January 6, 2022 Charlottesville City School Board Meeting

001it's mckeever to participate virtually i so move a second it's been moved improperly second can all of all in favor say aye aye aye aye suppose i stop it all righty um we will now have our a moment of silence all right thank you we will now have our pledge of allegiance we'll now have our roll call of board members thank you dr gurley mr brian president miss bryson morrisberger julie present dr craft present miss mckeever here mr moors and mrs yes thank you dr berlin you're welcome thank you at this time we will need to do the election of a chair uh board chair do we have any nominations for board chair dr gurley i would like to make a motion to nominate lisa torres as chair of the charlottesville school board all right

002thank you do we have any more nominations on the floor all right so we do we have so we do now we need a motion so she's been nominated we do need someone to make a motion for her to be chair i move to have lisa torres be chair for the next year all right in a second second thank you so we have miss torres congratulations you are our board chair thank you very much as thank you sir and thank you to board members appreciate that um and now we will move on to um recommendations for vice chair if anybody would like to recommend someone as vice chair yes um i would uh like to recommend mr james bryant to serve as vice chair of the board for the coming year are there any other

003uh nominations great i would now entertain a motion i will move what i just recommended so we have a motion by dr kraft a second by miss bryson morrisberger and if any and we can take a vote all in favor great thank you mr bryant i look forward to working with you again this year thank you everybody we will now i will hand it over back over to dr gurley for our appointment of clerk and deputy clerk for the board madam chair i would like to recommend miss julia greene as our board clerk and i would like to recommend miss leslie thacker as our deputy war clerk and i so move that thank you i'll second it all in favor aye aye closed great thank you so much all right moving on now we're going

004to i would like to ask for a motion for approval of the agenda for today please i move that we approve the agenda for today a second any questions concerns from board members no concern that i i mentioned to uh stacker that there were a couple of items that were listed as info items on our genders and they should be action items yeah the um calendar the program of studies should be an action i think now it is an action yeah they're both action items now all right so that's been changed so that's great so we did have a motion and a second any other questions all right all in favor aye opposed great thank you all right we are now moving to comments from members of the community we offer two opportunities for this

005we do have people in the media center in person and i'm going to call on those people first so reminder to those as you come up to the podium please clearly state your name and your address and you are limited to three minutes for your comments and first on my list i have miss christine esposito welcome good afternoon dr gurley and school board members i am christine esposito i am a grt at johnson and i live in the city i'd like to start by thanking the school board for their leadership over the last two years these last two years have been some of the most difficult of my teaching career but i've rarely had to add the stress of wondering where the board stood on the safety of our students and staff to the long

006list of stresses a pandemic creates i have felt more heard and listened to in the last two years than i have at any other time in my career with charlottesville city schools i've been even further heartened by dr gurley's stated intention and his early efforts to create a culture of care for our division the summer of 2020 when the discussion raged about how to conduct school as safely as possible for everyone ccs did what few other divisions in virginia did they trusted teachers enough to give us a voice in how schools could operate i believe i return to school in september and in march was made easier because teachers the people who would have to implement their policies being discussed were given a chance to make those policies stronger this for this reason that i

007ask you to approve a collective bargaining agreement one that gives our division a chance to derive the full benefit of teachers expertise to improve learning and working conditions in our schools while it is true that i've never felt more heard or listened to than in the last two years i'm in my 22nd year as a teacher in charlottesville i remember all too clearly the message coming out of central office during the height of the recession you should be thankful you have a job the unspoken but absolutely clear part of that message was that we should sit down and shut up discussion was neither welcomed or entertained we are one election or one superintendent search away from this being our normal once again it is for this reason i ask you to prove a collective bargaining

008resolution one that gives teachers a guaranteed voice in the discussion a handful of years ago i worked for a principal who routinely targeted some of the teachers on his staff i was not on his target list but i could not sit quietly and watch this principal continue to target teachers and to destroy the morale of a place at which i had loved working for more than a decade with no real structure in place for addressing issues with principles i along with several other teachers made an appointment with the school board member to address our concerns the day of the meeting almost everyone who was planning to attend was called out of class one by one to be reprimanded by the principal and an ap for daring to take our family business outside the meeting with

009the school board member did not take place as we all worried about retaliation it is for this reason i ask you to approve a collective bargaining resolution one that gives teachers a stay in their working conditions and a process for addressing addressing similar issues i do not doubt this boards or this administration's commitment to our students our community or our staff i believe that you truly want to create a culture of care in charlottesville city schools a culture of care means knowing that we all want what is best for our students and by guaranteeing us an equal seat at the table you trust us enough to make that a reality no matter who is in charge thank you miss esposito next on our list we have mr david cunning good afternoon my name is david

010koenig i'm a history teacher at lugo mcginnis academy i'm also a parent of a second grader at greenbrier elementary i'm here today to comment on the presentation on collective bargaining which is being given by my employer charlottesville city schools article 23 of the universal declaration of human rights states that every person has a right to form and join trade unions for the protection of their interests implicit in this fundamental human right is the right of workers to bargain collectively since collective bargaining is what allows workers through their unions to level the playing field between themselves and their employers of course protection of even the most fundamental rights is always dependent on the government under which a person lives in the united states the right of private sector workers to bargain collectively has been protected since

011the enactment of the wagner actor in the great depression but public employees collective bargaining rights depend on individual state governments and in 2020 the government of virginia finally enacted a statute recognizing that right joining 47 other states statute empowers local governing bodies including this school board to enact ordinances recognizing and defining the collective bargaining rights of local workers so when the teachers and staff of charlottesville city schools present this board with a request for a collective bargaining ordinance signed by a majority of those teachers and staff your choice is clear to recognize and protect the fundal fundamental rights of our school divisions employees or to refuse to do so the presentation that you will hear from ccs this afternoon is clearly intended to portray collective bargaining as optional this board can approve an ordinance or

012simply decide not to presentation includes 11 slides dealing all of the things that the school division has done for or given to its employees reading between the lines reasons that we don't need collective bargaining and while i do appreciate things like the extra days off that dr gurley added to the spring schedule i do what i would appreciate much more is the chance to join together with my brother and sister educators and to sit down at the negotiating table with dr gurley in the school division as equal partners in the education of our children the ccs presentation concludes with the directive to this board the decision is yours an act to collect a bargaining statute or not while this is technically true under the virginia statute this is not a neutral decision you're being asked

013to make this is not a choice of whether to appropriate funds for a new high school gym versus a middle school auditorium this is a choice of whether to respect the fundamental rights of the people who work in our city schools i'll just conclude by saying today that i am new to charlottesville city schools this year my family and i moved here this past summer after living and teaching in washington dc for the better part of two decades one of the main reasons we decided to make the move was the consistent anti-teacher stance from the dcps central office and the resulting combative relationship between that central office and the district's teachers and staff so far we've been very happy with our move and with our new employers i have found charlottesville city schools to be

014a well-run organization and the relationship among teachers and administrators at least at my school is extremely cooperative so it was with real disappointment that i read through the ccs anti-collective bargaining presentation which i view as dismissive and disrespectful of teachers rights and of educator solidarity my hope is that when we do present this board with with a petition requesting recognition of our right to bargain together the division's leadership will have changed their position and will be ready at that time to express unreserved support for their employees thank you thank you and next on our list is jessica taylor would you like to no okay is there anybody else in the uh media center who would like to make public comment at this time okay i believe we do have some people that are signed up

015potentially in the zoom room um i have on my list and maybe this can be confirmed miss hannah helm yeah and i would just ask that anybody who's in the attendee gallery on zoom the best way for them to uh let let us know they would like to speak would be to raise their hand in the gallery or to post a message on the chat boards so if they could do that at this time that would be super helpful and i do have hannah helm uh coming through so han i'm gonna promote you up here to the panelist stage and you should be able to unmute and you will have three minutes to public comment thank you good afternoon everyone my name is hold on miss helm we're having some trouble with the audio yeah

016i don't know that that's coming from our end it might be her connection but we may be able to try again if not we may be able to come back to her shortly go ahead and try again let's see how it sounds no i believe i believe it's your connection so i don't know if you can disconnect and potentially try and reconnect and we can pivot back if that's okay with you i can check see if there are any other participants who would like to speak by raising their hand in the attended gallery or putting a chat message in our chat not seeing any other hands up at this time if we want to give 30 seconds for hannah to come back in we can try to promote her again sure that's fine let's give

017her some time okay i will uh move hannah up to the panelist view at this point hannah you should be able to unmute it this time let's see if the audio quality is any better nope it's back on mute i'm not sure if the quality did not improve maybe we want to try at the end at the second public comment speak speaking section miss helm are you there she says she can wait until the end of the um at the second comment period so i appreciate miss helm yeah thank you jennifer all right we'll do that and again as a reminder to everybody we will have a second opportunity towards the end of the meeting for public comment again so thank you for being willing to wait i appreciate that anybody else mr como that

018you see right now there are no other hands raised in the attendees gallery and i do not see any um chat messages at this time for new comments okay all right we're going to move on then thank you um thank you to those who made comment we appreciate that so moving on our next um up or this is an opportunity for comments from the board um and in the interest of time you know if we have some announcements that need to be made let's make those but i'd like to keep it moving just with the potential inclement weather on its way and other things that we'd like to talk about so miss mckeever did you have any um announcements or comments at this time not at this time thank you okay um miss bryce morrisberger

019not at this time thank you mr bryant united this time okay mr morse no i'm fine thank you all right dr kraft i would just like to welcome our two new board members miss julie and mr morse at this time thank you miss dooley i don't have any comments at this time okay thank you yeah quickly i i as well would like to welcome our new board members thank you both for um joining us i look forward to working with this entire board again and my only other comment quickly at this point is to congratulate mayor snook and vice mayor wade and to just send out a message that we look forward to meeting uh working with council in this next year um and i will now move to the adoption of our consent agenda

020if someone would like to make a motion for that please so moved i'll second that okay any questions or comments about the consent agenda all right all in favor of approving the consent agenda say aye aye any opposed great thank you all right and we are moving on to action items um dr gurley our first item is approval of the 2022-2023 program of study you have dr odie who will be doing that thank you thank you madam chair members of the board dr gurley good afternoon in december staff presented to you the program of studies for 2022 2023 since you've had time to review those recommendations tonight our superintendent does recommend the board take action thank you for that are there any questions from board members and and i know that um mr morris and

021ms dooley hopefully i think you both were here and had the opportunity to see those presentations but any questions or comments from anybody miss mckeever i have no comments or questions at this time great thank you i will go ahead and move the program of study for approval all right any questions that this are comments at this point sure um i just want to quickly comment that i applaud the course changes that better utilize funding um it's something that probably won't be covered in terms of media but it's something that i think it's important for us to better utilize our money so some of those courses uh changing to cte courses or just their numbers allowing that additional funding um or not even additional funding better utilizing the funding for perkins so i just applaud

022that that's something small but i think it's pivotal on that we've talked about in terms of making sure that we have our dollars going the best way so thank you thank you thank you mr morris any other questions comments so we've had a motion and a second all in favor aye aye any opposed great thank you thank you dr odin thank you um and then next we have dr gurley for 2022-2023 calendar and that'll be dr odie again thank you uh also in december we presented to you a draft of the 2022-2023 school calendar as mentioned before we collaborated with albemarle county public schools to create aligned calendars the process did include involving joint calendar committees composed of teachers administrators central office staff and parents as you know we also share the draft with the

023community for review and comment we do have one small change after a request from a community member after our december i'm board member meeting and so we have changed the language from chinese new year to say lunar new year in an effort to be more inclusive so at this time the superintendent would like to uh ask you to take action on that 2022-2023 school calendar i would like to move that we approve the 2022-2023 school calendar on a second any questions or comments from board members hey this is jennifer i just wanted to note that i probably will say no to this calendar again um i just think there's a lot of um a lot of short weeks and kind of in a row which i just always think is a problem um i i

024kind of wonder i don't know who's on these committees and i so that's also i'm sure very good people who are accurately representing all of the possibility possibilities here i just wonder if there um should be other representation on this because it just always feels like the same issues come up year after year with respect to the three day weekends that happen every other week in multiple months so um i'm gonna say no but not out of disrespect not out of the hard work that people have done but i just would um so that's i just wanted to be clear that uh i'm that i'm uh respectful of the work that's been done but i also would like um to kind of know who's on these committees in the future and to um perhaps see

025additional representation from families who are struggling to kind of find child care for their family for uh these three day weekends thank you miss mcuber any other questions comments dr odie dr gurley would it be possible that we next year revisit and look at who is on that who is invited on those committees and look at whether or not we might be able to include absolutely i mean we can most certainly share that um and i appreciate that miss mckeever and you know one of the things that i believe i'm sure i said at the last um at the last meeting you know the sticking point is when school starts and when we count those um those those nine weeks out it's just the nine weeks and right before we have the election um the

