think i think in light of this it's really important for the division when they do the training for our new board members that our new board members understand the codes of virginia specifically their duties and powers and our policy manual and what's required of them in terms of that training because there there are a lot of required trainings weren't

187done like foia is required that was not done child abuse training was not completed i i'm stunned thank you dr woodford thank you for your diligence on this um i i can't underscore enough the importance of professional development in any field but there are a lot of moving parts to serving on a school board and i found personally that the virginia school boards association's trainings have been very helpful in seeing the bigger picture seeing and better understanding the role of a board member and i just encourage everyone to look into those trainings we get the emails almost on a daily basis of professional development opportunities so please lest lest we put a bull's-eye on our school divisions back again make sure that we are staying in compliance with the law and professional development requirements all

188right so any other questions or concerns on that move into informational items 2223 calendar dr woodford um so um we offered four options for our 2022-23 school calendar we shared we put together some calendars based on our needs for professional development work days things like that we shared those four options with all staff on october the 4th we ask all employees to respond to a survey with their preferred choices of the calendars i'll give you just a brief summary of the differences between the four drafts that are on here for information for you draft a it's very similar to our current year calendar with start and end days professional development days planning days and spring break is the second week in april draft b was the exact same as draft a except spring break was

189the first week of april before easter draft c had a later start day for teachers and students and it cut planning days to end school prior to memorial day and spring break was the second week of april draft d this option also had a later start date but contains the same amount of professional development days and planning days as drafts a and b spring break being the second week of april um that survey was online for staff for a month um and the third week of october i asked mrs sexton to send an all employee email to make sure that we had gotten feedback from our bus drivers our cafeteria everyone who has an email with us on the calendar choices we ended up with 519 responses and calendar option c had the highest number

190of votes at 42 calendar a and calendar d were at 22 calendar b 15 in the comments basically people liked the idea of starting a little bit later and still getting out before memorial day pretty much professional development and all of that is pretty similar so you have these calendars for the next month you can look at them if you have questions you want to talk to me if you have any concerns please reach out to me and i'll just bring back at this time draft c for approval from the board i i do want to say some of the comments i received back from staff was why weren't we kind of planning for a revision to calendar like we've had this year and we've had last year and i am just hoping that we

191will be back to a more normal place and i really don't want to bring a revised calendar unless we need to so that is why you're not seeing a calendar similar to this calendar that you just approved and revised last time so i'm bringing a normal school calendar so i'm happy to answer any questions mr leaning um dr woodford yes sir so draft c is the recommendation correct it is the recommendation based on feedback from the employee yet it's cutting planning days it didn't we just add planning days we we did i'm confused in typically in in with prior calendar adoptions the question has always been what have the employees wanted and so i'm making a recommendation pretty much based on this and what they've asked for what's important to me as a division person

192i'm going to say is professional development making sure we have opportunities for professional development to work with teachers um and and that is part of calendar c if if we add work days um it does throw us off and we either have to start a little bit earlier or we have to end after memorial day and i'm happy to to that that is one of our drafts calendars well i'm just wondering okay we're cutting planning days that we just recently added are we going to find ourselves in the same situation one year from now where we have to add planning days back you see where i'm going with this i do see where you're going with this absolutely um i i think the reason that we're really struggling with planning days this year and needing

193to add them is because of our lack of substitute teachers and our teachers having to use their planning time every day to to cover classes and so they're planning time that they normally get just as part just as part of their day they're not having access to i think that's what's causing the stress um but but i do hear what you're saying and and i can try to reach week and get some planning days in there um i can also do another sermon i'm just you know i just want to understand what what the deal is here i get you know we got recommendation it's going to be calendar calendar c um which cuts planning days even though we just added them so i i just wanted some clarification on that because that was very

194counter-intuitive to me yes i saw it um i just want to make sure if that's what the the teachers want if that's what the vote was and that's like what i'm understanding you say i i certainly want them to have what they feel is going to work best for them but i would also caution them that you have no team planning days here so those days in school where you really want to have that team planning every day is going to be a professional development day so as long as our teachers and if the bca could make help us make sure that they understand that um because you know i'm concerned that they may teachers may come back and say we you know we really need those team days in our schools they are valuable

195days um but if they they just have to realize that that's going to be after school i i don't even see where else you can get it from and i will say this was a you know we we surveyed all staff so i do think there's maybe a different perspective from teachers than there would be from you know just support staff who are working and don't really need those planning days that's a big difference yeah 42 22. yeah it is yeah and and there and there were only 519 responses even though we sent out reminders we sent all emails and you know as long as they realized that that you know it's going to be difficult to come back and say can we add some of those days in and and i will say let

196me do this maybe what i'll do is i'll send out calendar c to the principals and ask them over the next few weeks to to get some input from the teaching staff and from the from their leadership teams and i will bring back if if they have a different feel about missing some work days and i will also talk to mrs childress with the bcea and just get some feedback there um and bring that to you next time and see where we're at at that point yeah i like that as long as they're short as long as they're sure why would we go to the bcea well i was just saying the teacher organization and i mean i just they only represent 13 of our employees so why wouldn't we go to our entire employee

197base she said she wanted our entire teacher base or i guess i feel like we did our entire employee base with the i agree okay this is what they've told us we've given them ample opportunity to say this is our preference you sent out multiple reminders it was available to everyone this is what they're saying so why are we going back i just i guess i just want y'all you all to be satisfied and and i don't want to come back and ask for work days either and well i do think that asking oh dr wilford your suggestion uh in terms of asking the principals um to just talk to their staff about this very this topic that we've discussed here tonight and to get their feedback i think that's valuable absolutely so did i

198hear you correctly when you said that there were you got what 519 responses back yes ma'am wow that's low it is why is that about 17 something teachers we need you to respond let's close now so i can't open back up and i and it's hard i did it's an anonymous survey so i don't know which you know staff ms kirby thank you for clarifying for me chairman johnson that these are available on board docs for the general public to look at so i encourage parents to also look at that and contact your representative and let us know what you want for your families as well that's all [Music] thank you i think it's great to cast as broad a net as possible and try to through any means necessary to get all of those

