001good afternoon everybody it is five o'clock and i'm gonna call the meeting to order welcome to october what is today 7th i was going to say 4th i'm stuck on the 4th 7th school board meeting to welcome everybody and if you will join me please in a moment of silence thank you and now everybody will please stand for the pledge of allegiance thank you and now we'll have a roll call of board members madam clerk madam chair mr bryant president miss bryce and morsberger president dr craft president mr cleaver miss hurrier president miss torres yes mr wade yes and our student rep leila thank you now i will entertain a motion for approval of today's agenda please move for approval second questions or discussion from board members all in favor aye any opposed thank you
002passes fixed enough um and now we're going to move to our first opportunity for comments from members of the community um we do have at this point at least three people in line for comments we'll start with the two that are signed up virtually a reminder to please state your name your address and you're limited to three minutes and first we have beth ike uh madam chair i do not see miss ike in the attendee gallery okay so i can remind people if they would like to comment publicly and they are in the attendees gallery they just need to raise their hand and so that i can promote them to speaking position or they can type a message in the chat so that i know that they are looking to speak so right now i
003see three in the attendees gallery but i do not see anybody at this time with their hand raised okay so we can circle back and see if she shows up or later there's another opportunity um and then we have um miss regan welcome can you all hear me okay hi my name is miss regan and i'm a reading specialist at walker upper elementary i've been teaching for eight years um my partner teacher and i um have written a letter that i would like to read to the board dear ccs school board members allow us to introduce ourselves we are jen snyder and ray regan we are both reading specialists at walker upper elementary we both thoroughly enjoy the time we have spent teaching in charlottesville city schools and love working in this community as you
004know the mission of ccs is every learner every day every run right now the substitute shortage in this division is stopping us from accomplishing that mission and we fear for the success of our students as you know every school in the division is struggling to find substitute teachers and there seems to be no end in sight and no real solution offered to stop the crisis the current solution is not sustainable or in the best interest of our students and staff teachers at many schools are being asked to give up their planning time to cover staff absences which means they are not being given the appropriate time to plan and implement the quality of education they strive for gifted resource teachers math and reading specialists behavior interventionists instructional coaches stem teachers librarians and counselors and even
005our administrators have all had to cover absences this means that students who are struggling with math and reading are not receiving the necessary interventions that they need to succeed in and out of the classroom students who excel are not being given the proper enrichment that they need to keep growing their minds not to mention that these services are services that local taxpayers have been have paid for and have been told that their students are receiving if this issue is not addressed this lack of intervention and enrichment support will eventually be reflected in the test scores that are so harshly examined by the state for accreditation surrounding districts are having similar issues but have made attempts to address the problem that we feel ccs should implement as well these actions include but are not limited to
006incentives and bonuses for substitute as well as raising the substitute pay or possibly having in-house sub-positions that benefit with benefits at each school we and our students are employing you to find a remedy to the situation so that we are no longer hindering our education of our students there are a couple things that i would like to add that the letter did not address the first is to clarify that we are eight weeks into this school year and i have pulled one group of students one time for reading services i would also like to note that while kobit has exacerbated this issue it has been an issue in the division for years i would also like it to be noted that the walker administrative team have done everything that they can to try to get
007substitute teachers in the building problem solve and to make this process as painly as possible and we greatly appreciate their effort lastly i would just like to say that we cannot keep asking teachers to do more with less and expect to have a culture of teachers who want to live out a career in this division and grow and cultivate knowledge in themselves and in our students thank you so much for your time i appreciate every single one of you thank you mr calmer i think i don't know chris meyer yes i was going to say um chris meyer is has his has chris matters of hand raised so i've promoted chris to panelists that should be able to unmute to uh speak at this time thank you yes uh good evening school board members uh
008and thank you for the time and your efforts and again managing our uh publishers we're having a hard time hearing you all right uh better than yell if they can either all right here we go um so one i just wanted to update a little bit on an effort that a number of parents informally took upon themselves to support the reconfiguration funding i i hope it was noticed and i think it is noticing the results that we saw monday with the 5-0 support by the counselors and i want to thank all the school board members who put a lot of time and effort also into helping make sure that the reconfiguration advanced uh to this next phase but the the parents uh spent a fair amount of time uh not only one organizing a petition