026election day so that's what causes that october november and i agree um you know i wish it was it was different too i mean really we if we could have if our schools weren't used as polling places that would help some of it out too we could move those days or we could move some of those days around but that's where some of that sticking point but most certainly we can share the list of names of people who've been invited and who serve on that those committees absolutely thank you all right any other questions concerns we've had a motion in a second all in favor aye aye opposed me jennifer thank you dr odie thank you all right we are moving on to our items for discussion and the first item is 11.1 student and

027family and we will have a miss bianca johnson will be coming forward and i'll introduce i should have stayed up here sorry um so i will ask for our coordinator for student and family engagement bianca johnson and two special guests who she will introduce to provide you an update for our student and family engagement efforts here in charlottesville city schools ms johnson good afternoon madame chair school board members and dr gurley uh good afternoon austin any community members that are watching with us today my name is bianca johnson and i'm the family engagement coordinator for ccs uh thank you for having me present the yearly update and we can go to the next slide and before we get started i want to quickly address our current state with the winter weather i know that it's

028been a difficult couple of days for some of our families and i want to personally let you know that even though your children are not in school we are still here and ready to support i work with a small group of families and i've checked in with those needing assistance by dropping off a few extra food and hygiene items before the next storm hits please check the family engagement social media for information on warming and charging stations as well as how to access food if need be feel free to also reach out to your school mental health professionals to navigate community assistance and of course me if need be on this slide right here you'll see my contact information and for those that are watching um please feel free to screenshot the slide or use

029your device to scan the qr code and it'll save my contact information should you need to reach out below you're also going to see a hashtag that says barrier warrior and as i've continued this work for the third year i continue to work with our families to eliminate barriers so that students can contribute all that they can to the classroom and that families can support their children as best as they can next slide and um this slide reads a quote from steve constantino he is the author of the book engage every family which i read in a book study a while back the quote reads strategies without a process produce sporadic and temporary results i ask that you keep this quote in the back of your mind as i continue through this presentation next slide

030in november i gave a brief community engagement update under the equity presentation where you all had the chance to hear more about the inclusive excellence framework i helped create the community engagement portion of the framework along with other division staff in this part of the framework there are three objectives what you'll see in this presentation is two out of three objectives in action and a plan to get the other one in action as well objective two reads improved communication engagement outcomes and experiences for marginalized groups within the division one of the strategies to make this happen is to continue to leverage partnerships at community events that address the needs of ccs families and as mentioned in november you'll see ccs implement these efforts by both coordinating community events and joining efforts already planned since the

031last family engagement update we've attended health fairs community fun days and even basketball games to continue being familiar faces in the community and to greet and connect with families we've also coordinated events like the back to school bash clark community connections and bus stop meet and greets for dr girling these events have allowed me to connect with many families and to connect them to resources such as beds for their students or a computer so that a family can continue to meet with their child's teachers despite having limited mobility these connections have also allowed me and different division staff such as our student support liaisons and our mental health professionals provide direct family support as needed next slide workshops have continued this year on a smaller basis for our families that are part of different community

032groups and so far this year family engagement has presented eight workshops and counting most of the workshops have been virtual and you have also been in person um i also co-led a training with jody murphy the mental health and wellness coordinator with the ymca after school staff more family workshops will be available in the spring next slide since the last update family engagement has hosted three more response to essential needs drive-throughs for our families and as you all know at these events families can drive through to receive free and essential items such as food coats hygiene products books and community resources since the last update we've given away about 2 000 of these items to our families in need and all of these efforts are made possible through community donations and sponsorships going back to

033the inclusive excellence framework objective 3 states that we will work to evaluate and increase community partnerships in support of diversity equity and inclusion one of the strategies to make this happen is to add to the comprehensive list of partners by contacting community partners who provide services that address school or division needs at the end of last school year i sent out a thank you video showing our gratitude and what our collaborations have provided to our ccs families this was also a way to implement this objective and begin conversations about future collaborations two organizations that i have with me today reached out with the same question and intention what we did was great but how can we make this happen on a long term basis and so we're going to start with the chris long foundation

034who's been a sponsor for almost all of our ran events kim packett the development manager of the foundation is going to share some information about ed zone which will continue to eliminate barriers but on a school-wide level afternoon everyone thank you for having me here today uh like bianca said my name is kim packett and i am the development manager at the chris wong foundation at the clear slam foundation we're primarily known for our work in the clean water sector but education has been at the core of our mission since the beginning we have previously run programs such as ed zone and first quarter for literacy which was focused on the construction of at home libraries for students and just increasing the overall literacy rate through cities across the country and so now we have

035our new ed zone initiative which is our newest education program which will be partnering with charlottesville charlottesville city schools on through ed zone we'll be focusing on the distribution of essential needs items to students and communities of importance to chris and meg long who are the trustees of our foundation those communities are st louis philadelphia and of course charlottesville virginia ed zone will support students through the provision of basic needs breaking down barriers to learning so every child can start the school day cared for provided for and confident we like to use the example we don't send our football players out in the field without their helmets and pads we shouldn't be sending our students into the classroom hungry uncomfortable and um cold we've been working with bianca to figure out how to get these

036essential needs items to students not just at distribution events held periodically through the year but also in the classroom every day during the school year we settled on the creation of essential needs closets at the six elementary schools here in charlottesville to house these items and so we launched a zone this past october at our annual fundraiser at king family vineyards which bianca and dr gurley were both able to attend and speak about the program since then we have been readily accepting donations and i'm really excited to share with you all that we have we have uh secured funding for five of the six closets for next year and we anticipate the six being funded by the end of the month the response from the community has truly been overwhelming and we're very grateful so

037the profits will launch in fall of 2022 and we will continue of course to also support the fundraising i'm sorry the distribution events throughout the year as well so we just wanted to take a moment to thank everyone at charlottesville city schools for this partnership we're excited to get going get to work and to continue to work with bianca and her amazing team thank you kim um so just a little bit more information about ed zone we've talked with the elementary schools about their spaces and we're also taking into consideration the modernizations that are planning to take place and for now we've cleared out the back conference room downstairs at the annex to have a centralized hub for surplus or if other schools need items as well and so next you're going to hear from

038catherine donnelly you're going to hear from her virtually this afternoon she's the manager of child nutrition programs at the blue ridge area food bank who's provided self-stable boxes for our families in need at the ran events but we are now looking to pilot a school-based food support program she also prepared an overview and i made copies for you guys if you're interested thank you bianca can you all hear me okay yes thank you so much for having me i'm really sorry that this is virtual i'm from our i'm coming to you live from our main office in verona uh do the weather and covet concerns we decided to not go over the mountain today but i do really wish i could be there with you in person um we're really excited to work with bianca

039it's been a great experience working in some of the shelf stable um food items food boxes that we've done for some of these events and what we'd like to do is expand our good food school market program that currently exists in two schools um in one in harrisonburg and one in broadway and what they are they are distributions of both shelf stable as well as fresh produce for schools it's another way to create an access point with limited barriers for students and families to access this food that they may need from the food bank as opposed to having to to navigate the emergency food system through food pantries so it's just another way that we like to create access and create a buy-in by identifying partners such as bianca to help us come to the

040right schools and to advertise the events and to make it accessible to to any and all who may need it in the area thank you and so we are looking to pilot this over at buford i've already had some beginning conversations with the beaufort admin and i have met with the community partner committee at the school a few times to get the ball rolling with planning and we would like to get that started next school year next slide please there are many hats worn in this role and so i'll briefly go over other efforts in the family engagement umbrella as a coordinator one of my requirements is to provide workshops for families to learn how to best support their children since the last update five different live virtual workshops were presented to families and recorded

041for them to have access to at a later date topics range from core learning such as math or reading and from talking to kids about race and racism workshops will be continued to be offered in the spring um i just lost my place i'm sorry but the format could look a little different with family feedback and further conversations with partners i'm hoping to provide information to families based on what they need and a format that works best for them family engagement also supports the reach them to teach them grant program that encourages teachers to create and document their efforts to engage families throughout the school year normally a winner is chosen based on an essay that a teacher submits that documents their work over the school year and from admin feedback we have determined that

042this isn't the best environment for a teacher contest and so we are working to revamp that as well my hope is that we can include family feedback to select a teacher that's doing the work to connect with students and families with family engagement being part of the vtss virginia tier systems of support i am also a part of the division leadership team a goal this year is to create an action team for all domains and we're working to have a few family engagement action team meetings before the school year is complete to hopefully create a clear vision for dishawa family engagement as well as some universal ways to provide support for our students and families i'm also looking to gain some feedback from our teachers and support staffs within the school buildings to find out

043what they need to better engage families next slide in this work i believe that it's important to also increase my learning capacity as well and so on this slide you'll see two books that i've been reading this school year last year i was invited to join the district leadership network which allows me to meet with others in the same work field as me to hear new ideas to engage families in november i intended the dln two-day learning lab to hear about many new efforts in districts across the u.s including connecting with families during covert and evaluating district-wide family engagement next slide and i will wrap this presentation up by going back to the quote that i had at the beginning of the slide strategies without process produce sporadic and temporary results and i hope that

044through today's presentation you'll have a better idea of the strategies and efforts that family engagement and community partners are doing to produce long-term and sustainable results for our families that need some extra support through our partnerships honest conversations intentional work we hope to continue to be barrier warriors so that families can support their students and students can be their best selves in the classroom i would like to thank the school board for your ongoing support i'd also like to thank dr gurley dr odi and especially denise johnson who's been a great partner in planning community engagement efforts and i'd also like to thank our community partners for continuing to collaborate with us and all the division staff that help us all continue this work as i've said many times my work is nothing without partnerships

045and it's because of all of you that we can continue to make this happen thank you and if there are any questions i'm happy to yeah thank you thank you so much so let's start anybody have any questions i'm gonna again i'll start with jennifer just so i don't forget you up there on the screen okay um so thank you miss johnson i think the critical question that is kind of being asked right now is like um i guess in comparison to march and april of last year when we um brought food to families is there any discussion over the past couple days about how we're going you know it sounds like you have done a little bit of that with a number of families but i wonder if there's any other engagement efforts for

046families who might need um i don't know warmth or food or anything like that for our students who are not at school in school right now um aside from my personal efforts i am not aware of any but if anyone needs any assistance please feel free to reach out to me um or any of our school mental health professionals for assistance between you know we're a really resourceful community in between all of us we can absolutely help i guess the um again i i appreciate that i think this is a pretty small window of time that we'll be doing um you know not in school so i'm hopeful that we'll be returning to school soon but i wonder if they're the barrier of having to ask for help is i i think one of that

047you can appreciate and respect and i just wonder um if we given our culture of care if we can kind of if like if we can think in a long term about how we can overcome that potential barrier um and how we can approach families in a way that makes them feel like it's not reaching out it just is like this is what we do um because i think again you're doing all of this incredible work so i i this is just like obviously a very unique moment with the snow um and weather this week and so i just wanna i think it does provide us an opportunity to think long term about how um that reaching out peace can be such a i mean i know for myself and my own challenges that that

048can be very hard um and so i imagine some of our families also have similar difficulties so thank you for the good work and i um applaud your effort and i look forward to kind of how we can continue to examine our process thank you miss julia i'll start down with you right now sure so again just echo my thanks for your work and your team's work um in supporting our students in our community i've had the opportunity to participate in some of the events and just been really impressed with the organization and the involvement um some questions i have are just more systematically how are you measuring success is it by the number of families that are served um you know how many people are coming through or that's a good question i think

049that um it can be measured in a number of ways i think that we can look at uh what we've bought versus what we've gotten rid of i think we can go on uh family feedback i think we can go on community feedback a lot of the feedback that i receive is really organic and so a lot of times i'm not creating surveys and things like that i'm out in the community asking questions being a familiar face and i think that as long as we continue to be familiar that families will feel comfortable kind of coming and giving us that feedback sure i and i think maybe what miss mckeever is getting at too you know having some of our established events that we know our consistent needs are always going to be there but

050when we do have moments like this week that are hopefully unprecedented and not uh normal um you know that we're able to pivot you know more nimbly to respond to what members of our community need but overall just really impressed and grateful for your work thank you dr kraft yes um yeah i just had a couple of questions and and i really appreciate the work that you're doing to kind of move things to the next level as you say to make them sustainable and system-wide and it's really great to see that happening um i had a question about the needs the closets in the elementary schools and whether are the items that are there are they provided by the foundation by donors to the foundation or can people in the community donate items that's a

051great question and i think that um and can please correct me if i'm wrong i think we're planning to do both and so the foundation will provide some basic funding to get those supplies but the community is always reaching out asking for ways to donate and so we definitely want to utilize that as well okay and will it be um will it include clothing or is it limited to toiletry items so at the moment i believe that it's going to be limited to more of our hygiene supplies but if need be we're happy to maybe have some clothing i think that um the coat drive is something that we are possibly planning to continue and anything that's left over can go directly to those closets great yeah well i just think that it's a wonderful