199teacher responses through all the organizations and uh administrators that can get access to our teachers um now just for for clarification dr whitford i know one thing that i heard a lot last year from teachers as well as students let's say they loved the flex learning wednesdays and the incentive that that gave them as well as kind of for teachers that break in the middle of the week to get caught up in plan any chance down the road something like that even if it's not a weekly thing but like once a month or twice a month that something like that for our high schoolers could still be an option i think it will definitely um be a topic i mean this year we've always kind of been given some flexibility to make some choices here

200this year the general assembly was very specific about clock hours and virtual learning and what counts for what so i don't know what may come out um if some of that will um be changed and give us a little bit more flexibility with virtual learning options and flex time for kids but we definitely we hear that loud and clear and i think uh our kids like a little bit of that flexibility to do jobs and stuff especially at the high school and so um if if it comes back and we are given that flexibility we'll definitely bring that back to the board the biggest pieces for the calendar i think are really for for parents knowing vacation and christmas vacation and easter vacation and so um that's one of the reasons we try to do

201it early and then if we have to tweet you know our instruction week or things like that we can okay great yeah cause that's just something i heard a loud and clear yes many times from many different individuals yes thank you all right program of studies dr trosper all right thank you uh i have a proposed draft of the program of studies for the 2022-23 school year it's posted for the board's consideration so this evening i will summarize highlights of the draft just for your consideration and so i do want to say a few words about the process it was very collaborative we involved principals counselors teachers directors supervisors on october the 28th i met with the principals and school counselors to discuss potential new courses for the upcoming school year there were a few

202course deletions course modifications as as well as several proposed course editions which i've listed in the other document that's posted on the agenda there's a few editorial changes were made just included wording edits formatting improvements changes based on state curriculum adjustments editions descriptions changes to wording are actually put in red just so you see what was updated or changed in some areas where wording was changed you might see a strike through with the new wording beside it again in red and so the final program will be on the agenda for uh in december for approval so the course registration can begin in in january of 2022 so it's it's coming quickly it's hard to believe so just i'm going to run through the new courses give a quick brief explanation just to kind of help

203you understand the thinking behind their discussions uh so the new courses we're proposing and one more thing i want to add is that some are specific to schools it's really based on student interest based on student enrollment and staff availability that's what those schedules are built on they are available to be taught by you know by any but it doesn't you know that just means that um it's on there for consideration uh first would be advanced band and so this would be for students who have at least two years of experience in middle school band just to give them a more rigorous band course in high school we have agricultural structural systems which which would essentially round out the ag mechanics pathway so currently we have intro to power structural and technical systems and we

204also have an agriculture power system this kind of goes in the middle and it just provides a more thorough experience in the agriculture career cluster there's been a proposal to add business management uh the reasoning behind that would be that we're currently we have a principles of business a lot of the same content is covered in business management a lot of that content from principles of business is also covering our personal finance government marketing classes and so business management's a little bit more focused on entrepreneurship management of business not quite as much overlap so that was some feedback we got from from some of our administrators counselors and teachers college biology which would just be another option to take a dual enrollment course so if this is approved students can they can still take freshman

205biology but junior senior year they would come back and be able to take a college or a dual enrollment biology and so if that's approved we'll work with cvcc to to go through the steps we need to to offer there's a request at communication systems and what's going to happen is at this school the high school principal will work with the middle school principal to add a hopefully a completer so that way it becomes just another addition again to our cte course completers another opportunity that meets our goals that we discussed earlier um earth science 2 oceanography it's just a different area of earth science where there's some students that have showed interest so anyone in grades 10 through 12 can take it guitar and piano lab are two courses that have have not been

206offered previously but there are some students that have expressed interest who would like to take that develop their skills i've already talked about the hvac process and what that might look like but that is in the program of studies to which would be the first step in the process of offering that program and then a small instrument ensemble class so those are the new courses that we're proposing as far as course updates or revisions a dance company was previously available for students in grades 9 through 12. we're asking to make that available for 8th grade students middle schools will potentially offer drama 8 instead of theater what we want to do is provide a consistent experience across all three zones what we found is just just some differences in how it was offered so we

207just wanted to clarify um that this if a student signs up for drama or a theater type class it's drama eight in middle school biology 2 anatomy and physiology it's it's just a course change the state had changed that it used to be intro to anatomy and now it's the new name based on the state curriculum and then of course removals and these are generally due to schools just not offering and having not offered them for for a number of years so computer six um there is other courses that um offer skills like computer solutions so certainly that's an important subject but just uh it's through a different course creative writing is one developmental reading from high school uh just to be clear that is a valuable class but we have functional reading available at

208the high school so that accomplishes the same purpose as developmental reading um emt program at suzy gibson that has not been offered for a few years and that goes back to the challenges we have with finding instructors and so um that's just we just felt like it was probably time um functional reading similar to the developmental reading we're removing it from elementary middle school again critical class very valuable but developmental reading really accomplishes the same purpose so we just really clarified who who it would be offered to we did remove general internship and teacher office volunteer what we would like to see is students who participate in internships go towards the career internship path internships is a valuable valuable experience for a lot of students what we're talking about is um maybe students sitting in

209the main office answering phones exposed to confidential information that they're really not entitled to what we'd like to do is take advantage of some of the expertise of staff on on campus and so so one example of a career internship that a student could do on campus if they have some skills in in it then they could work with the career internship teacher get valuable skills report to them but also work with rit staff on campus to troubleshoot potential issues with chromebooks so that's what we mean we really want to encourage students to go career internship we think that's more appropriate keyboarding that can be incorporated into other subjects rather than an entire course focused on keyboarding principles of business and marketing again we we discussed that reasons for in the course editions and then

210small engine repair the feedback from the teachers was that that content is very similar to the ag structural systems any skills they would get from that class would be covered in the ag structural system so um and just a few other changes updates um of course there's some wording edits formatting improvements just a few changes based on state curriculum adjustments we clearly define the conditions for early release we as we discussed we found that there's some inconsistencies across the division those conditions would be seniors only they must have met all graduation requirements up to that point they must have approval from the principal director of instruction and um if this is approved then our next step would be that the principals myself and other staff would get together and really define what those conditions are

211and put together a former students can request that so that's what that means by defining conditions we did clarify what a full-time student enrollment means again a lot of questions this year about how many courses do you have to take to be a full-time versus a part-time student we did state that you have to be enrolled in at least four credits just to clarify to be considered a full-time student otherwise you're considered a part-time student before county and then as far as graduation requirements in previous program of studies there was essentially two different graduation requirements based on the age of the student and so previously those that began before 2017 and 18 they had different graduation requirements than those that came to school after those students had now graduated so that just was removed and