009on change.org that i think as a monday afternoon at 137 signatures also a letter that was sent on monday from local businesses and environmental climate oriented organizations that had 17 signatures on it we organized multiple public comments at work sessions and also on at monday's city council meeting in addition to a social media campaign that leveraged a lot of the materials vmdo and put together so i would like to say that this informal group is very interested in continuing to support efforts to ensure that reconfiguration and the redesign does happen including a sales tax increase etc i think you know how to get a hold of us but if you'd like to you could just obviously contact me but we do want to continue to support again and make sure this happens finally um and
010sorry real quick i'm at 124 oakland court and i have two kids at jacksonville elementary school uh i do am concerned that the new aftercare program is not covering uh teacher professional development days and other days again this is a uh kids that missed a lot of school uh over the last uh again year and a half because of covid obviously but i would hope that the aftercare program uh that now the ymca is providing you know can have access to the facilities and offer that programming during those days to again help kids catch up at the moment it is not happening thank you very much thank you mr cuomo anybody else um at this time madam chair i do not see any other hands in the attendee gallery or any chat messages indicating time
011for public comment at this time and as a reminder anybody else here in the media center if you'd like to take this opportunity you can do so now and or we have another opportunity towards the end of the meeting for public comment again so you don't have to sign up if you'd like to come up and say something give it a couple more seconds mr como to monitor that and then we'll move on okay all right thank you um we will move on to the next item which is um adoption of our consent agenda i move adoption of the consent agenda a second any questions from any board members let's break some more of its morse burgers uh yeah it was um not so much a question as a comment um and i'm glad that
012the reading specialist spoke um this meeting um i was concerned and i wanted us to think about as a board and now that we have new leadership um about walker up upper elementary school and um in particular but as a division as a whole our staff turnover and um i was concerned over the summer when we lost a lot of long-term long-serving staff members and we're making a big push for equity and inclusion and hiring um more teachers of color but i'm very concerned about our retention rates with those teachers and so um moving forward as a board and with our new leadership i think it we really need to spend some time focusing on walker um i'm sorry buford i apologize buford uh as well with the with the staff turnover and our teacher
013retention particularly in that area and staff retention listener thank you for that so did you this wasn't necessarily particular to the consent agenda our personnel items are always in the consent agenda all right agenda about who's leaving and who's not leaving and so i just wanted to i wanted to bring it up and gotcha i just wasn't sure too because we'll have a discussion in the staff report as well i think so thank you no thank you okay all right any other questions comments all right all in favor of approving our consent agenda for this evening hi any opposed great thank you okay we are now moving to our next item which is action items and the first item is approval of our 2022-2023 wow that seems weird first time i've said that um proposed
014budget calendar and we have renee hoover thank you good evening school board members and dr gurley before you have the f523 budget calendar approval since the last time that you saw the calendar there has been an addition or a change the joint meeting between the city council and the school board will be on february the second that's not in this in what we have here in writing no it it's it's in your it's on the calendar it's probably about two-thirds of the way down on the page um [Music] um passed the pto's budget update and input yeah we hadn't locked into that date yet so that's why it was added correct correct it it wasn't locked in when you first saw the calendar in september right and then the our saturday work session also is
015included in this and we weren't your saturday work session is included on january 15th there's been no changes to that date okay and then also thank you for including the city council's budget calendar so please everybody take note of that and if you can attend or or watch and tune in to any of those meetings it's really important that we do that so this is an action item if we could get a motion for that please i'll move that we accept the 2022-23 budget development calendar second any other questions comments on that all right i guess we're all in favor sorry any opposed there we go official thank you miss hoover all right um and next we have our wellness policy with dr baptist madam chair members of the board and dr gurley um as
016you probably recall back in june the when we did the major policy update for this year you had the uh wellness policy that had been worked on very diligently by the school health advisory board and there were some concerns about formatting at the time since that time we've continued to talk about the formatting and the board asked that we wait until the september shad meeting before we uh voted on the are you voted on this and so we did meet on september the 14th and the chadboard discussed that the format should be very similar to the way all of our other policies are and that the regulations were indeed the responsibility of the superintendent so the shab voted unanimously to bring this policy back to the board for action so i bring it back tonight