052idea and i know that there would be there are many people who would be really eager to donate items if we get to that point or when when we get to that point thank you and my only other question um was you know with the workshops that were offered do you and i i remember i sat in on i think one at least one of them and it was really great and i'm wondering um if you have a sense of how many people are taking advantage of these either live or the recordings um i think that um if i'm being 100 honest i don't think that there are enough families take taking advantage of it our numbers have been relatively low um and i'm open to you know hearing feedback as to why that's happening

053um but i i think you know with covert times families are busy families are stressed and which is why we also offer the option to record it so that they can access it at a later date great well yeah i it would be wonderful um they're wonderful resources so whatever we can do to get people to focus and and listen and watch that would be great um so i would just encourage that okay thank you and um i think that's it but thanks for your work thank you mr morris yeah i just want to um quickly say thank you for creating these partnerships and it really does help our school system uh cultivating these partnerships and serving our children so most of everything else that i had written down has been said so i'll just

054keep going thank you mr brian bianca i want to certainly um thank you and your staff for the wonderful work you're doing in our community also i want to give a shout out to partners who have partnered with you all in terms of providing these family workshops and essential needs to uh students and families in our community uh i do applaud you for that um i did have an opportunity on several occasions to see you in action so i'll continue to do the good work and i do concur with dr craft um if we can find a way um to engage our families to you know to participate in those workshops um to enlighten them more i think that would be a great i think that would be a great thing so continue to do

055the good work that you and your team are doing in our community and you are valued and they are very appreciative of your work thank you mr president morrisburger no questions i echo what everyone else said thank you and no questions okay thank you yes thank you um so much gratitude to you your team to the partners for everything um and for these new programs i look forward to how they'll be rolled out um and whatever we can do to just to support you and to support that um i definitely look forward to that i think just quickly regarding ms dooley's question as far as how do we measure the success of these programs i mean i think i've attended almost all of your response to need events and and the number of products that

056you all have been able to gather and give out it's more each time this most recent coat drive we were out of coats in the first hour i believe and there were people lined up before we were supposed to even start um so there's definitely the need and and you know you just are doing tremendous work so thank you for all of that um as it relates to the current weather event um and this week definitely uh i don't think anybody expected it to be what it was um i think the schools um are ready and available and and potentially we can always do better so i think we are open to receiving feedback and and recommendations and and i think even more importantly you know we might have the space but i look forward

057to and i would hope that and i am willing to bring this forward to city government city leadership on how we can maybe team and be better prepared if there is a next time so if they are able to support and they need a space maybe we can provide the space so that we can better support our community so thank you for reaching out to who you have and i will definitely like i said bring this forward to leadership at the city level so that we can we can continue to do better and support all of our community members so thank you thank you we will we will um now have dr uh baptist come forward with our um revisions to our leave and so i want to say that um as a part of

058just the listening sessions that i've had and just you know this caring culture that on many of my stops i've heard from a lot of men who have said you know i think that we need to re-look at some of our policies because in terms of paternity leave i'm not able to you know be out with my wife or when my partner my husband has had a child and so i want to be able to take advantage of that too and i've also heard from expected mothers who said that our current lead policy just does not address what we need in terms of being able to support our child in terms of bonding and things of that nature and so on what dr baptist is going to do she's going to present to you a

059policy that has been drafted for your consideration madam chair members of the board dr girling dr gurley has just shared with you everything i was going to share with you um except this is a regulation not a policy we already have the policy and so this would be the regulation that that goes along with our staff leave policies and we're not 100 sure we will keep all of the numbers in here exactly as they are but we did want to share with you what we're thinking because as dr gurley says we have had concerns from families that there has not been the bonding time some of you know i'm a new grandmother and i also experienced this with my own son who had very little time out for the birth of their child so he's

060not an educator so it's a different group but i see how it has affected families so what we have looked at is several regulations throughout virginia the usual places i look at when we're looking at policy to sort of see what are other divisions doing and so what we have here and it is on the second page and the part this in the bold print is the only part that we've looked at changing um so we were are looking at the possibility of having up to 30 accumulated sick leave so someone would have to already have the sick leave to be able to to to do this with pay but allow them to have that time for bonding and if you look you will see that there are some stipulations in there it needs to

061be consecutive time it needs to be within the first year it there and there's certain events that it would um need to follow but we just feel like that it is something that does match the culture of care that we're showing the the mother will have fmla and would have the amount of time it is the the father or in an adopted family the you know the either of the parents or both of the parents that this would really be um a benefit for so like i said we're not we've seen different numbers from different school divisions some have used 30 some have used 40. right now we've got 30 i think in here yes 30 not to exceed 30 work days but we really want to look at it anymore but wanted to share

062with the board what we're thinking about to match with the culture of care that dr gurley has talked so much about so this doesn't really require any sort of action it is an information item anyway but wanted to get your thoughts on it and if there were things you wanted us to look at research or um rethink to get your opinions and dr baptist i think time to go home yes time to go home i think one thing that would be really important for people to know too is just as a little background is that um before this regulation fathers could only take three yeah three what three three days off during the birth of a child um so this is a tremendous improvement um in terms of heading in the right direction so i

063would ask if there are any questions or feedback that you would have on this okay thank you um again i'm going to start with miss mckeever hi thank you dr baptist i'm in the um speaking to the speaker um i am always looking to improve our maternity leave policy and i appreciate that this is finally or family leave policy um and i the addre the email that we got a couple weeks ago uh related to this i mean i don't know that that actually addresses the concerns in that email so um is that your understanding dr gurley that this would address some of the concerns that were brought up forth by that is this the email from a male employee or a female employee female so what the female was with our female employees they

064are covered under fmla so there is still up to 12 weeks that um so currently so with our male employees well yeah with our male employees there are only three days that you can take off during the birth of a child period regardless of how much sick time you have so that's our current policy you can only take three with our female employees i think some of the issue comes with the um the bonding of the child and so those are the fmla i think there's some wording things here that we're going to have to and we've taken this to tech we talked through this at our tax meetings and most certainly it's a moving this is not a one and done um now we do know that some we can't account for all situations

065within the regulations but i do think we can umbrella most of those things um so some of the things will be taken care of with fmla um and i think i'll have to go back and read it one more time please do because i think it um it requires the doctor's notice and that's like only really up to eight weeks or so like there's some very i think funny things about the fmla with respect to um giving birth and i would you know to the extent that a parent could a new parent could use 12 weeks or um add sick time to the amount of fmla like i thought the concurrent wording was a little again it's fine for the for paternity you know for um people who have not just given birth i i

066don't know i i my language around this is very ignorant so i apologize um the family bonding is key but also the kind of um if they have sick leave that they can use i i would like a parent to be able to use that on top of their fmla if possible um or just go back to that email that that um that our uh teacher wrote about and i would definitely encourage you to talk to um more than just the tac like expand um because i think there's a there's been a lot of questions over the years and i'm happy to talk with you offline about it more um because um i i again for the paternity this is a no-brainer totally supportive of that um but i i definitely want to see more

067support for new moms and new families around this fmla and sick leave absolutely and and it's this is not a one and done and when i say tag tac is our springboard and so they most certainly they represent their school so the members of the tech committee represent the their teacher community within the school and so most certainly i appreciate that we will it'll this will be fluid and we will almost certainly continue to bring it back as we evolve it um and we'll continue to put it out to our um teacher stakeholder group we'll all the whole all stakeholder groups within our buildings mrs bryce morrisberger you look like you're working diligently down there do you have any thoughts um i had a few thoughts um for the fraternity league that we were talking

068about the 30 days i was wondering if our starting point could be six weeks because that's the amount of time to heal from a c-section i guess the window and so a lot of times the parental leave is to help the spouse who's just given birth to be able to function and you know like they need support and help so i was just throwing that out there that maybe we could start with um a window that kind of correlates with like the medical need that might be involved and um mr price and martial are you saying start it when the baby is six weeks or start the leave as six weeks at a minimum of six weeks so that you can support your spouse or partner who may have had a c-section 30 days would

069be six weeks that's six weeks oh yeah well six times yeah it'd be six weeks oh well never mind everything's great with that and then the female employee the email i'm confused i thought that they were asking to be able to use their sick leave without a limit on how much they could use while they were out on fmla or whatever period that is covered that they would could at least use sick leave so they could continue to be paid do we allow that i haven't seen these emails that you're speaking about but for the for the mother fmla would be what the mother would use but for the father as dr gurley said if we've had a very limited amount of time three days that people could use their own sickly for this would

070allow somebody to use up to 30 days or six weeks of their accumulated sick leave if they already had it now if it's somebody that's in the first year with us our first year teaching they may not have accumulated 30 sick days so that would be a different issue but if we have employees who have accumulated sickly this would then allow them to use up to 30 days of their already accumulated sick leave for bonding or being at home to help and that's that's if you know if the mother is ill then that would be an issue or the child is ill but this is trying to help with the bonding piece differently okay so if i'm i just gave birth and i need to be out for longer than the 30 days and i

071have longer than 30 days of sick leave can i access as much of my sick leave because i think people take sick leave so they'll continue to get paid because fmla you're not paid it just guarantees you the time so can you access as much of your sick leave as you would like if you're an fmla you can use either sick leave until you use it up and then go to unpaid or you can use fmla and hold on to some of your sick leave depending on the individual rules of fmla so the mother would be handled differently than the father this is really helping more the non-birth parent to be able to have more time at the time of a birth or an adoption or fostering okay thank you yeah and and i thought

072ken um and one of the things and and this is just a clarification piece now i'll be happy to reach out to the employee um and ms mckeever um just looking at that email i know specifically that um that particular person was talking about using the um using their sick leave within the um within the fmla period which is permitted yes uh which is permitted so and i think there's a little bit there's two different languages used here so i'll just make sure that we clarify and and that this uh policy also states that you can about the fmla window because the email says being able to use your sick time during the fmla period which we would which we would support right and we're not wanting to do anything that would be in violation

073or compromise fmla that's you know federal law we're definitely going to follow every bit of that this is to help people who wouldn't be covered within the fmla and have the time okay so i i feel like this is a tangent of from the policy that we're talking about and um but one that i think is really important because um as she says as the situation stands i will only get paid for six weeks and will go unpaid for the other six weeks um and because i think that the so even though she has far more than six weeks of sick leave so that's where the confusion is yes and as long as long as she has the lead she'll be paid and she as long as she's been working over a year she's protected

074by fmla so i'll just make sure that i clear i'll follow up that would be very helpful thank you so much dr gurley no problem thank you um mr morse do you have any questions uh one of the things i was curious about and maybe just giving some clarification around the reasoning between if both parents are employees of charlottesville city schools um in the combined total of 30 consecutive days it's on our we it's on our list we've talked about it um and it's i told dr baptist and she agrees to you know it it kind of puts us back in the same predicament of two people our employees because then one person's not going to get the full benefit so it's on our list of things to revise however it is that language is

075seen in a lot of the policies that we pulled but we said we're going to be better than so i always strive to be the best thank you dr kaft um i just applaud us going in this direction um i think it's really important for our employees i don't have any questions at this time thank you miss dooley i echo mr morris's question and just fear i don't want us putting a disincentive on couples in the division not working here i think from a you know teacher retention standpoint i would imagine we retain more teachers if they're both employed by ccs than if one is working in a different division and so i think you know they should not be penalized for both being employees of our division uh and having a child um yeah

076the concurrent piece is very convoluted um certainly i mean the idea that it was it still is three is outrageous to me and so i am very grateful that we are you know joining the 21st or even the 20th century and and improving parental uh maternity leave um but it seems like there's a long way to go and i'd like to see us maximize the number of paid days that both fathers and mothers can take um you know well beyond six weeks especially if they have that accumulated sick leave in their name great thank you i also had the same question dr gurley and i had spoken about that before so yeah i agree um father mother father father mother mother we can do better so i appreciate you all working on this thank you

077and i do think one thing with that and i don't know i don't understand all the reasoning but if both mother and father are our employees the mother is likely to already have the fmla so the 30 days may go to the father they may the mother may not have to take any of that because the mother's already taking the fmla so there's some questions in my mind too but as dr gurley said this is what is in some other division so if we will get to the bottom of it and we'll do what's best for employees about the consecutive nature of the days also just i imagine that comes from continuity of teachers and instruction and things but i don't know if there's any ability to be flexible um you know in terms of

078timing and do they have to be 30 consecutive days or you know is there a way to break that out and we can look at that but i think from what i've seen in more most divisions the to have for the bonding it was the consecutive days rather than even thinking about the child back and forth back and forth but we can look at that see if we can get a better understanding yes and one of the things we talked about in one of our planning meetings is if dad wants to if mom wants to take off the first six weeks and dad wants to do the second six weeks um i think we were trying to address like that i'm going to take three days here three you know we want to be able