212now we're all under one graduation standard as you can see on pages 11-13 this might sound minor but there's some hyperlinks to the table of contents that's much more detailed as a principle that is a big document to look through what i hope is to make it more practical for our administrators you can actually click on a topic that goes right to it that's maybe that was selfish but that was something that i think would help our principals and then we updated some course numbers um developed after the courses were approved um the back i'm really proud of our supervisors they created uh visuals of course sequences so if you're a parent that's not quite sure the next step you can go to those visuals and see these are my options for math english and

213so on for core subjects and then finally we describe the mental health support team and school counseling services uh really just to recognize the important role that they play in student learning and student academic achievement so again this will be for the board's consideration in december i'll take any questions at this time um dr crosby i know you said that the emt course is being well it hasn't been offered and that's due to instructor availability or lack thereof having said that though is there demand within the division by students for an emt course well and that was as we talked to staff from susie gibson there really hasn't been a lot of interest either in that and it was it was dwindling and then with the instructor not being there it was just it just

214felt like it was time what we can do is if students start to express us we can always bring that right back and put it right back in the program of studies so that was that was a kind of a painful deletion it really was but it just tried to reflect reality it's also now offered at the cbcc um cte academy so there is an avenue for our students if we have a few students interested in it okay thank you yeah um first of all i love the um core sequences the design from the our instructional supervisor so thank thank you for that just a question about the early release sure how is that gonna unfold you know who's going to approve that sure so and that's something that's been practiced for for as long

215as i can remember and typically it's for a student who has completed all the graduation requirements typically for seniors we just never really spell it out and what we want to do i think the discussion revolved around the fact that we feel like we owe it to our community to provide graduates that are prepared that we've done everything we can to give them skills and opportunities and so part of that um and the process that we want to have is that the principal has a conversation with that student and so let's say they just have english and government left to graduate um maybe that conversation could be what are your plans for after high school so just an example a few years ago i had a conversation with the student and um the student wanted

216to leave early and and i just talked about career goals and found out the student wanted to go into nursing and so i made a call to susie gibson we were able to get that student enrolled in a nursing program um hopefully gave the students some more skills that that they did not have otherwise so it's really just we just want to make sure that that we're preparing students as best as we possibly can is it going to be the sole decision of the principal or what we've written is the principal and then the director of instruction would approve um so typically that would go through the counselor who would take it to the principal and then myself okay thank you mr hill then this hairstyle so just to piggyback off that the parent would

217be involved in that decision-making as well sure sure the parents always would sign off on something like that just have to make sure so dr trustworth two quick questions uh you mentioned formatting or adjustments being made uh and then several additions yes uh i want confirmation that there's nothing in any of those courses that would encourage or teach the hate of america are you aware of any of that i am not aware of anything and um what i do want to say is i understand that there are some some people that are skeptical that we've heard that and so this is an opportunity to open up dialogue with our schools and so what i would say to those individuals we welcome the opportunity for you to see for yourself and so get involved in your

218child's education go online and look at those standards um read with your kids get on their canvas page join the pta be involved and know what's going on and if there are concerns bring it to the teacher to the principal to myself and we will address them well and as we heard tonight we want we've got parents that want to come back to the classroom as well so i would hope we can eventually make that happen um and then the other clarifying question in any of this are we encouraging in any of these format changes editions etc are we teaching our kids what to think versus how to come to their own conclusion or way of thinking so i want to make sure we're not forcing our opinions on our students sure mr hill i

219think we do our students a disservice when we we simply feed them information the way we think they should it is very important and we've we've heard this a lot those five seas of a virginia graduate that is our charge is to produce students that are good citizens they're creative thinkers they can communicate they can collaborate um and i think i said five um those are important skills they have and we take that seriously and you know when i think about as an educator you hear the term bloom's taxonomy a lot and bloom's at the lowest possible level of learning is recall memory and that's important um for many things but but the highest order of thinking is analyze and create and and so on that's what we want our students to do is think

220at that higher level so they can take facts and learn from them for themselves and so so absolutely we want them to learn how to think okay so i don't want to assume what your answer was but it is not correct yeah correct okay all right ms harrison thank you mr chairman dr transfer um edge labs can you tell me which of our schools are using you know edge labs so edge annuity sm yeah so all three high schools to some degree are using it um that has it's it's been a tool that we've used frequently um we we obviously would rather have students getting direct instruction from our teacher but um there's been a lot of situations where students do well in that in that environment um they it's a little bit more self-paced

221they can work with a learning coach which can be any staff but what happens is they would work through that program they would have a teacher of record that's certified in that subject area um and again they would just kind of work at their pace i don't have numbers as far as how many but all three high schools do use that to some extent okay all right thank you other questions mr trump's very really appreciated hearing you say that internships are not going away that was absolutely not that was my initial concern when i saw that on there and i know firsthand how that internship program especially for seniors can help develop um career interests i i did an internship my own senior year with my band director and i think that's what sparked my

222interest in education um many years later so glad that's that's there i know it's a great um halfway in and to see drama eight will now be available at all of our middle schools i'm looking forward to seeing what kind of farm teams we can develop at all three of our high schools before they even even get there because i know ms white does a great job at forest middle i know ms cruz has tried to do that i would love to see all three of our high schools have those vigorous middle school drama programs you all right policy updates ms sexton this evening we are presenting 21 policies and regulations for information these policies will be brought back to the board for action at the december 9th board meeting nine policies have minor legal

223or technical changes and one regulation is recommended for deletion because we no longer use the form specified these may be viewed within board docs the remaining policies and regulations have more substantial changes and we will review those now i will pause momentarily after each of these policies or regulations in case there are questions about the suggested revision vce school board committees this policy has been edited to allow for standing committees approved by the school board by majority voting dr bergen has some more he wants to share yes so board members we've looked at this policy uh just last last meeting and mr leamy had asked if we could rather than limit the policy to just one standing committee could we just have language and just allow for standing committees that could be determined uh you