017ask for action on this so that we can have the wellness policy implemented for the school division thank you we can either um discuss it if you want or i'll um make a video make a motion um i'll move that we approve the um revised wellness policy second any questions discussion and i just say i'm the board member on chad and um you know we you know i think the committee that committee feels the advisory board feels really good about our current wellness policy and we're eager to be able to to fully act on it and you know once we vote to implement it uh that that will be the policy that will be in effect for our division and so we've been eagerly awaiting this moment thank you any other questions comments all right
018all in favor of approving this say aye any opposed great thank you thank you thank you dr baptist all right um items for discussion we are now um to energy and water report good evening madam chair members of the board and dr gurley uh the report you will be receiving this evening is is a report you have you have received before typically you receive this update in the spring around earth day but with um covid in the pandemic items filling up our agendas uh you haven't had this report in over a year and so as i was working with the city trying to determine you know how we could get this on the agenda now because it was it was time uh i was i found out that october is energy awareness month so it's
019a time where to encourage government and organizations to raise awareness of the importance of sustainably managing the nation's energy resources so actually october is a great time for you to receive this update and i'm very pleased that we have with us this evening jill grenier from the sustainability office she will be joining us virtually this evening her colleague kirk vizier who's mentioned in the um on the agenda item we work very closely with kirk unfortunately he is unable to be with us this evening but we're very happy to have miss grenier with us to provide this report there we go yeah can you hear me i'm just checking hi uh my name is bill griner thank you school board members for having me and thank you for this time i am the city's water efficiency
020program coordinator and as kim mentioned not here with me today is kirk vizier he was instrumental in developing this report and he is the city's energy management coordinator and today i'd like to give you an overview of our school's 2020 energy and water performance report this was developed by the city's energy and water management program you can go to the next slide so just a little bit about my role with the city my focus is on monitoring and managing the water used at our facilities and also implementing programs that support community-wide improvements in water efficiency my co-worker kirk focuses on monitoring and managing the facility's energy usage with an emphasis on improving efficiency and reducing our overall energy footprint we both facilitate the city's energy and water management program that emphasizes improving energy and water
021efficiency at our city and school facilities which is over 70 municipal sites you can see a picture of our energy water management team here obviously during covid as we're we're doing our zoom meetings we've got mark zavikar from facilities maintenance crystal rittervold from facilities development and environmental sustainability and kirk and myself from environmental sustainability through the team we have a really great cross-divisional perspective to help find solutions that impact our energy and water usage next slide the city's energy water management program has continued its strong partnership with the schools that was really set in place by our energy and water saving goals that were outlined in the 2019 resolution for charlottesville city schools energy and water performance since the signing of the resolution we've had monthly meetings with the ccs administration to discuss the school
022performance and educational initiatives also we provided quarterly updates to each school principal around the school's performance and upcoming education outreach efforts next slide in this presentation i'll be reporting some of the highlights from our 2020 annual energy water performance report this report is a 2020 update from a more detailed 2019 report that established a lot of the background and baseline information from our program that we've been working on and you could actually view both these reports as a as well as a companion interactive dashboard on our on the school data on our website and i've listed that at the bottom here of the slide and of course i can't discuss 2020 without mentioning covid19 as it had really a significant impact obviously on the schools and also on the overall energy water performances of our
023buildings building occupancy was significantly less throughout the year across all of our school facilities which resulted in a huge decrease in utility usage and kova 19 created a new challenge of tracking any changes that we implemented by our program to increase efficiency and so this report makes clear that a lot of the decreases in utility usage were primarily driven by this low to no occupancy in these facilities for a large portion of the year however the program will continue to explore a lot of the um you know sort of this unique year and how our school's portfolio performance with regards to goals and trends can be sort of evaluated in addition the performance and some of the actions that we typically implement by our program were specifically impacted by covid and so a lot of
024our actions were delayed or cancelled or had to be modified the report incorporates three focus areas identified and improving energy and water performance and those are going to be operations technology and people so first i'm going to go into a little bit more detail about our program's operational focus and actions in 2020 next slide operations is really important component of our program as it often involves delivering actions for minimal costs but for potentially some of our greatest achievement achievements to reduce energy and water use our program's goal with operations is to have schools run as efficiently as possible with the needs of the users of the school and kova 19 triggered a lot of operational changes particularly at schools started to shut down in march of 2020 and our facilities maintenance division really worked hard