079to support the the building and the students in the learning environment but yeah we're flexible great thank you any other questions i just had a quick question you sort of alluded to it dr baptist if uh i guess it's more of the male employee and then we're looking at maybe expanding it from three to 30 days what happens if what what plan do we have in place if an employee does not have the 30 days and there's a newborn they could request time off and at our request that it be unpaid we do have a policy about extended medical leave so they could ask for that so that their job is not in jeopardy they just would not be paid during that time period okay thank you you appreciate it all right next uh dr

080gurley we're moving to 11.3 this is our discussion on collective bargaining sorry all right good evening afternoon madame chair board members uh educators in the art and in the audience and so this evening i want to talk about being a better together and so one of the things that i want to just start off by saying is that we do value our our teachers we invite we value all employee groups and so um i have heard you all loud and clear with our community comments earlier and so i just want to make sure that people understand that the intention um for this is to make sure that as a superintendent i provide um the most recent and i keep the board informed of trends uh going forward within our school community and so um i

081just think it's especially improved to have the conversation um surrounding collective bargaining earlier this week i had an opportunity to meet with miss taylor and miss saxton and just to really hear some of the concerns um you know we talked about glows and grows from the school division um but partic but particularly um throughout that conversation we did get to talk about the collective bargaining and the why and so just and i'm really big on people knowing the why and so for me as i share with them this has become one of those things that you know from the um educational leadership standpoint people don't want to have the conversation about i'm probably maybe the only superintendent standing up right now talking about collective bargaining but i do feel and as i stated on that

082day that i don't want this to be something that we are running away from i do think that we can have this conversation together um and you know i'm big on hashtags and i do think that this is something that having the conversation we can be better together and i know that this is something that the board has wanted more um information about next slide and so what is collective on bargaining and so collective bargaining in school divisions it would authorize a union and so in most school divisions if you worked in various school divisions you know that there's typically an education association and so the um while we've not formally had teacher unions we've had the education associations and school divisions serve in that role and so we know that based on some of

083the legislations that we school divisions now have the opportunities to create um to create these unions um and so we do know that there are specific things that unions will have the opportunity to negotiate and so they negotiate the terms and conditions of employment entering into contracts over specific periods of time um so there's a collective bargain in in virginia then and now and so previously um schools in virginia have not had any authority to do any types of teacher unions and so in may of on may 1st of 2021 there was legislation passed in the general assembly which was made back in which said that school divisions school boards can recognize collective bargaining for its employees and turn the page sorry about that um so there are specific areas that are outlined in terms

084of what can be collective bargaining so the localities can determine what can be um what we can barg what the school teachers educator unions can bargain and so those terms typically are around one or more areas is wages benefits and working conditions so where are we um so where are we now so um currently in ccs um there is no collective bargaining i mean that's why we're having a conversation and so um one thing that we i stated and the reason why i had this and we kind of had this conversation because you know it's like what's the tone of the presentation and so the reason why i say certain things because i want to make sure that people are clear it's not that we are running away from um because i do think that

085we'll be better together once we all have made some types of decisions but we it's important to know that we've always been willing to work um you know and i know that different things happen under different administrations or different localities but we've always been able to work with teachers in a respectful manner but as it was stated today as someone stated today that you know those things sometimes are based on the person who's in charge and so that's why collective union is very important and and that's one thing that i have learned in our conversations is why collective bargaining is very important for teachers is because you know if the administration changed well i may have a culture of care the next school division there may be some different type of culture and so um

086moving on our decision making is our decision making is always influenced by what's best for our students and staff members and you know we've been we've had several commendations from our cea um about just the manner in which we work to resolve problems for our teachers and so that's something that we will always do whether there is collective bargaining or not but i want to make sure that people know that we will always work and i believe that our board will always work to um resolve things in an amicable manner and always work to do what's in the best interest of our teachers we always want to hear our teachers voices and so when we talk about better together we know that there have been some things that have been communicated we know that the

087cea has expressed interest in communicating um information about collective bargaining and we talked about that um at our meeting on monday initially um initially there was a request to do it during faculty meetings and then we thought you know when we were working on our silo we said well we'll send we'll i'll just create a video and we'll send it out but then during our meeting on monday um ms taylor said well is it possible for us to just do it during our faculty meetings and i said absolutely um you know and not only did i say absolutely i said i would love for you to join me today um at this meeting because i do want to i do want people to see us together um because it's not a us or um us

088or them and so as a result of our meeting for monday um the each cea representative will do um they have a standard presentation that they've developed and that exact presentation will be presented at each school at their faculty meeting just providing the teachers more information about what is collective bargaining and so that will happen um at the that will happen at the next faculty meeting at each school so when we talk about better together it's about creating and sustaining a culture of care and so we um we are working together to just meet the needs of our teachers and staff and also one thing we've successfully just managed um just the needs of our um employees and i just want to keep reiterating that because you know regardless of what the the outcome of

089this is and you know and i know if it's collective bargaining we're going to always do those things not just because we there's a teacher union but we're going to do those things because those are the right things to do next um and then also um one so it's also important to note that um we are welcoming we are welcoming more information i know that um we are at board chair um participated and one of the rallies that for the teacher union and i believe one of the um key things that she stated during that meeting was that our board welcomes hearing more information about collective bargaining and that still is the position um it is my hope that our employees always see that our leadership consistently supports the ideas um i'm sorry consistently supports

090the sharing of ideas and implements change will um and implementing change ultimately will enhance our work experiences so when people when there are issues that people know that we want to support the working conditions what people experience when they're um here on the job and so we do know that one thing that and we talked about this also that um one of the things that collective bargaining is used for and in some places is to negotiate the wages and to negotiate wages and benefits and so one of the things that we don't have as a as one thing we don't have as a school board here is school divisions don't have the authority to tax um and so that will be one of the things and uh that would be one of the things that

091we will um you know have discussions about so when it comes to wages and like what does that look like in terms of negotiations as a system um but again it's not a barrier it's not a barrier to implementation it's just one of those things how will we address that if there are teacher unions um and then there are some things that just i want to highlight that have happened and can will continue to happen um and under um our caring culture we have um promoted a safe and inclusive work environment um throughout our covent and so we it's our some of our primary goals to ensure that we are keeping our staff safe on last evening you know i put out some of those metrics that we are watching um throughout our throughout this

092as we navigate this covet pandemic and those things are important for us and those things will continue to be important making sure that we enhance our students learning experiences that we are soliciting we solicit feedback from our teachers through our tag we've been having community conversations and all of those things impact the manner in which we support our we support our schools and our teachers we have given and we will continue to provide um some of the things that we will continue to sustain are just the unencumbered times for teachers um we will continue to do that and then we will all we've also provided the covet leave for our teachers in their cases where there may be have been some close contacts or they have been contact contracted on the copa 19 virus and

093also we've done things such as supporting um the substitutes in terms of increasing the hourly wage and then we've also uh created the school-based substitute so um some of the things that we talked about on monday are just you know some of the long-term things that we will need to address in terms of teacher shortage and what does that look like in terms of supporting teachers moving forward um all of the things that uh and these are things that we just will continue to do and we've um we've compensated teachers while we know it's not the end-all be-all and the answer we do know that um when teachers and paraprofessionals have given up their uh planning time that we've also we've provided them for compensation um when they've given up um that time and then

094we've also raised the base of our um teacher pay and um in which we've done that every year except for one and then just the professional learning opportunities and then the tuition assistance to increase teacher skills and we will continue to be creative in terms of um just how we you know support our teachers it's the the other benefits that we've heard from teachers throughout some of the listening sessions it's not always about the compensation but the professional development um and then the listening and learning sessions um just um we're going to make sure that we've honored the request of our cea and we're going to make sure that we provide the opportunities for them to do their presentations for collective bargaining and then we will continue to use our attack as a method to

095gather teacher input um so you know i know this is the slide you know we had some conversations about the you know well you know the presentation and and it it sounds like okay well you can choose one or the other and it'll work without and that's not the intent of the presentation the the intent of the presentation is just to know that at the end of this all that our board will need to as a school board you will have to um you know resolve the matter by saying whether you will support moving forward with collective bargaining or whether you can do this without and so um i just think that the path forward just should allow for the opportunities for you all to get all the information you um need um so that

096you can continue to support our culture and the value and the needs of our stakeholders um and so what that looks like is and this is just the options that recognizing that you can recognize that the unions as the exclusive bargaining and allow collective bargaining or you can specify that we don't authorize collective bargaining and that's not what this meeting the this meeting is not about action this meeting is just about providing you all with the um information um that you need just to start the conversation and then i did as i mentioned earlier i did invite miss taylor because i am not the resident expert um i did um invite miss taylor to join me um today um because i told miss taylor that on her foot that she had surgery on that i

097do think it's very important that she and i stand together because it's not us them it's really we can have a conversation and this is very important so i'll give her the i'll give you the opportunity to ask her questions and i'm also going to allow her the opportunity to speak good afternoon madam chair members of the board dr gurley my name is jessica taylor i'm the president of the charlottesville education association and uh proud clark b teach first grade over there so thank you so much for inviting me to speak this afternoon and to share the cea's stance on collective bargaining and our plan moving forward first and foremost i want to acknowledge that the charlottesville education association has enjoyed a productive relationship with this board most notably over the past two years in

098fact having worked for the charlottesville city school since 2005 i cannot remember a time that educators were as involved in the discussion planning and implementation of policies that directly impacted our day-to-day work in classrooms than during this pandemic together we worked to develop successful and safe reopening plans it's got the most up-to-date air filtration systems ppe and mitigation practices that surpassed minimum recommendations we modified curriculum and learning practices to support the academic social and emotional learning needs of our students how were we able to do this your educators came to the table advocating for what they needed to best serve their students and families you listened the superintendent her staff and the board came to the table with what resources they had or could make available to meet those needs we listened agreements were made

099by which all of us were held accountable we were able to reopen keep students and teachers safe and continue teaching and learning despite a pandemic raging around us we exemplified a culture of care through which all parties were successful essentially we collectively bargained collective bargaining means that we can be equal partners dedicated to creating mutual agreements for the betterment of our schools collectively bargained contracts hold all of us accountable for the decisions that we make together by agreeing to collectively bargain with your employees you are showing that you trust us that we will come to the table asking for the resources support and benefits that we need to do what is best for our students and collective bargaining gives the people who interact with students on a daily basis a voice in the conditions of

100their employment so where do we go from here members of the cea are in the process of educating all of the ccs staff about the benefits of collective bargaining we will be presenting at staff meetings and holding q a forums online to provide information as educators want to learn more as our membership grows we will hold a card campaign through which we will get signatures from all of the ccs employees cea members and non-members who are in support of collective bargaining to present to you in the few meetings i have had with dr gurley i believe him when he says we are developing a culture of care in ccs he has shown with his actions over this week especially that the welfare of students and staff are paramount and i do not doubt that the

101intent of the decisions made by this board are for the betterment of the students their staff and our community but you are at a crossroads as dr gurley said in his presentation this board has the opportunity to decide what will be the best decision for ccs based on our culture on our values and our needs for our stakeholders he added that we trust that you as the board will listen to our staff and make a decision that is in our best interest we will be coming to you with our signatures we are asking you once again to listen thank you miss taylor dr gurley thank you both and any questions i'll be happy to answer thank you gurley do you have anything else no okay any questions comments board members miss mckeever hey thank you

102i just wanted to say thank you to dr gurley and miss taylor for their um really important collaboration and work here i um just like when miss esposito told that story um about several years ago just being you in a crime so upset that um for all of the the that hardship and i i i really want to find a way to work in a collaborative way um between you know with the all of the entities like here the staff and school board and the central office division level staff and i do think it's really important that we have some ground rules for that and um it's just these are our values and i do think we need to exemplify how we can make this work in such a positive direction in a positive way

103and we are just blessed here in charlottesville to be so supportive of our um our public school system and we can really do good things here so i hope and of course everybody understands the limitations of what collective bargaining can do um but often i had questions like what is the real world impact of this um and and i i think you know having a seat at the table in a very meaningful way in a transparent way will help school boards make a much stronger policy decision um so i i'm looking forward to continuing this dialogue and i appreciate um you know all of the hard work that's going to go into it and and um thank you dr girly for really being willing to hear um you know this community and our teachers and

104staff in this um process so thank you all and i don't have any questions at this time um but i know that there's a lot of hard work ahead so thank you thank you miss mckeever miss dooley let's start down here with this end sure um is the intent for the collective bargaining unit to represent just teaching staff at this time or all charlottesville school employees so that's something that we're still working through right now we're just getting information and developing an organizing committee with representatives at every school we do have building reps but we currently don't have reps specifically designated for organizing for bargaining which is a whole other level of involvement and so once that group gets together then that's when those decisions will start to be and so you know i've said