224know at the will of whatever board deceived at that point over time in the future and then mrs kirby followed up and said and also can we make sure that there's there's language in there that we can also dissolve those standing committees so the current policy you see the straight through words at the top there are currently no standing committees for the board in bedford county it hasn't been for quite some time and i'm happy to form as many standing committees as you'd like to work with me and our executive team so the first rewrite first rewrite would be that the school board by majority vote may create and or dissolve standing committees as necessary to provide ongoing oversight engage the board of strategic dialogue and help facilitate the board's decision making and then the

225policy below that that is current language that would remain that in addition special committees can be appointed by the chair and that can be dissolved when they start their purpose so that is that's the only change of the policy it doesn't reference any standing committees in the policy and this policy would allow you to create and dissolve standing committees as as you wish moving forward once this policy is not so if we can scroll up down then i've suggested after speaking with mr leamy and some other board members some potential standing committees you may want to consider there are if you can just scroll a little more there are three that surfaced a budget and finance committee that would work with me and mr hagler and the development of an annual operating budget and then

226monitoring the the uh the finances as we go throughout the school year a facilities committee that would work with myself and mr dewis in developing a comprehensive improvement plan a cip and then monitoring throughout the year you know projects as they come and go and then lastly an intergovernmental affairs committee that would work primarily with me and helped draft a position statement for adoption by the entire board that you could then carry as you're meeting with our local delegates and you're visiting enrichment and you know lobbying for additional resources for the school division as well as continuing to strengthen our partnership with our other locally elected officials so those would be three but again it's entirely at the will of the board what you how many you want to form what you want to call

227them i was just trying to give you a regulation to help guys with your thinking my suggestion for tonight would be uh you consider the policy only it's for information tonight that you if you are so inclined to adopt that policy in december then after the new board is seated in january determined at that time what standing committees you might like to form and make those appointments any any questions about the recommendations on the policy of regulation okay thank you most of you will continue on gbg staff participation and political activities this policy has been reworded to conform to vsbr recommendations regarding school time and school property not being used for partisan political purposes by employees gcbc mrs sexton yes yes i'm sorry i didn't know if i could interrupt with questions and everyone wanted

228me to hold them to the end okay so just to clarify uh with the revisions for policy ebg any school employee who wants to be active politically can do so without interference from the school division as long as it's on their own personal time and they're representing themselves in that school and they're representing themselves only of course okay just just clarifying that if that's approved that there would be no interference from the school division if school employees wanted to participate in political activities on their own time all citizens are encouraged to get involved politically but not part of your work there right it's part of your work responsibilities right very good as long as you're not representing yourself or as in your capacity as a an employee at bedford county public schools does that make

229sense it does yes i'm glad to get that clarification for um future staff members that might be interested in participating in political activities so they're not stonewalled thank you miss sexton and i'll take like a three minute i mean three minutes three seconds in between each one okay [Laughter] gcvc professional staff fringe benefits the main change to this regulation is the addition of technology as staff permitted to take vehicles home gcl professional staff development policy language has been added as recommended by vspa to reflect enactment of virginia code stating what instructional staff and support staff are required to complete mental health awareness training do we have an enforcement mechanism for that one [Laughter] gdq school bus drivers edits include the removal of a paragraph under eligibility for employment requiring proof of certifications or training because

230the documents specified are not required by vcps igbh alternative education policy has been edited as recommended by vspa to remove all language regarding proposals for alternative education programs but adding that the school board establishes alternative education programs as needed jfca teacher removal of students from class policy has been updated to reflect bsba recommendations bcps practices and to conform with virginia code the main edits include criteria for a teacher to remove a student from class for destructive behavior and requirements for incident reports jfcf drugs in school policy language has been added and other wording changes as recommended by vsba to reflect amendment of virginia code stating that on school property no person may manufacture sell or distribute or possess with intent to sell give or distribute any controlled substance or imitation controlled substance kc community involvement

231and decision-making edits include the addition of language by vcps staff to incorporate the importance of community involvement in decision making and last kga solicitation on school property policy language has been added to conform to vsba recommendations prohibiting anyone from selling or offering for sale within the school's own school grounds or at school-sponsored activities any product or service except when the sale will benefit the educational program of the schools in addition individual discussions between school division employees regarding solicitations for specified organizations during school hours are not prohibited any questions thank you miss sexton that's all right i didn't have more under the table you wanted to pull out no okay unless you want me to read the other nine i think we're good all right okay so moving down to item 9.01 action items this will

232your 22-23 budget calendar mr hagler yes i brought the budget calendar to the board at the last meeting and it's being brought to the board to uh for approval tonight in that case do we have a motion on the budget calendar mr chairman i move that we accept the fiscal year 2223 budget calendar as presented by mr hagler all right so we have a motion by dr mealy to approve the proposed budget calendar as presented have a second second second by dr hicks any discussion on that bring them i'll call for vote all those in favor please say aye aye any opposed thanks the proposed budget calendar is approved and we'll begin very soon i believe of policy updates presented at the october 14th board meeting ms sexton again at the last board meeting we

233presented 25 policies for information are there any questions or concerns from the board before you take action good job sounds like there are none so do we have a motion on the policies presented last month mr chairman i believe that we approve the policy updates presented at the october 14th board meeting dr hicks moves that we approve the policies as presented at the last board meeting do you have a second second second by ms harrison any discussion final questions here you know all those in favor please like ms johnson would you please pull the board ms harrison yes dr hicks yeah mr hill no mr johnson yes mrs kirby yes mr lamey yes dr maylie yes you guys have it with six thank you ms johnson superintendent's report dr bergen i will start with what's

234up on the screen so since we were last together we have more accomplishments from our students and i just want to give some shout outs and well-deserved shout-outs to our students so beginning with jefferson forest high school and stanton river high school's yearbook staffs both schools placed in the bhsl multimedia state championships this took place using their 2021 yearbooks and categories that included advertising infographics candid photos and coverage of sports clubs student life and academics congratulations to those students and their sponsors on their accomplishments next you know you have a special program when both your boys and your girls teams win district championships and that's the case this year at jefferson forest high school the jf cross country team participated in the seminal district championships and brought home first place in both boys and girls

235with dominating performances the girls took seven of the top ten spots and the defending boys state champions took six of the ten top positions brandon adams and zoe lamanna won the boys and girls races respectively and seminole district cross country runners of the year coach colby won seminole district boys coach of the year next liberty ffa livestock team consisting of current liberty high school students megan cash and mckenna garrett as well as graduates charlie moser and kevin hanchod were awarded a silver rating in the national livestock evaluation career development event at the 94th annual ffa convention which was held in indianapolis indiana virginia state president charlie mosher was awarded or recognized uh as individually uh as a leader in the nation congratulations to charlie and to all of our liberty ffa students and their sponsors