025to scale back from our facility operations particularly with some of our hvac schedules while still implementing cova 19 mitigation measures within our facilities and we continue to meet regularly with the ccs administration staff through the pandemic to stay on top of the changing needs and requirements of the schools we also continued to monitor utility usage monthly and reported you know questions or concerns to the appropriate staff to further investigate these issues this monitoring was really important as we as there was less use of many of the school buildings which means a lot of the leaks or say like electronics being left on or hvac units not working correctly would most likely have gone unnoticed in 2021 we're going to be monitoring our hvac schedules and doing a lot of those actions as the students start
026to return to in-person learning and we're expecting actually to see an increase in utility usage in 2021 when compared to 2022 and this will be mostly results of the increased occupancy and also implementing some of the coven 19 hvac mitigation measures next slide technol technological actions focused primarily around improvements made at the school buildings through equipment upgrades and replacements covered 19 had a significant impact on technological actions as many of our projects slated for 2020 were put on hold to ensure staff were able to respond appropriately to coven 19. the actions included some upgrades to led lighting improvement to hvac equipment and upgrading building automated systems or bases which is really important for controlling and monitoring our buildings particularly the hvac systems and lightings and also we could do this remotely which was really effective
027during covid the program is also pursuing opportunities to assist with funding these improvements this includes participation in a rebate program for implementing projects that reduce energy use and improving energy efficiency and looking into an energy performance contract cova 19 did delay this the process significantly but where our energy savings performance contract is going to be a primary focus for the program in 2021 which would help deliver some essential upgrades and improvements to the school facilities next slide so focusing on our last action the people that use and interact with the facility can have a significant impact on our facility's performance a primary strategy for our program utilized is to connect with the people that use the facilities with education and developing better awareness of really how our facilities work so in 2020 our program put
028out quarterly educational campaigns each with their own theme and message and educational materials that were targeted at the students starting the summer of 2020 the program put out activity sheets to help engage the students while they were at home or remotely learning and were supported by the school's icon staff in the fall we also had started to meet and work with the school's green baking club on energy and water saving initiatives the program also worked to educate the school staff around energy water saving efforts we put out messages about limiting the use of space heaters in the schools as these are really unsafe and they can cause a lot of hot and cold issues in the workplace and use up a lot of energy and then looking toward 2021 we again are going to be
029continuing our education outreach efforts at the schools with our quarterly educational messages and materials with kovid continuing to impact everyone we do anticipate using activity sheets as the primary materials developed to further our program's messaging next slide so now turning to the school's performance we actively monitor the performance of our school facilities looking for trends abnormalities successes and when it comes to energy and water usage we currently have a general goal of a two percent reduction in utility consumption each year and we use this goal as really a point of comparison for each school's performance to continue to encourage overall reductions in utility consumptions and costs as i mentioned covenanting posed this unique challenge for monitoring our facilities as the occupancies were very different and our operations dropped drastically when all the lockdowns were put
030in place and so continued this continued to make the year um very you know sort of significant and very different and so we had to kind of evaluate it very differently from from you know normal years and uh two of our main metrics that we use to benchmark our facilities and track energy performance is energy use intensity or eui and the energy star score an eui is a measure of the energy used per square foot of a facility and it can be compared to other similar use facilities so in this case schools can be compared to other schools and the lower the ui the better the average ui for an educational facility in our region is at 62.8 kbtu per square foot and our school's averages were around 65.3 kvtu per square foot in 2019
031and 84.9 in 2020 energy star scores is actually a 1 to 100 scale and in this case the higher number is the better one and the scores are developed by making the space attributed to a facility so our square footage the number of occupants the number of computers and say operating hours those are all put together and we look at the energy usage for a given period to determine the score and this is done using android star's portfolio manager which is an online benchmarking tool and it is a way for us to compare the performances of our schools to those across the nation a score of 75 me for a school would mean that it's in the top 25 percent of schools across the nation in efficiency also 75 is the minimum score needed to