105this during the campaign publicly um i am a former teacher and i'm supportive of efforts towards collective bargaining i would think as we're moving forward on this path that um like as we get started to consider you know starting with teachers and then slowly expanding um you know if that becomes the correct path to make sure that we get it right um you know with the intent to expand to additional employees down the road thank you dr kraft yes this is so important and just to start off i would say that um you know my general inclination is to be supportive of this process and um you know i i just think that uh you know as we aspire to you know work together and trust each other um you know i think that this

106you know this kind of a process really exemplifies that and i hope that we we can figure that out however you know as a board member i guess i have the responsibility of sort of hearing all sides and really understanding better what this means so my general point i feel like i just have so much to learn and i want to know how i can best learn that i don't know if the presentation is something that's going to come to the board meeting or if we could sit in on any of the faculty meetings to hear the presentation i really feel like i need to understand this at a deeper level and understand the details a lot more so i'll just put that out there um you know i'd really i'm i would would be

107very open to attending um whatever sessions there are or having the sessions brought to a school board meeting so that we we can understand better what this actually means and what it looks like dr craft would you be interested in becca um miss sacks and i think most of you know her the my unicef director from the vea if she and i did a presentation to the board i would love with information about the process i would really love that okay you can do that yeah um so i had a couple of other specific questions one what what is included in the term working conditions what does that actually mean it can be anything that the employees determine they want to include so it's not something i would decide or the cea would decide or

108the vea would decide it would be what the members bring do we do we know what typically is included typically it could be you know in the era october it could be all of the work that we've done with the filtration and the cleaning and the safety it could also include you know structured planning time and everything that goes into being in a building and working with children even things like class size or support okay yes um and uh what what kind of time frame are we looking at here it's a process it's a process so as i said we currently have building reps in every building we're still working on an organizing committee becca you look like you want to add something she does this is becca hi i can just let you know

109the law as it's written at some point we come to you when we're ready when we've hit our 50 plus one have signed the cards to say they want us to be the bargaining agent and we come to you with a proposed resolution you have time to look at that resolution so right now city council has a resolution in hand from the um bus driver the cat bus drivers the atu has presented them with a resolution that they then have 120 days to look at that resolution to make tweaks to it we are happy when we get to that point even before that we can start talking about what that resolution can include we have um a vea attorney who is available to answer questions to you know crash the language so that it fits

110what you and your school board's attorney are saying it should include um you know we have our proposal it doesn't mean that it's accept this or don't because obviously that's a part of the negotiating as well um clearly to really start talking about wages we would have already had to pass this since you're in the budget process now but if we get this passed and we approve it and we're ready to start negotiating there's a host of other things we could negotiate that don't have direct budgetary so that can be part of you know the transfer process or you know how people get promotions and how those get posted all of those things they could be part of that that it don't have a monetary impact directly on the budget to get started initially okay

111so the time frame you know it's kind of flexible but the only hard stop is that you have to decide after you have up to 120 days to consider the specific resolution once it's presented to you so do you do you have a sense of when this might be presented to us so we're hoping it would be something you know in the spring okay all right thank you um one other question i had and that's probably from miss taylor um what percentage of our our teaching staff are members of cea so currently i haven't had the most up-to-date i think last it was i couldn't give you a percentage but it was approximate about 40 okay okay and um is that part of your process are you working to increase that yes okay yes right

112thank you appreciate all the work that you're doing on this mr morse ah thank you for you know just coming to the table and having this discussion um i think it's very important for us as in terms of both sides really having this discussion um together um and starting early i'm really appreciative that i know you know being in the classroom myself that it's important for teachers to have that sense of empowerment and being able to talk with their administrators and you know the school division has been really really good um i've heard from other people in the community how much they appreciate the support that the school division has been giving them especially over the last couple years even though there have been some some tough challenges that we've had to overcome together so

113i'm just happy that we're having this conversation out in the public thank you i want to thank you both for your great presentation uh i too am looking forward to more additional information in relation to collective bargaining and i think you mentioned um is it just for the teachers or will it involve our staff members custodial staff cafeteria workers will they also included in this yes currently we need to talk as a as a membership about who is going to be included in the first bargaining unit typically in an albemarle who's going through the process right now it's primarily teachers who have direct contact licensed teachers with direct contact with children so library media specialists counselors classroom teachers reading specialists people like that eventually will transition or they'll transition to ias custodial workers nutrition workers

114and other people in the school building eventually also uh becca this is for you um when and if you know once we get to the point that we've had all the the conversation and it's presented to the board um i am a lifetime member since when i retired i became a lifetime so would i be able to vote on this or would that be considered conflict of interest if it came to a vote i think you could because you don't have we i mean as much as we would love to pay you we don't we don't pay you as the vea so i think you would be able to there are some people who um i mean who would say that you can't be an active member but retired members are different they're retired members

115all over the state and all over the country who are serving on uh school boards because that's what retired educators do they continue to serve and it's never come up as a conflict of interest okay all right thank you and thank you for getting the conversation started i just had a few comments i just wanted to add that i completely understand from working in a variety of jobs that your working environment is often time determined by who you work for and the type of environment that um they create and that workers have little recourse when it comes to people on their chain of command um i've also stated before that i support collective bargaining um i do believe that since it's a special situation the way the board is set up here um how we

116are able to ask for funding or the fact that we have to ask for funding and we're unable to tax that those details um about how we negotiate in those particular instances as far as wages are concerned um will be an important part of the discussion um but over the course of the last couple of years i've seen teachers go from the most magical people in the world to being painted as you know villains and so um i appreciate the work the teachers do i support your ability to be able to form a union and you literally keep our children safe right now from both a virus and the threat of gun violence and i think that you're hold the respect of having a formal voice at the table and i would just like to

117say i support our kids first and foremost and i think that means supporting the people who are taking care of them every day just really quickly maryland has the same type of funding structure that we have here in virginia in terms of how their schools are funded that their school boards don't have taxation authority and they have to get the money from their county or their municipality and they've had bargaining forever so it can work and what it has created in maryland in most places is that the school board and the teachers and the administration work together i mean once they've come up with their contract it's all proposed until they get the final say from the municipality that holds the purse strings but it has created a real team there where they work together

118to then present and get the money needed from the municipality so it doesn't hit what ends up happening now is that you guys can create whatever budget you want and we can love it and we can be so thrilled and then you go to city council and you know we blame you when you don't get the money that city council uh you know from city council we don't blame city council you guys end up holding the bag and this prevents that really from happening because we we all have shared ownership of that budget so there are i mean it's it's it's not perfect every time but there is a model for this to happen that it happens successfully in other states with this same funding uh model are you are you saying that in all

119districts in maryland uh this is the this is the process yes okay interesting yeah i think that's helpful to know that and and i do uh i want to thank all the board members for your questions and comments thank you both and thank you dr gurley for initiating this um and bringing this to us i think um miss taylor and ms saxon information like that where you can share some of that because i think where we are at right now is is wanting to continue this relationship with you all as dr gurley has stated as ms esposito said and as you all have said i mean i think some of the um most rewarding work that we've that i've been witness to and part of um in the last couple of years is when we

120have had committees with teachers at the table you know and i can't stress enough how important it is and i think we do value that being a teacher moving on to administration being in administration years and years and years and i'll speak for myself being a health care worker on on the ground and providing health care to people as opposed to administrators who were clinicians but have been removed from that for years and years and years often forget what it's like when you're out in the field and making those decisions and providing the care or providing the instruction as it is with teachers so it's it's so important and you are all so valued and and we did some awesome work um as a division with you guys at the table so we appreciate you

121and i think you've heard uh unanimously from this board that we are all supportive of this and are very willing and and want to know more about it and and that's where we're at with this is needing more information so that we can all move forward together so thank you all and i look forward to where we go next thank you dr gurley all right now we've got another uh very important topic dr gurley um we will be moving on to our covet update that's missed that up and down back let's call the queen thank you i wear that title proudly thank you well i don't need to tell you that um covet is very much in the news so where are we now but before i tell you where we are now some of

122you know that um blue ridge helps district had a town hall plan that got canceled it will now be monday night at 7 00 pm so as soon as i get more information or link i'm sure it will be shared but it will be now monday night at 7 p.m so i wanted to make sure i announced that so where are we now virginia is all red so that means every um jurisdiction in virginia is at a high level of transmission and looking at even today's numbers positivity rate was 33.6 percent and virginia as of today had 100 oh had 1 million 202 727 cases and even today 15 840 cases just today so yes our coveted numbers are on the rise um you may be wondering are these all uh delta are they omicron

123we don't get the distinction we're just told that they are cases so there would be some of each we know delta is still here with us next slide please this is ongoing from what i i do every day and some of these columns may not make a lot of sense but how we get the level of transmission is they go back and look at the rolling 14 days so that's the next of the last column um where you see total 14 days that's how many we've had so like for today it for the last 14 days it was 844 cases anything above 200 in that column will put us in the red so we are definitely in the red there i also do each month um just the cumulative for the month to kind of

124see where we are each month from that day from the year before so if you look at today and i've realized i'm kind of reading from right to to left um so far in january through six days we've had 458 cases in the city of charlottesville this is not charlottesville city schools this is the city of charlottesville we have a current date of today he had 114 cases in the city of charlottesville now i believe that's about the highest per day that i've seen throughout the the pandemic then the um the column that says number two subtract again i look at a 14 day rolling period so the second column that shows for today 12 23 that was 14 days ago so that is where i know i need to go back and start my

125subtraction to do my calculation to get the 14 days where i got the 8 44. so i went back to december 23rd to do the calculation i'm not explaining it well but i do understand what i'm doing with it um so today it was 114. two weeks ago we had 27 on that day and so that tomorrow i will start with 8 44 and move forward but so you can see we've had a lot of cases in the city just at the first six days of january i apologize that this slide looks like it did this was done without internet last night i happened because i had didn't have power but this is um one i happened to have already had downloaded so i can show it and the the bars are small i get

126that but you can see that the bar for this week is taller than many of the other bars now again i did this last night and since i did this chart we have had another eight employees to report and another 14 students to report so the bar if you look at it on our dashboard is updated so you will see the bar the way it should be this is just as the bar was reflected last evening next slide please some of you know that i attend a weekly meeting with the blue ridge health district and local pediatricians we try to forecast we i don't but other people are trying to forecast where are we going with this what do we need to look at and that's one thing that this group has talked a lot

127about we can't change the past some of it we can't even change the present but what can we do at forecasting and we know just like the weather forecast sometimes isn't what happens so this forecast could also change and it's so far it's been at about a 95 rate this is the uva model and they show four different forecasting ways i've only listed one on here for you and i know it's small and don't expect you to read this print but this is on the um vdh website under the data insights under uva model and i just wanted to tell you what the model right today is showing if you use the current that's the view that you're looking right now where it goes up for that last time that is january the 16th so

128the forecasting model right now if everything continues just as we've been going the peak should be january the 16th if you use the holiday model that brings in impact of colder weather and holidays and you don't have a picture of this but if you go on the website you can see it would show us that our peak would be january the 30th if you look at the omicron model again another view that you can look at the peak on that is february the 6th if you look at the optimistic model which is higher vaccination rates and more and more people getting vaccinated and everybody doing what they should be doing that's the same as our current which is january the 16th if you look at the surge model which we would have to be able

129to reduce our transmission levels by 25 to to go with the surge model it would be january the 22nd so we can look at all these different models and and see what happens but i think what this does tell us is that we are headed toward a surge sometime probably in mid-january-ish depending on how people behave having people inside doing all this snow and whatnot i don't know whether that's going to help or hurt but those are the different models and that's one thing that blue ridge has encouraged us to look toward what can we do to be more toward the optimistic model and working to have more and more people vaccinated so our mitigation plans that we have been following and we are still continuing we are keeping our in-school protocols you have seen

130in the news probably that the cdc came up with new um recommendations for quarantine or for isolation that you isolate for five days and then you go back out into the world heavily masked for the next five days blue ridge health department and vdh do not recommend this nor do our pediatricians so at this point we are not recommending that we make any change in our current isolation or quarantine protocols that we're using in the division we're still at 14 days for quarantine several divisions have reduced theirs to 10. and i'm willing to talk about that but health department still says it's safer to go 14. i feel uncomfortable making changes too much right now while we're in the middle of this surge but that is something that we can talk about but primarily our

131locality our in virginia is not recommending making any changes and expecting from cdc any minute another recommendation for k-12 versus other sectors so we don't think that the five-day isolation with the next five days masking is what is really recommended so we're continuing all of our in-school protocols we're continuing our vista testing yes we missed a week this week of our vista testing and not surprisingly we had quite a few parents and staff members sign up to be a part of our testing program now um beth chuck and i spoke with our representative this afternoon and they're trying to work on something we don't know that it will have excuse me what happened but we may be able to get a testing event in here this in town this weekend if so you will be