236these young ladies might have begun their season a month late but they never gave up and now a trip to the state competition is their reward for all their hard work and determination the jefferson forest high school competition cheer team recently finished second at the regional level the jefferson forest high school marching band won the virginia marching band cooperative group 3 state championship this past saturday he won caption awards for best music best general effect and best percussion jf also finished fifth overall in the state championship are they weird river colors [Laughter] stanton river high school speaking of uh their one act theater cast and crew recently finished second at a regional competition layla crutchfield was honored as outstanding actor while madison crowe received honorable mention and cavalier theater was also recently crowned vhsl sectional

237champions with their comedy of heirs production sky evans received outstanding actor recognition while princess patrick carter and paul reed received honorable mentions the group now advances to the regional theater festival held at jefferson forest high school on november 20. uh as mentioned earlier this evening with there is a survey open at this time for everyone in the community we invite you to participate if you've not done so already the main purpose of the survey is first to check in with the community to see if we find that our current vision mission and core value statements continue to be relevant or need to be modified since our last break i did do some checking we've had 920 responses thus far to the survey of those 920 respondents 87 out of 100 people are happy with the

238current core value statement uh 70 of the 920 respondents are happy with the current vision and mission statement so applying runners for future success uh appears to continue to be relevant for this community as a as a visionary phrase but we'll continue to leave that survey open through the weekend and into monday and then again we'll check in with some of our stakeholder groups and our superintendent's advisory council and i'll come back to this to the school board in january with a recommendation whether we should hold with our current statements or we should consider some revisions let's see um you know it's the days are getting uh darker earlier and it's getting colder and we might soon be seeing snowmen so we want families and employees to be aware of our updated crisis inclement weather

239codes that we're going to be using this year these codes will be posted tomorrow on our division social media platforms and families and employees are encouraged to look for official information on crisis inclement weather days on the division's social media pages website and smartphone app codes will be shared with local media as well after the division has made the information available through our own communication vehicles and of course last but most importantly we'd be remiss if we didn't just pause today to remember that it is veterans day thank you to mr leamy to all of our board members all of our community members our staff members who have served our country for your duty and your sacrifice to our to my father to your fathers and mothers brothers and sisters aunts uncles cousins neighbors and

240friends who've served our country particularly those who have given their life for our country we thank you for your service we thank you for your sacrifice [Applause] and lastly i have an introduction to make uh you heard a bit about this young man in our earlier presentation on cte and workforce development but i want to make sure you had a chance to meet them personally and individually standing over there by the door for us so at your october meeting the board took action to appoint mr trevor haas as our back into our recreated position of supervisor of cte and workforce readiness i learned through this process there used to be a dedicated position to cte that went away and the organizational charter will bring them back mr haas has 10 years of service in public

241education five of those 10 years the last five here in bedford county where he has served as the school counselor for the students at the susie g gibson science and technology center before joining bedford county mr haas spent five years as a school counselor at william fleming high school in roanoke city trevor earned a bachelor's degree in psychology from lee's mcrae college and he has his master's and his educational specialist degree in educational leadership both from liberty university congratulations to you trevor on your appointment we look forward to having you serve in your new capacity just as soon as we can find your replacement and get them in place over at susie g gibson congratulations [Applause] all right thank you dr burgin medicine board mr hill uh yes i attended my first special education advisory

242committee meeting and um i appreciate that group welcoming me i'm not sure how excited kelly was to have me there i do want to give a um a notice that they are accepting parent guardian student applications for all three school zones so take a look at that and you can go to our bedford county website and search ciac and find that information you mentioned all of the accomplishments at jf so i'm not going to repeat those but kudos to all three school school zones we had several recognitions and i appreciate you doing that every meeting i think that's important um my next question is around uh is going to dr calver from an hr perspective um do we have any language in our employee contracts that encourage professionalism at all times and prohibits any negative

243or slanderous language that would shed negative light on before county public schools in the contract that they signed that has their money in it no okay um there is language in the ca most of the contract talks about work days release money reporting if you're charged with a criminal offense complying with school laws board of education regulations regulations of the school board i not i can double check nothing comes to mind of a regulation or a of a regulation in the school board policies nothing is coming to mind that i can double check that before you show that uh and then one thing i wanted to bring um to this to staff and then of course we would have to have consensus from the board but recently york county passed a resolution in support of

244parental rights and i would like for the staff to work on something similar for our school system that we could do a resolute a resolution for but it has things that states a parent has a fundamental right to make decisions concerning the upbringing education and care of the parents child believes that all academic success begins with embracing fundamental parental rights and our educational institutions it's about parental rights york county and it recognizes state law 1-240.1 of the code of virginia and i'd like for staff to look at that and bring something similar to us to pass as a board for resolution sure [Applause] would we need to have consensus or can the staff begin working on that to bring back to us i think it's a fantastic idea yeah i think the staff could just

245work on it bring something back for us to review without consensus tonight thank you uh and then the other thing um this list of books very concerning um i would like to recommend that we remove all of these books immediately um and have it reviewed by staff with a recommendation or reason why they would want to put it back on the shelf to come back through us just reading the second page the glass castle was concerning enough and if all of these books can contain offensive stuff as that second page i don't think it's appropriate um so i don't know where other school board members are on that but again i'm not saying it has to be permanently but i would like it to be removed reviewed and then brought back to us to make

246a decision of if it goes back or not okay you guys good with that well i haven't actually read it i mean we i'd like to read it so i i don't particularly have an objection but i'd like to read what what it says before i say yeah let's do that and i do have a question tonight but i'll wait until it's my turn to ask regarding the books so do we have consensus or i think i'm asking for it to be removed immediately i want to read it first i don't know what i'm remembering but there's seven of us here sorry i'm just saying that's my phone i think there needs to be some further discussion i have some questions i don't want to get out of line with the processors why don't you

247go ahead okay so uh dr woodford uh if memory serves me correctly and of course i have been out of the principal role for a little bit there is a process is there not that is in place um for when parents have concerns about the contents of a book that is in the library uh i say that because i have had the same experience myself as a principal and we had a process so i want to be sure do we still have a process in place yeah and can you just expound upon that process what that involves okay okay so all right go for it it's policy klb we do have a process um and it's the title of is public complaints about learning resources um and so it just outlines procedures for public complaints

248about that and as you read through that it establishes a committee that would look at certain criteria and the way to initiate that process from a family member is there's a form attached to the agenda where we're either a parent organization or group whoever that is they're asked to identify themselves then they would essentially list their concerns and that would prompt the committee to need so so it is it is board policy klb that's accessible for anyone okay um and so this committee so help me here i i do remember uh certainly having to uh where parents have brought concerns like that to our attention so the committee is comprised of the building principal the um is it the liberian of course the media specialist the parent yes and isn't there another party classroom teacher

249if it does impact them is there anyone from central office because not not as written okay i certainly think having someone because if memory serves me correctly um we did have someone from central office serve on that that panel um at ottawa river to offer just another perspective then also just uh help us there i think we have a structure in place now whether that structure is being utilized fully is questionable um but we've got it there and so i would say that we should encourage our parents and building principals should do that and letting parents who bring a concern regarding a book to their attention that they make the parents aware of what the procedure is and that it's the principal's responsibility to ensure that that process is being carried out and i would

250encourage the central office staff the executive team that when a building principal brings it to your attention that you provide that support that they need but i say that we have a structure in place that certainly needs to be utilized to its fullest there would be uh my suggestion i'm sorry they did point out there is a in policy a member of school board office that would be a part of it i agree with this hairstyle we already have a process in place let's go ahead and and get that uh started with these uh these books that are being questioned so question does the policy state that once i file a complaint it's immediately pulled here's it there's a a very in intensive discussion that is that is had with the members of that committee

251and so the decision is a collective one at least i can say to you that that's what the decision was at at uh the school that i served at when there were questions raised so it is a certainly a very extensive discussion um all views are listened to and heard um and and certainly um i can say that there were books that we did remove as a committee we decided to remove those books because we didn't feel that they were really in the best interest of a child having to have access to so again we have a policy we have a structure in place i feel like we need to utilize that and miss harrison i just wanted to ask you so each individual school makes that decision so so so if this list is

252coming from different schools then we have to start with each school instead of it coming back to us to decide the committee makes that decision so each school would have their own committee okay so it's it's these committees are building based is that correct they are okay so a committee at jf may decide yeah this profane book is fine at jf but a committee at the other two high schools could decide that it's not appropriate i think that's problematic it needs to be counting wide it should not be building based i'm just reading the word positive i understand it has changed policy you have changed i don't agree that we should remove it from the building level i think to take that autonomy away from our principals our experts our teachers to me is not

253in the best interest at all but do you see where i'm going with this there's inconsistency county-wide potentially and that's we can't have that you want to be consistent i think we cannot have the rights of our teachers in our school principles to have that taken from them we can't have that either they should have a say they should have a say in what is being done let them have input to a a county-wide committee that makes that decision well we have a member of the the school board i mean the central office that's a part of that committee so you've got someone from central office as a part of that service and i love you to death but i gotta disagree with you on this and you know you know mr leamy from the

254bottom of my heart i know that you and i can agree to disagree and still walk out of here absolutely let's show them that okay i cannot wait to see that dr emily no i i was going to say the same thing there's a structure in place we should do that um if we want to move that to a county level type of committee would that not require it would require right it would policy a policy change and then you could have parents at one school who say i think there's nothing wrong with the book exactly and then you have parents at another school saying well i think it's really wrong so so in one case there then you're taking away the rights of some parent group because you know it should be if we're

255going to base it in the school as the policy currently says then you could potentially have it and i'm not saying you're wrong i'm just saying you could potentially have two committees make a different decision that's my entire point yeah i said our parents part of that committee yes yes and i did want to add if if the parent disagrees with the school-based decision it says the complaint it may appeal to the superintendent and his or her design and then to the school board so okay so eventually so again when it was my turn i'm asking for books to be removed and i'm asking for a consensus vote because i want it publicly stated that i've asked for these books to be removed or to be reviewed by whatever committee we have or to be

256brought back on a recommendation and i want a consensus vote not be the school committee because that's our current policy i want to restate again i'm asking for these books to be pulled immediately i understand that for it to be reviewed i don't care who it's reviewed by well we haven't had a staff member well go buy the policy all right and then bring it back and make recommendations of it's going back and why okay as long as we're following our current policy because we're not making any changes tonight in circles because that's what i well i just want to make sure so the policy does not permit the removal of the books tonight it says challenge materials will remain in use during the formal challenge but the complaint it may request materials i understand

257what you're saying but we're saying we're gonna follow the policy but we're not okay a consensus vote until that vote takes place that's what we'll go with but i want a public record that shows i've asked for these books to be removed if that makes you happy and it was my turn and that's why i asked it consensus vote consensus okay so remove the books immediately and empower the school-based committees to review them correct okay that's check i'm going to be an unpopular person i sat here it's it won't be the first time it won't be the last but i sat here months ago listening to arguments on a confederate flag that we weren't going to ban anything nobody we didn't want to ban a flag didn't want to step on anyone's rights i don't

258want to start with banning books but we do have a policy in place um so i said we follow the policy but have a pull from every school and reviewed by the committees as required in the policy okay so leave them in pending the review by the school-based committee yep okay i say that we continue with our policy we implement that continue using the policy that we currently have i agree and i agree too so so the committees will convene to review these books including these pulitzer prize-winning novels the language in these books let us remind everyone we are still conducting business so please refrain from outbursts so the committee will will convene review these books and we'll make a determination at that point dr trosper correct okay this is the first time people have

259contacted others it's not british my ears so i appreciate you bringing this to my concern i'll follow so thank you for bringing coming up is it really my turn now i think so um dr brogan recognized veterans i'd like to do so again if there are any in the room please stand please [Applause] and the word on the street has been that parental interest would dwindle beginning in november i see that that is not the case i encourage you all to continue being engaged being involved be involved in your kids education don't come to meetings just when it's a vote that's too late keep doing what you're doing please it's odd miss kirby on the broken record so happy veterans day to everyone um and thank everyone for their service um mr edwards i want