132hearing from the beth team because we will need some volunteers and we have assured them that we will get volunteers if they can do it i'm not going to ask anybody to swab noses but i may ask you to direct traffic so if if we're able to get it done beth and i have assured her we will get the volunteers so hopefully more to come on that i don't have it on here but also working with blue ridge health district they're wanting to do more vaccination clinics at schools like they did back in the fall and maybe even do them now during school sort of like we did way back when in the h1n1 time and i'm i'm willing for them to do that that went well with the h1n1 i mean it's not fun

133to watch children be scared but we were able to get the shots done and parents didn't have to take time off from work and everything worked well so we'll be working with blue ridge to try to get some of that done pest to stay vdh has identified a couple school divisions in virginia to be pilot schools we're not one of them but that doesn't mean that we might not still be able to work on it because we've got uh uva docs that have been helping to write protocol our local pediatricians have been working on it um right now it's getting test i have gotten a few more tests after the ones that were um expiring came after they were gone i've got 270 tests now but that does not begin to work on a test

134to stay model i have written to not written i have sent a message to the testing company uh test company about ordering more tests so i'm working on trying to get more tests in here so we can do test to stay interesting in the the weekly meeting some places are looking at doing a test to stay for the adults rather than the children but realizing that you've got to have the adults in the schools to be operational so we're looking at all sorts of options i don't have anything to announce on test this day but to tell you it is something that we're working on dr baptist excuse me can you just quickly explain to everybody what the test to stay means or what just assumed everybody lived in my world test to stay is

135when you and it can vary depending on what model you choose test to stay is when you provide tests to whether it's the children or whether to the adults and they take them it could be every day for a set number of days or it could be every other day some are doing it every other or every third day and as long as your tests are negative you can stay at school if you then get a positive test that would mean you would leave so right now if we've had one test um people are out but this would keep people in if they've been exposed they're out but this would help people who've been exposed to stay in school pending a positive test so an example would be a classroom a student test positive those

136who were considered close contacts would then be enrolled in that test to stay program so that they're not missing school while they're quarantining correct okay thank you um i've already said we're continuing to follow the guidance regarding isolation and quarantine and then continuing mask mandates uh while we're all tired of wearing masks it is still believed that that is one of the um mitigation measures that is going to be the one that will help us finally get to the end of this next slide so with masking everyone does agree and still advises masking double masking making sure we've got very good mass not just very thin and wearing them properly there's so many times i'm out and about and i just want to go grab somebody's mask and pull it up it's got to be

137worn properly there's not chin rest as i see people doing um we know that local school divisions have the option of still maintaining mass mandates even if there is a change in direction from the state level there has been rumor or talk that when the younkin administration comes in the masked mandate as it currently exists may not still be in place i know several school divisions that are saying that we are still going to continue to have the mask mandates as long especially as long as we're in this surge or until a later time i know that albemarle county has this same stance and should the mass mandate from the state level change there will be a joint statement from both the city and the county regarding continuing the mass mandate as you know you

138passed a policy last year requiring mask and so our administration dr berlin team everyone is recommending that you continue with our mass mandate policy and not um remove that policy regardless of what happens at the state level in january in the message that went out yesterday from dr gurley he mentioned that there are some data points that we are monitoring i've shared with you through some of these different slides some of the data that i follow every day but we are looking at three things specifically one staff capacity we know we have to have our buildings operational in order for us to open our buildings so we are looking at staff who are out the numbers of staff what are the areas it's not to say that any staff member is less important than any

139others but there are some staff members that are more important in their being present for us to open school than than others so we're we're looking not just at numbers of staff but where they are in the schools we do not have a set magic number that says when we hit this number it's time to do something because that number is very different at each school and we don't want to say that this number is the number we just know that we are watching it very carefully with our adults who who is out how it's affecting the schools and working very closely with the principals dr gurley's working with them to make sure that they will have the staff to open their buildings we're looking at the covet cases by school both for remote and

140in person learning to make sure that we don't have outbreaks one thing that has changed in virginia january 1st the definition of an outbreak has changed it used to be that if you had two cases in a location such as a school that were associated as one causing the other that was considered an outbreak that has now changed as of january 1st did three cases make an outbreak but we are looking at the active cases by school every day we have them on the the charts that we're doing looking at them not just you know the names but is it a certain classroom what do we need to do and if we see that we've got an outbreak within a classroom or a school working with the health department and they will guide us as

141to whether we need to close a class or whether we need to close a school again not a magic number but you have to look at the overall situation and then the attendance rates we're looking at the attendance rates and you're going to hear more about attendance in a few minutes but just because a child is out are they out because of covet are they out because the family is traveling what are the reasons they're out have they been exposed at home what is whatever so we're having to look at all of those pieces and again no magic numbers for when we would want to do something we've got to look at it each individual situation i think that's the last slide so i would ask if anyone has any questions thank you um miss

142mckeever you're up okay thank you so much um i would like um possibly to come back to me i i feel like there's probably other good questions that our board member has board members have but um it sounds like we are going for a class by class or school by school view of all of this um in terms of if there's going to be any return to virtual learning that it would be done on a class by class or school by school basis not a school-wide basis yeah that's correct ms mckeever so at this point right now the the metrics that we're using we are ensuring that we look school by school and you know we know what that that code says and so you know we think we're just going to remain very intentional

143and i met with the principals earlier this week and we just are going to monitor each school and make sure that we can support each school so if it falls below this level that it's not operable then we surrender we um support them correctly and and the next phase and whether that's virtual or whether that's because we're leaning in from the central office level in terms of supporting schools and so yes that's correct right now we're just looking at it on a school-by-school basis i i don't know that i've heard what these metrics are and i think um it may be helpful to have a conversation around that because um the co the metrics seem unbelievable right now okay and and i think what dr baptist said and this is what and so in the

144communication that i put out the the first thing that we are looking at is the staff capacity and so i guess i want to practice by saying that since i've been here we've been in a substantial or high transmission the city has been let me make sure i'm clear about saying that since i've been here the city itself has been in a substantial or high transmission rate and so we've proven that you know we've kept students safe and we've had little to no transmission within the schools so in the in determining like what's the pivot point um what we started with is the staff capacity and that was so important to me because i know that one thing that we've heard as we've been talking about care that we don't want to overburden teachers because

145one you're stretching them thin for example if they're four teachers on a third grade class and two of the teachers are out and then they're no more subs and you know we don't want to stretch people so once we've leaned in from having district administrators and substitutes once we're no longer able to support that school we need to be able to pivot um and so one of the things some of the things that are currently happening behind the scenes the schools well we've not had teachers in place for the principals to have these conversations but they've they're working through some very intentional pivot plans if we need to go virtual uh you know by school um and so the staff capacity is one of them um and then we are looking at just what is

146what the overall what's happening uh with our students our students attending um for what reason um is it causing some obstruction to their to their learning um so we are monitoring our attendance numbers and then my third one that i just had a brain lapse was the um attendance rate coveted cases in school yeah i'm sorry and the kovic and the covet cases and the uh the number of covet cases in the schools and so i think what the hard part and i do apologize there really is no hard number i mean we've really seen this and i mean that's probably the biggest email that i get every day like what's the magic number and so i'm just listening i'm using those three things but i'm listening and i'm looking at what's happening in the

147schools and i'm just not going to let it create a situation where it's overburdened overburdening our staff members okay and can you hear me i wanted to also ask the question about um perhaps i mean one of the ways that we were able to keep kids safe last year was to try to you know limit the number of students in the building and if there's any voluntary voluntary you know families who would be willing to keep their children out to just kind of limit the number of students in the building uh just at least temporarily uh it sounds like this you know given the uva model for the optimistic all the way to the pessimistic um it seems like it's going to be pretty short-lived so is there a way to um you know just

148pivot before we need to pivot um because honestly without having any in-person experience over the last three weeks now um it's pretty hard to know if we have those three metrics and you know we don't even have those metrics because we don't nobody's had to call in sick and we don't have the active coveted cases by schools and we certainly don't have attendance rates so it's almost putting us in this really difficult position and you know i also wonder if we've been able to reach out to the teachers and to staff to say like what are you thinking here um so i just don't want to be caught flat-footed um and just kind of i think it'd be you know we are in a position to have a community conversation about this and i know

149that they're strong believe me i i responded to many many emails over the past three years that you know very strong passionate opinions about this um so i just think that there are some like intermediate short-term um measures for people who would be comfortable with that so i asked that what you know is there anything that we can do in addition to what we are doing right now chris mckeever we have had a few not many but a few families who have opted to do home instruction for the time being they have not said they thought it would be for long term but we have had that and as far as the metrics that dr gurley has you're correct we don't have um information on some of them but we have had families continue to

150let us know about covet cases and exposures during the break so that i've been able to keep up and we did ask families to let us know if there were cases that had nothing to do with schools but just the cases so that we would have that and i am not naive enough to believe that the number of reported cases that we have are all the cases that have been in charlottesville or charlottesville city schools but to this date since july 1 we have had 182 student reports and 75 staff reports again that's roughly 5-ish percent of our students and staff which the health district will say is awesome now every case is one too many so i'm not naive to say just because we've had a low number we're doing great but um we

151we are still getting reports as i've had a case report since i've been in this meeting this afternoon so we are getting them whether how many we're getting a broke percentage i'm not sure but some families are are looking at home instruction and that would be the one thing that families have tried okay so is that a white i mean i don't know what home instruction is um and when parents teach their children at home i like that i mean so is this an option for families at this point it's always an option we have families that get can choose either public school private school or home instruction so they choose to teach their children at home and while they're doing that they're not technically considered charlottesville city schools students they have to apply for

152it and have to be approved for home instruction and there are some criteria and yes we've had increased home instruction numbers during the pandemic but that doesn't sound like that's something we would actually want to have i don't really encourage that because again they're not considered charlottesville schools students which goes against our adm correct like right so that's critical families it is an option for families okay so i feel like we need to come up with a different option that's not home instruction miss mckeever we're gonna rotate to a couple other board members and i'm happy to come back to you if that's okay alessandra um just to uh follow up to what miss mckeever is saying um or was asking about sorry is there during the surge any ability for parents to say like

153can we get our instructional material a few weeks in advance so that we could be you know an excused absence during the surge or is that completely off the table i believe excuse me i believe we can have conversations with teachers and administrators um i think the thing that we heard during the pandemic while i wasn't in charlottesville in the peak of it um i'm in a family full of educators and so one thing that i heard was it was very taxing on teachers to do both and i would not want now if and we do know that there are teachers who voluntarily are doing things i mean i remember being over at clark one day and teacher had student was out sick and she had him up on the board in her second grade

154class first grade class um you know teachers want to do those things but it's not my it's not my position to um it's not my position to tell a teacher to do that um you know if teachers want to do that i mean you know we were in there that day and that was they were writing a little letters and she just had a little kid out sick and so you know if teachers are doing that but i don't want to i don't want to man i don't want to man because i already know what the stretch looks like with our virtual instruction we had a conversation today about virtual instruction um and so i know what the stretch looked like because not a lot of teachers volunteered to want to do it even with

155the pay you know so it's one of those things that i think that most certainly we can consider it and we can have a conversation about it um but i mean we're really you know we're really at the willingness of what a teacher would want to do in that moment and i i just don't feel comfortable mandating something like that because that would be really taxing on to do both okay thank you um for the testing when you were saying we have the screening available for the families that signed up that's still the pcr test we are not offering rapid tests when kids arrive in the morning yeah and do you anticipate us getting any additional rapid tests during the surge like i have requested uh a sales rep to contact me about getting more

156tests the state through the vista program sent us 270 tests but we need far more than that if we're going to implement either a test to stay program or to really offer them to widespread families so i'm hoping we will be able to get more it just may not be through the vista program okay and then i know we have a math policy in place and i talked to dr gurley a little bit about it but are we updating our messaging you said a little bit of it tonight about double masking but just putting out the word that cloth mask alone individual are not the best protection that we should be upgrading to double or cloth with a surgical or a n95 i am not sure whether our messaging has said that or not i

157can encourage our next messaging to do that and i'm pretty sure that the newsletter that comes out from blue ridge health department has said it or we'll be saying it this week they have a newsletter that comes out every week and if people are interested in getting that newsletter i need to go to the blue ridge health district website and you can sign up to automatically receive it as an email every week but i think they've been talking about double masking but i'm just not sure that our message has been about that but we can look at that okay because i want to make sure we're encouraging that and not that i follow the whims of private schools but i see that a lot a lot of local private schools are requiring the kn or

158the n95s and they're very expensive so i just wanted to know what the division what we can offer our students at least during the surge we have uh been researching the looking at the the different masks and what it would cost to to get those um and i don't think we have an answer on what it would cost or if we would be able to miss green did uh we chatted a little bit today um and so we we do have the funds available i think it's the you know the inventory like whether they're available a lot of the companies now are requiring a minimum number so um you know which 3 000 is the one of the ones that she mentioned today the vendors require that you buy a minimum of 3 000 which