260to thank you so much for recognizing miss warwick last month she's still stopping me in the mornings and telling me how much she appreciates that so you really meant a difference made a difference to her and i thank you for that um this year was great i got to take my kids to football games watch them walk around with their friends and and enjoy a good time and i'm glad everybody got to complete their fall season and i'm looking forward to their winter season i can't wait to see basketball start and replay um a lot of the stuff i had written down has already been said recognizing for everyone want to remind parents do not send your school your kids to school tomorrow don't put them out at the bus stop in the morning um

261let's see when we were talking earlier about the possibility of of all the schools being on the same schedule and looking into that when can we expect to hear something back from that well i would like to make that part of the strategic planning process over the course of this school year we will engage all of our stakeholders on that question because to have shared resources that would require some give and uh it'll be a gentleman conversation for some and most challenging for others but it's a conversation because we do need because the big talk has always been to get them on equal playing fields so we need to have equal playing fields in all three zones um congratulations to mr mr esselton um not only does he have the accomplishments of these awards i've

262seen how the students interact with him and that to me that speaks more volumes than these awards and and he has had an astonishing career and he's impacted a lot of lives i want to continue to thank all the teachers paraprofessionals administrators office personnel nurses cafeteria personnel bus drivers crossing guards and i apologize if i admitted anyone and families for supporting the students and working tirelessly to have an awesome school year i know it's been challenging i know it's been difficult but we gotta let these kids succeed and be the very best they can be and finally since this is the november meeting i want to wish everyone a happy and blessed thanksgiving and make sure you count your blessings for we all have something to be thankful for yes um i want to want

263to also echo so many things that have been said but first and foremost just to um thank mr leamy and also john here for your service um for our nation serving in the military i think a lot of veterans today numerous family members as well so i just wanted to say thank you to any other member of the armed forces out there in our com in the audience thank you for your service as well god bless all of you um i also want to um say to dr bergens thank you for your presentation um i know that you have been out in the community full force i know because i've heard from my constituents that you've been there you've asked some really pertinent questions and you're gathering information and so i love the format that

264you've used the feedback the information that you've given us so i look forward to hearing more and seeing our county and our division move forward so thank you for your presentation tonight i attended the jf cavalier production of clue wow that was really awesome really awesome we have so many talented children and students they were just fantastic um i never laughed so hard it was just wonderful that belly laugh that you get um and i am so looking forward to liberty high school's performing arts they're going to do charlie brown christmas one of my favorite characters so i'm looking forward to attending that in december um and also i just have i have one or two questions that i wanted to ask uh you guys know that i am fixated on our hvac system i

265can't let it go it's just stuck in my head so my question is and during the october meeting i had asked uh when we would have uh proposals or uh a review and i'm just wondering when will we have that um we've just posted uh yesterday i think mr hagler is that right the request to call for bids for six schools to have those systems replaced next summer and so those are out now next week we'll be doing pre-bid tours of those facilities so that companies are interested in bidding can get in those boiler rooms and mechanical rooms and see first-hand the equipment that they'd be replacing and so we hope to have those back in for approval um we need to give those firms some time so we're going to be targeting december or

266january board meetings for those approvals of bids so that we can um they have several months to prepare procure equipment um so got four done last summer and six more coming this summer so fantastic yes ma'am and um and these schools are in need so that's absolutely a big improvement thank you dr doulas um i also have a question and and you know doctor does i think this may be a question for you do our bus drivers do they have updated employee id cards um employee badges yes yes yes ma'am they they do they do okay and does this allow them access into the building well um all all employees have access to the building they can come in the office and and enter some of our buildings do have badge swipe access uh technology

267in different parts of the building and so um i have um i have to check to determine yeah i know all the employees who are based in those buildings their badges work we program that but i'd have to um you know have to look at how that's programmed could you do that for me i just heard from a couple of um drivers who were concerned that and so if you could check into that for me i think that would be great there's a concern that their their badges don't give them access to the doors that they would need to get into okay i think that's all thank you dr hicks uh i attended the uh stem academy board meeting uh yesterday uh um zoom meeting and um uh the uh director is uh planning on

268having a five day a week in person instruction next semester they had a little uh rocky start this year with the amherst county students being out for for two weeks and for their students uh coming down with kobe but they uh she has high expectations for next semester the kids are currently doing internship interviews with with companies and they plan to start their internships uh january 5th um i did attend uh the 3-0 women uh one act play at a liberty high school and the uh jf uh theater production of clue uh kudos to ms cruz and mr white for both putting on wonderful shows thank you sir hi camilie yes i i'd like to start also about veterans day i just want to thank all of our men and women um that we're honoring

269today who served and who served in the served or served in the u.s military for their sacrifice to our country i don't know how many of you know that we have over 20 million veterans in our country right now and i very proudly say that over 2 million of those are women so i'm really glad to see that um and i think we need to remember that these brave men and women have stood by to protect the ideals of our american democracy and i honor each one of them for their selfless service and recognize that we owe a debt to all who answered our country's call and served more and more when i'm out in public and someone thanks a veteran my husband's veteran of the vietnam war he was a helicopter pilot during vietnam

270they say thank you for your service and a lot of times you you always hear you're welcome but more and more i'm hearing it was an honor and a privilege to serve our country so god bless our veterans some of them who carry with them the scars and the horrors of being in war still to this day god bless them and their sacrifice and their families they are the best of all of us sorry um i would like to take a moment to welcome our new board members i don't know if they're here mr holbrook mr nelms are they here welcome i look forward to working with you all and mr hill you're just returning so we're glad you're here um a month early um i'd like to also thank dr hicks and mr johnson

271for their service to our board our division our students our staff our community bedford county is a better place because of your work and your service and i thank you there's more to come next month so i have to come back um i i really appreciate i had all these congratulations so i really love that you do it that way i don't know about you all but instead of i congratulate jf i congratulate jf do you get over here and it's like i know um i love that i think you know you doing that is great so thank you i'd love to see you continue that um i've always thought and miss kirby is usually one who says i know i'm going to say the same thing everyone else said broken record so if you

272do that i think it's it's really great um i also want to thank dr cornette for the weekly news brief those are really cool thank you for doing that and dr bergen um for your work with the strategic plan i do think that needs to become a more understandable user friendly document um so i really appreciate you working on that and bringing that um up to something that our our community will find i think a little bit easier to use then i have one thing i i would like to talk about and um it's kind of um hard to talk about this but i have heard from teachers from principals from central office staff that they are being verbally abused by people in the community and they've been called a lot of different names um