159we have more than 3 000 people um but you know it's the to get them you know we're kind of the mercy of the the supply chain and the what they want to charge you right now but it looks like some of the inventory is out there so we just need to explore like what's the most cost prohibitive thing thank you and then um i think those are all my questions for now that was um miss morsenberg she covered a lot of it but i just had um i guess a concern because sometimes i may get a call or see a prayer in the community and they say i know you all are not sending those kids back in school there's cold war going on so you have to kind of calm them and assure

160them that we have all the mitigations in place so in saying that when the kids return to school uh whenever that is what is the plan forward in terms of monitoring you said school by school i understand that but um in monitoring because we don't know what it's going to look like once they get back in here after the the christmas break and the winter storms so what will that look like will you all have a set time in terms of determining that if we need to pivot we you know what i mean how do we determine that because there may be some some of our students who may come back and make it sick and we don't know it is their timeline or whatever your will principles engaging staff members and students in terms

161of well with the staff part so we've created a um so this week beginning of this week we created a google sheet which the principals have like a little reminder um that they will complete every morning and so we'll we're going to watch that in real time and so they get they'll indicate how many staff absences they have by teacher by support staff because again like dr baptist said it's about looking at some of those critical areas and then we know that we have some people who've been leaning in so like if the teacher is out we know that in some cases we've had some instructional assistants that have been jumping in so we'll get to see that every morning in real time the cases are reported um the cases are reported in real time

162and that's track so all of these this data points now we'll have right at our i mean we've always had them minus the the newest thing we've created is for the principals to submit the number of this google sheet which will and it's a group of us and we we can get we'll get the huddle around um and just you know once it you know looks like okay we need to talk about what does this look like today um is there any implications for tomorrow and that's also the reason why the principals have created those virtual pivot plans which will also be communicated because if at a moment's notice some things need to be happened because you got to remember the things like chromebooks that have to be deployed um you know wireless hot spots

163you know how do we fill that that gap um so the plans we i think we've been very thoughtful about what the pivot what the pivot plan looks like and so and it's really about what is the implications for the next day um are we seeing some consecutive day things that and we know that teachers are not going to be able to sustain this moving forward and then that's what helps us to get to that pause point i think too within our schools we have maintained throughout covid a conservative approach as far as making sure we're doing what we can with the mitigation with all of the air handling things that we've done the requiring of the mask the the looking at uh not having kids in large groups in many more than keeping it

164cohorting so we have been doing so many of the right things already and we're just not ready to be uh to ease any of that so we'll keep doing much of what we've been doing and each school will look at are there some things we now need to tweak because we never really relaxed even when we went down to the substantial we didn't back off of what we were doing so i don't know that you will go in and operationally see much different because of this surge but we're paying attention to a lot of things and talking about it um behind the scenes even more well i think that discussion will certainly help those parents who are somewhat hesitant at this point thank you sure mr morris um i think for me i just want

165to state and we've talked about it just a little bit um just stating that to continue the mitigation process that we already have regardless of the state's decision i fully support that and i understand that you know we're trying to find out what steps we might need to do moving forward depending on the numbers just to keep the teachers in mind of allowing that process whether it's virtual and i appreciate you dr girly uh bringing up the fact that you know trying to do both is very difficult um so just keeping that in mind i appreciate that thank you not being able to update things while the power's been out this week has been one of the hardest things for me i've come into town a couple times just to be able to add things

166to the dashboard so i understand that that families are looking at that and want to know where we are that's kraft yes um i would i think you know we've done such a wonderful job with our mitigation practices but i do think our weak point is the masking of the students the lack of consistency the fact even in my limited experience in the schools you know i see lots of kids wearing poor fitting masks you know and masses slip down all the time and i know some families certainly can afford to provide better masks but there are other families that cannot and i'm wondering it seems to me it would be wise for us to try to you know look at that and fix that piece of it if we want to keep kids in

167school you know if there's a way for us to to purchase enough better masks for the kids that need them and then also to you know really enforce the messaging to parents about the quality of masking that that does seem to be our weak point particularly with younger kids and dr craft on yesterday miss green did um she did send three boxes of mass to each school that that went out on yesterday so each school got three boxes of masks and masks are going to um transportation so i mean we we're definitely you know and we're even in a situation where if kids if they need to double mask with the mask that we're giving them we have enough to do that okay um well i'm glad to hear it one other small question i'm

168aware of the time and the impending weather so i want to make sure everybody gets home but with the vaccine clinics will those clinics be able to offer booster shots and even to the ones that have just been approved for the 12 to 16. any shots that are approved by fda or cdc we can do within our shop clinics it might not be that on this particular day they're doing whatever because the dosage is different for children versus adults but what whatever they're trying to do we'll make sure that we will get as many of the boosters as we can are you know the first or second doses so we're we're aware that we need to try to get all of that in there okay well thank you um your majesty thank you for all

169you're doing thank you thanks julie thank you um i just want to echo the support for high quality masks it seems like that would be a really good investment um throughout all of this masking seems to be the lowest hanging fruit of mitigation against infection and spread and it seems like you know for this variant and whichever one comes next that that's going to be a consistent and so albeit expensive um it just seems like that is a worthwhile um expenditure at this point um also just a policy question related to vhsl with the expansion of boosters being approved for younger students that's curious if that is going to be added into our student athletes who were required to be vaccinated well we do require athletes to be vaccinated or to test weekly i think

170the definition of fully vaccinated is rapidly changing to also being boosted so many of our athletes are not yet eligible for the booster because it hasn't been the six months but as soon as we get the six months we will be offering the is they changed it to five months i'm out of the loop um as soon as we can get them on the list to be boosted then we would certainly do that too and we'll look at um whether it would be a requirement to have the boost or or not is that it all right thank you um yeah so five months i just saw that today i believe as well for boosters i don't know if that's differentiated at all for the younger group or not but i did see that um also

171as i'm also supportive of us continuing to look into quality masks for our students and then also i would like to throughout their you know if we can look at a quality mask or an n95 or can 95 for teachers and staff as well please for everybody's information dr bonds did make a presentation to city council last night and that was right at the beginning of the meeting at 6 30 and that's taped so if you want to go and listen to her update it did have a lot of the information and she did speak to masks and mr wade did ask a follow-up question about quality of masks about double masking the importance of masks is the if they're cloth that they are multi-layered and not just a single layer but she did address

172some of those things also a reminder to everybody as far as on the blue ridge health district site as far as covid testing locations i mean we are really lucky here in the charlottesville albemarle area that there are testing opportunities every day of the week pretty much and that that you can go on their site i have them i won't read them off to you but they are listed right there on blue ridge health districts um especially now we're going to try to have one tomorrow at fashion square i know that they've been sort of messed up this week because of weather but they are trying to yeah and there's two or three different other vendors so there's probably at least three different testing um vendors in in the mall in fashion square so pay

173attention and she was supportive of all of them i think you need to make sure you have a clear understanding of how you're going to get your results if you're going to one of the other vendors because they don't automatically feed through the blue ridge health district you won't get the call from them so make sure if you're going to one of the other sites or testers or vendors that you you're clear when you depart with that our vendor this afternoon did mention i didn't say it earlier encouraging families that because our school sites have been messed up this week if they can go to a blue ridge site to try to do that you know we certainly want to get back on track but if families are concerned before we can have another clinic

174to go ahead and try to get into a blue ridge yeah i know they canceled the monday one tuesday mount zion they they i was there i worked with them through that and there was cars lined up out the main street and it you know from before a five to seven o'clock event we were there until after 10 and they ran all 200 tests that they had available so i mean people are definitely showing up to be tested um as far as everything else that's been said thank you for the questions i i just do want to reinforce i want to acknowledge that you know we're in a different spot a year ago we were in orange or red and we weren't really back to school yet and we were operating out of a lot

175of fear and unknown we got to a different place where we were back to school we never have like you said really got out of the orange but we have been very successful and we have again i'm very proud uh to be part of this division and what we have put in place but i don't want to negate the new fear that people are you know processing right now because this is unknown the transmissibility even though they're saying omicron you know is less severe it's still part of this virus and there's still a lot of unknowns um i think you know i think everybody's made it very clear that we are committed and we know that it's best to have our students in the building you know getting that face-to-face instruction and we want to

176do everything we can to do that in a safe manner and so i think what dr gurley has said and what all the staff and what you have said is that that we're going to do that but our priority is to keep everybody safe you know we will continue to do what we can here in the school division but it is more than just what we're doing here in the division so a reminder again that it's what goes on when those kids get off the bus what goes on in the household what goes on in the communities around the holidays we all have missed family but we all have to continue to do our part to take care of each other because it's impacting everything and and so i you know again we want to

177um have those kiddos in the building and we want them safe i want them safe i want our staff safe we all do so i just wanted to i felt like i needed to just remind everybody how important that is and just because um and i am so grateful that we have the vaccinations we have the booster um that does not mean we can let our guard down um it does not mean that we are protected it does not mean it's okay i have those oh well i'm just gonna get omicron this is my opinion i'm speaking now um you know we have to continue to wear our masks wash our hands socially distance all of those all of those layered approaches that that we we know we have to stay vigilant so i encourage

178everybody to please please do that um and i think that's it um and if we're if everybody's okay if we can move on from this unless dr girl if you have anything but thank you for that all right um we have our 2022-2023 budget development dr gurley miss hoover good evening madam chair dr girling school board members i'll be presenting the fi 2023 state budget revenues the governor's budget was presented on thursday december the 16th before we went on winter break on this slide is the key recommendations in the governor's proposed budget impacting public education i just want to highlight a few of the bullets revenue numbers are based on the computed composite index and ms pound presented at the local composite index at the december board meeting the employer vrs rate changes for fiscal

179year 23 and 24 thus funding of the french benefits are adjusted accordingly to the rates there is a compensation supplement funding for the five percent increase salary increase but soq funded and structural support positions effective july 1. and i just want to remind the school board members that ccs charlottesville funds or staffs over the soq positions additional funding to support students educational at risk and there's additional hold harmless funding to restore funding for certain re-bunch re benchmarking data points that's that were significantly impacted by the pandemic next slide all right in the uh council there is a school construction grant that's in the governor's budget and per vdoes talk tool for charlottesville city schools we are estimated at 1.6 million in the next slide so in summary we build our budget based on the governor's

180proposed budget we're estimating additional revenue from the state of about 1.7 million we'll continue to watch the state's budget as it progresses through the general assembly and conference in the next couple of months are there any questions dr kraft well i yeah i'm trying to figure out my question i didn't understand about the school construction grants program uh what you said about how much we are eligible for and how is that this the governor's budget this year and so when we opened up the cap tool and uh we selected our school division 1.6 million dollars was identified for charlottesville city schools uh it says grant so i'm anticipating that we'll probably have to apply for this so we're probably eligible up to the 1.6 million so this is something we'll hear more about potentially at

181our budget thank you this is this is something that we're going to watch and that's in the governor's budget and hopefully it goes through because it would be beneficial for us thank you miss dooley do you have any questions okay mr morris jennifer no mr bryant lashanda no um yeah i'd love to just hear a little bit more about that grant opportunity you know what what qualifies us and what indicators you know how they what the calc will look like i guess well we're hoping we'll get more money uh information as it proceeds through the general assembly and if it's approved right i mean right now it's it's stuck in the count tool with this number but we don't have a whole lot of information on it we what we typed came straight out of

182the superintendent's attached detail and this miss hoover the uh with the governor's proposed budget it can be modified with the incoming governor correct correct the incoming governor can make amendments uh put forth bills right along with the senators and in the house of delegates everybody can put in their two cents on this budget your initial understanding of this grant would this be something that we could put towards reconfiguration um according to the the notes that we have right now it says non-recurring construction renovation technology and debt service costs so yes i'm thinking that it can go towards reconfiguration okay well fingers crossed i agree could you quickly maybe um just review and i know we'll go into this in more debt but regarding that five percent compensation and how that relates to the soq funded

183positions how that's been in the past so this last five percent increase what does that mean for the school and what we need to match it with or come up with or how does that look we'll come back to you with more information with a slide of how many positions that we fund over the soqs and we can calculate the dollars on that okay but i don't have that information tonight okay great thank you we'll we'll make a slide for that yes ma'am all right any other questions all right thank you appreciate it all right and then next we're on to our transportation attendance update yes we have mr cuomo we saved the best glass uh good evening everybody madam chair board members um those in attendance tonight um we'd like to provide a bird's-eye

184overview of transportation and attendance as it relates as we know we've been divisions across the state and the country have been struggling with procuring enough drivers to provide routes for our students as you may remember from past discussions we do look at 30 drivers being needed for our regular routes 40 would be optimal and our goal um and as you know with this great resignation time period we've had lots of people resigning lots of people seeking other opportunities and since this past update we gave you in december we've offered and had we've lost two drivers and we've lost two of our trainees that were originally intended to be part of our plan moving forward um so we have been able to get three new trainees on board but with uh weather and the surge and

185the illnesses of covid it's uh it's been a bit of a struggle so um currently we as you know we work hard every day to come up with solutions and our building principles to our bus drivers to our teams are constantly uh weaving a web to get as many students on buses as possible so currently we are using um some of our relief options and some of our office staff from transportation and supervision to cover those added routes so we've been able to add three additional routes which is two full routes and one double route and through all of this we've been able to reduce our wait list from 700 to 300. of course we want that number to be zero but moving progress in this direction is is optimistic and encouraging um there may

186if there are additional covert protocols that may reduce driver availability has everything has the possibility to impact our current routes and we continue to monitor we know there's an immigrant student population surge and additional impacts that this may have on transportation demands just as some notes that were that we've been discussing um like i said we do have some additional people in training right now and uh we hope that uh one will test on monday and join our workforces and then we're waiting on test dates for the other two trainees and like i said uh transportation is continuing to thin their office staff to fill in um the bus routes so that we can get as many kids to school as possible in terms of overall attendance we'll see on the next slide we we

187continue to maintain relatively steady numbers right in an ideal world we'd want everybody at 100 um we know that's not possible even during the best of times but in terms of the category of bus rider and non-bus rider that we have you can see that we're pretty close being the entire average just under 95 overall attendance rate you can see that whether you're assigned a student is assigned to a bus listed as a wait list or not requesting transportation you can see in general those numbers remain relatively high and more importantly around what the entire division is seeking for attendance and of course we monitor these numbers regularly and of course our principals and our teams at the schools work diligently um to make sure that we do not have those gaping holes where attendance

188would be impacted and i'm happy to answer any questions that you may have but this is a format we'd like to provide for you each month so you can get a real good glance of where we are and then the work that we do between each of our meetings thank you um lashandra no questions mr bryant jennifer no mr morris not so much a question but maybe just a comment just for all of us to start thinking about next year and i understand that we're talking about right now we have this snapshot we have so many things going on but trying to get ahead of other school divisions just having that in the background as we start to plan other things i um while looking at this slot and i started thinking about one of

189my former students at monaco high school um and how for him he he wants to be a driver but he wants to drive traffic trailers right so how could we convince that type of population to then serve and work um and drop school buses and i looked at just you know just a quick google search indeed and stuff like that in terms of the jobs and it's not all about wages but how can we make it attractive as as a career that students would want to go into um as they graduate so i think that's one of some of the things that we need to start thinking about just future right so we're jumping ahead um as especially as we try to compete with some of the other divisions right around us thank you dr

190kraft is there any information about the uh the drivers that we lost as to why we lost them what were their reasons for i can look to see if that information is available i don't have that with me today to say what the reasons are okay miss julie all right um yeah i was going to ask that as well i was curious how many if any have we had any bus covered incidents where we've had to quarantine or there have been any contact on buses and we are still at two two students two riders per seat is that correct yeah i think we're we're still at two riders per seat okay okay and then um right before break um i believe we we had those additional routes added and that's when the waitlist was decreased

191so we're okay we stayed at that right now we're staying at that and we're hoping to add more um and the reason we're able to do that is because the the staff that's in the transportation department is being thinned out in the office to to carry these routes while we are in this transition of getting more of these trainees to pass their test and join our our ranks how do you have any um idea there was there had been a delay or a barrier um snag regarding medical physicals i believe did that get resolved i think for the group that we have brought on board they have everything they need just to just to pass this their final test to be able to join us okay um and i don't i don't want to go

192right yeah i remember uh delegate hudson did help with that and dr craft thank you with the dmv portion of it i thought there was also a with within the hiring process there was a delay or some of the employees were having difficulty getting their physicals or getting cleared so that's what i was yeah i'm not seeing that as as a barrier for this for these drivers here and i definitely don't want to um wrap this up without expressing our gratitude to the transportation folks who are stepping up and helping us out so thank you and thank all of them um for pitching in and carrying that that load and carrying our students um to school so thank you all right thank you mr como um we are now moving to our second opportunity for

193comments from members of the community i don't know if mr cuomo can transition quickly enough to see if hannah helm hung in there i certainly see several people in the attendees gallery so i would invite them at this time to either raise their hand or to put a message in our chat box so that we can acknowledge them and give them that time to speak i do see uh miss helm who was having we were having some audio difficulties earlier let's see if we um can move her up to the audience to the panelist view and she can attempt to uh offer that public comment yeah and a reminder to please state your name your address and you're limited to three minutes for your comments please thank you can you hear me yes hello wonderful

194um i'm hannah helm and i have the pleasure of teaching at charlottesville high school um i'm an avid supporter of collective bargaining and i urge the board to pass a resolution recognizing our right to participate in bargaining with other stakeholders i'm concerned by the lack of transparency in this district and it's my firm belief that if transparency is a problem it's because trust is also a problem currently if i have concerns i have limited options when it comes to expressing them i can reach out to my department chair who on behalf will speak to the administration and get back with me i can reach out to my administrators though in my experience this has been discouraged or largely ignored and i can also send in a question through my tac representative though i have yet

195to receive a direct reply to a single concern that i've raised i believe the new tac model despite its good intentions has further hindered communication between teachers administrators and district personnel so i'm asking that the school board members see collective bargaining as an avenue to increase transparency trust and accountability throughout our district as is stated in the resolution from the richmond city schools district collective bargaining and good faith on any matter relating to wages hours benefits safety and other terms and conditions of employment is the appropriate means to establish and foster cooperative relations between the school board its administrators and its employees i'd like to emphasize the phrase in good faith which suggests trust and respect i believe by allowing all stakeholders voices and including teachers in the negotiation process regarding anything that directly impacts

196us but especially in regards to our contracts wages and benefits is an imperative first step in achieving the culture of care we see touted so often in our district's publications thank you anybody else mr como um right now i do not have anybody in the attendees gallery on our zoom webinar okay well we'll continue to watch that and i believe um becca saxon is here good evening i will make this quick because i know i am speaking against um the threat of freezing rain we all want to get home uh but i just wanted to add we haven't talked about this yet tonight but public sector bargaining especially in the state of virginia cannot be separated from our history of institutional racism and economic injustice our public sector um jobs uh and our public sector

197unions are the backbone of the black middle class in this country because of racism because of discrimination it is public sector jobs where uh black leadership is most often able to move up through the ranks and have stability and um and experience perfect you know professional treatment and uh union is a huge piece of that for so many people um and i learned from sally hudson uh last month at our rally that the very first public sector union in virginia was organized here in charlottesville by the black nurses at uva and the state general assembly and the board of visitors fought it every step of the way and that it continued through until the band in 1977 which came after massive resistance after we had integrated schools i don't think it's a surprise that it

198came when the vea had its first african-american president that we lost bargaining because we finally had an integrated teaching force that was working together instead of against each other um you will hear from the vsba that bargaining hurts black and brown children but i would remind you that that is the same organization that last month voted to disaffiliate with the nsba because they disagree with their positions on equity so i don't believe that you should take everything that you are going to hear from vsba at face value that it is not the same organization that it was when juan diego wade was active with them and so please if you hear something ask us questions because you will hear information that is not accurate thank you thank you mr como anybody else all right anybody

199else in the media center like to make comment all right thank you thank you everybody um and now we will move to our final opportunity for comments from the board um i will start with who should i go left or right let's go with ms dooley um i just want to say thank you to my fellow board members i'm the outgoing board members and all the division staff has just been very welcoming um to me as i've got started to try to get my feet underneath me so thank you and look forward to continuing to work with you all thank you dr craft mr morris miss mckeever i have nothing thank you thank you mr bryant i'd just like to uh publicly um welcome emily and dom to the board thank you surprise morse worker

200i just have a quick comment i thought of it after the presentation um but i just wanted to say that i hear all the emails that i'm reading all the emails that are coming in about us staying in person and keeping schools open and i just want parents to know that we're hearing them and i also want to add that during the height of the pandemic right now with the biggest surge that we've seen that it it is reasonable for us to um approach the situation more thoughtfully um we're hindered by in my opinion this five days a week law virtual is not perfect but going back at the height of a surge is not going to be perfect either and to me the this this law that's requiring us to offer five days no

201matter what is going on is it feels like it's saying to me it it's okay for us to have some cases that if there's an acceptable number and i highly disagree with that and it's not something we can control our hands are tied but it is worth noting that we don't operate in a vacuum or a bubble our health system locally i believe a couple of days ago was was stretched pretty thin with icu beds that situation may have changed recently but we also deal with a population of children who can't be vaccinated that are five and under in our preschool children and those on our staff who have um underlying conditions as well as children and so we don't operate in a bubble and so what's happening with the hospitals that all needs to

202be taken into consideration and if we're to the point where we can only pause when we are unable to stay open we've significantly hindered ourselves for being able to bounce back from this current surge and i think that's it thank you miss forsberger thank you for those comments um i always appreciate your thoughtfulness and and what you bring often with your comments and and i i too did want to and i neglected to indicate that there was some newsletter and some update from centerra and sentara as a whole so not just centerra charlottesville but but there is a significant concern as far as uh you know coveted cases icu beds and again that's that's the entire sentara um so it is i mean that's a big piece of it as well when when i was

203talking about our responsibility as just human beings and as a community you know we do have health care workers who are beyond beyond taxed and and you know suicides of of health care workers who just cannot do this anymore and so you know we don't want to be part of increasing um numbers of hospitalizations and it is this is a really tough thing to balance um and and i appreciate everybody's concerns and conversation points around this and and i think if anything we as a board you know in the last couple of years have had some really um tough conversations you know um but i don't think we will shy away from this and i i do welcome um you know on behalf of the board ongoing concerns and emails and and dr gurley is

204available and we are willing to sit you know and have these conversations so thank you again for your comments um and now we will move to um superintendent comments and most of the things that i wanted to say been said but um i just wanted to thank uh thank miss johnson bianca johnson and just the work that she's been doing and the partnerships that she's fostered with the community i've been very appreciative of those things and i know that that community um we are better because of those things um i also wanted to just publicly think i've just recently met um miss sherry eubanks over transportation and she is just institutional knowledge um just so smart um and so i just been very appreciative of the things she's been doing getting on the road so

205you know i get i get a lot of phone calls i don't get a lot of love in my email box but i in my email box though i did i'm very appreciative of you know just her and and the things that she's been doing in terms of getting on the roads there are a lot of utility lines that are not associated with the city but you know we have century link and verizon lines and just all these little utility lines and just that you know pose such a risk for our buses on our narrow roads and so i'm appreciative of her and i'm appreciative just you know of our comments and feedback from our teachers you know we are listening and i know our board members are listening and that you know all of

206these things we will be better together and um and just lastly well two things i'm sorry and um you know our testing programs just continue to encourage our parents um to participate in our testing programs and there's some equity issues there too you know when you look at who's participating in so we really have to figure out what's the antecedent and what's causing you know some people are saying no i'm not going to do it and then others to say i am so we've been having some critical conversations with that and then lastly i've been searching in my the internet miss um backer and i've been looking and finally right before the board meeting it shows up starting january the 8th to the 14th it is um principal's appreciation week and i know that um

207people are saying well why 12 month people coming in they've been working so hard behind the scenes our principals and assistant principals have been working really hard and um i had miss thompson summerlin thompson emailed me while we were sitting here just the work that they put into the plan and they're going to get some feedback from teachers so principals appreciation week is april the 4th i'm sorry january the 8th to the 14th 2022 and we appreciate them all we love you all teachers and principals thank you thank you um work session wrap up a board would like to revisit the comb composition of the calendar committee to be more inclusive wants more work on the details of the staff leave regulations to have a presentation regarding collective bargaining for the board make sure that

208the message about the importance of masking is shared with families in research getting quality masks for staff and students more information about the construction grant more details on the five percent teacher raise and looking more to the future and competitive processes thank you very much i would also like to as far as the presentation to the board on collective bargaining i would like to reach out i would love to hear and want to hear everything that you all are presenting to staff but also would like to reach out to um mr anderson our our attorney to see if he has recommendations for presentations and just information that we can get from that end as well please um and okay we're moving on to upcoming meetings we do have a school board budget work session saturday

209january 15th that will be located here in the media center wednesday february 2nd right now we have scheduled a school board joint budget work session with city council it says that the location is to be determined i am lobbying for and hopeful that they will be comfortable to meet with us in person and i i personally would like to see if we can schedule that to be at buford um i think that would be a nice opportunity to sit there in that space and and work together there and then but that's again that's to be determined we don't have that finalized thursday february 3rd is our regular uh next school board meeting here in the media center and then tuesday february 15th we have a school board budget work session and thursday february 24th we

210have a special school board meeting which will be approval of the superintendent's proposed budget um and yeah we're busy so everybody thank you so much be safe weather safe health safe and thank you and we will call this meeting adjourned you