273you know effing idiot is one and um i won't even say the rest they're all pretty bad um what i'm concerned about is that we're responsible under osha to provide a safe working environment for our our employees and osha divide defines threats of course in a hostile environment but they also define verbal intimidation which may include false statements disparaging statements derogatory statements disrespectful statements abusive or rude state statements you need just to be quiet um so our our nurses have gone through this our teachers and i'm not sure what the recourse or the remedy could be if they're um they're abused that way um is it that they file a complaint with hr or how do they handle that because i think it's it's not appropriate you know to be called an effing idiot that

274you can be angry you can be passionate you can whatever but you don't verbally abuse people um thank you so i just like to know what remedies our employees have again is it filing a complaint with hr is it what is it because our teachers and our staff need some support with this and i think that they're they don't know what to do about it but i've heard from too many that uh just feel they're they're they're being verbally abused and that is in violation of the osha workplace regulations um it depends on what it is i'm sure osha is for personnel and for against your employer or against your supervisor well no it's also according to osha against just a workplace a workplace environment or hostile work environment there's different things for harassment that's

275one of those devices so that would depend on what was said whether it was sexual whether it was you know it would depend on that there's also grievances um which are all in our policies right can you just get back with us or just have a discussion because i think that people need again a remedy uh for this that no one should come to work and and um be verbally abused for any reason there there is no reason for that um and so i just want to know what how we can help staff that are enduring this um so i'll let you get back i also would like to wish everyone a a happy thanksgiving and to thank our teachers and staff um all of them for all the work that they're doing again i

276know this is a really unusual situation but we do appreciate everything that you've done for our students thank you mr johnson great thank you dr neely i would like to echo what everyone else said tonight and wish everyone a very happy veteran's day my father wayne johnson was a vietnam veteran i know dr miley's husband was also in vietnam dr hicks mr lullini thank you for your service to our country because of the men and women like you you're free to have self-government and we're free to live in a state where public education is a right not a privilege where we can learn we can grow we can have disagreements over what books might be in our library without it coming to violence and we appreciate all the service of all of our veterans for

277that um this month i have visited uh monita elementary jf liberty and stanton river um media elementary i had a fascinating look at a math program for our kindergartners and they were learning math skills and for every problem that they got right a little piece of a dinosaur egg would hatch um and if they got it completely if they completed their lesson the entire dinosaur came out um and i know some people don't believe in dinosaurs but the the little kids loved it it was so much fun the um they would actually want me to come over and look at their dinosaur hatching just so we can see the progress that they've been making in in their lessons so that was that was a lot of fun and just a great example of the way

278technology is supporting our teachers in the process of instruction and allowing us to really differentiate based on where our students are and what they need a little extra help and support in um like so many other people i attended clue at jf and that was absolutely hilarious mr and ms white and their creative team at jf do a fantastic job with every production and thoroughly enjoyed it and i'm looking forward to cool you'll hear in a few weeks um saturday i also attended the seminole district 3c tournament to watch liberty liberty theater compete with three old women's vet and one of the coolest parts of that was playwright was actually in attendance that afternoon and got to watch his production of being staged um and the the liberty team did did well uh lucas stomp

279congratulations won a special award for his acting skills um stanford theater i went to support them at the blue ridge region 3d uh tournament earlier this week and congratulations to leila crutchfield um it was a very very fun production looking always loved the theater productions i know as a former art student myself the art students don't always get the recognition that they deserve so i'm never going to be apologetic for lavishing praise on theater and band and being such a welcoming environment for all of our students uh that that those programs are and hopefully never ever change so the whites ms cruz sherry given keep up the great work we love you uh and we appreciate everything you do uh also like to wish stint river high school and the best of luck tomorrow night

280as they compete in the playoffs first round of the playoffs um go go get them eagles as dr cornette would have said back in the day um i did hear a couple concerns in the community that i wanted to address i know because of some of the covenant mitigation issues we were not able to have our traditional homecoming dances but dr bergen um dr woodford just curious if it looks like prom is going to be able to happen yes yes yes we met with uh high school principals and senior prom sponsors and um we have told them to book their venues and we're going to make it happen and yeah i got a special request in to the lord and it's going to happen no matter what we're having problem all right so what i'm

281hearing you say is go ahead and pick out the tuxes and the dresses absolutely or buy one from somebody from your before left yes it's gonna happen all right three great um so the virginia school boards association convention will be next week monday is a delegate convention and we do need to select a delegate to do that it is a virtual delegate session so you do not have to be in williamsburg on monday you just have to have a reliable internet connection um so would someone be that is registered to attend be willing to do that so we'll get the information to vsva so they can get all of the materials to you i'll do it okay mr phil i will make sure that we get that to ms patterson and her team in the

282morning so mr hill you said that you attended the ciac meeting um are you interested in the position yes definitely okay i'll continue to do that the rest of the board is minimal to that then we can go ahead and let them know that mr hill will be our board's permanent liaison to the seac remember wherever ms jennings is hiding over there okay all right and then finally on on kind of a personal note um i wanted to tell you a little bit about one of the special teachers in my life um her name is mrs shannon thomas and anyone affiliated with stanton river high school knows her she was one of our teacher of the year finalists this year uh she's an ap english teacher um and when i had her she was a

283ninth grade english teacher um and i know teachers spend a lot of time decorating their classrooms to make them inviting spaces for their students probably never really think about the impact that a bulletin board or a poster might have on a student but all these years later i remember a poster that she had in her classroom and i have not seen it since i don't know if she has it in storage somewhere or uh has it hanging in her house or what but it said what's right is not always and what's popular is not always right and i don't know why that resonated so much with me as a ninth grader but that's something that i have thought about almost every day since then and sometimes it takes a lot to do the right thing

284in the face of opposition it takes a lot to be willing to stand up for the rule of law for the constitution um and sometimes you lose it all and you know what at the end of the day that's more important than than uh popularity um and so i just want to say to mrs thomas and to all the other teachers out there that are trying to teach their students integrity thank you keep up the good work know that you are appreciated and you are valued and you are loved all right and so with that do we have a motion to adjourn we will do all right motion by dr hicks to adjourn do we have a second second second by the ensemble all right all those in favor please say aye aye [Music] there

285may have been