032pursue an energy star certification for the school and the energy star score is an operational benchmark meaning it's actually going to shift for year to year so ndstar emphasizes really pursuing this certification annually and reassessing each year the scores did increase considerably in 2020 again due to our reduced operations the number of occupants and so we still are kind of calibrating these benchmarks for the facilities for 2020 specifically and using energy star recommendations to take into account how to handle the pandemic and once this is done we can feel confident that we can pursue energy star certifications for any of the schools that qualify next slide in 2020 the school's portfolio spent just over nine hundred thousand dollars on energy and water utilities which was well actually below our typical year for the schools which
033spends closer to about 1.2 million annually and so compared comparing our portfolio to our baseline year which is going to be 2015 the schools saw a decline in utility usage the test of this decline is really going to come over kovid 19's impact um our after copenhagen's impact to utility usage and so as we sort of see what happens in 2021 and beyond because we did we were seeing a slight positive trend uh increased utility usage until 2020. and the estimated utility savings that we saw in 2020 compared to 2019 was nearly 350 000 and this is again due to the measures taken during covid19 to do things like make turning hvac schedules off and you know reducing a lot of our lighting and things like that next slide here we have the actual amount
034of u of what we use in terms of electricity natural gas and water in 2020 and their percent reductions for 2019 usage again this is mainly attributed to changes in operations and use of the school due to covid we do want to emphasize that facilities maintenance team and ccs working together to communicate specific hvac schedules and needs for the schools was essential for meeting this level of savings next slide we also look at the school's impact on greenhouse gas emissions from the natural gas and electricity usage we this figure shows the amount of greenhouse gases produced from the energy used in 2020 which you can see was a 28 reduction from last year this will most likely increase in 2021 as the schools are operating on a more typical schedule with greater occupancy next slide
035i wanted to end with a few notes about our 2021 outlook with kova 19 impacting you know still continuing impact this year we will still remotely monitor and report on school's performance as the schools open back up to students it is expected that some of our utility usage and costs will increase and potentially even higher than 2019 reported numbers and again this is actually due to some of the coven 19 safety measures put in place we will continue to review utility performance monthly and investigate any opportunities to improve efficiency through our operations technology and behavioral strategies the program is working to develop clear utility reduction goals for the school of facilities that are in line with the city's greenhouse gas emissions reduction goals and our climate action plan in addition the city is actively evaluating
036the use of power purchase agreements or ppas to help fund the installation of solar in the city and school facilities and lastly through an energy saving performance contract which is in the very beginning stages right now the program helps to identify and tackle a myriad of opportunities to improve efficiency at most of the city's or the school facilities and to realize the cost savings from these improvements over the life of the contract and last side so thank you again for your time today you can find more information including the reports mentioned at the city's website listed here and i'm happy to answer any questions you might have thank you um i do have a quick question kim did you have the only thing i wanted to add thank you for that joe um i want
037there's a lot of information covered there in a fairly short period of time and there's so much more she could have covered one thing that wasn't touched on was um charlottesvilleschools.org forward slash conservation is a website that really highlights all the student outreach materials and things that have been going on and jill has been a big part of that before chrissy vick moved to north carolina she was huge and that partnership and that but that website does also reflect a lot of the student outreach work that has been done and continues to happen so the work never stopped they continued during covid we there was outreach to our students um continuing in that way so big thanks to the team at the city for for all their partnership and all of these efforts um the
038people who meet with them each month are myself and nigel standish and nigel plays a big role in helping to facilitate that outreach to our students and and dovetailing those resources and with our curriculum wherever it's appropriate so thank you um thank you jill so i was wondering if we could go to page eight of the presentation please maybe you're seeing it um anyway in looking at that this is the page that that breaks down um by school and you were talking about the energy use intensity and the energy star scores so i was just wondering if you or somebody could just speak to besides the obvious and the age of the building what's going on at venable um the venable annex i think is probably what and also yeah so the available annex score
039is really low that's in part due to just sort of the unique use of it it's a very small space and just sort of the amount of you know kids that use it and sort of the operations of it makes it sort of a unique case and it's likely that sort of the the way that our um the benchmark system is not really sort of accounting appropriately with how it's getting used so there are a couple things that we still need to look into in terms of you know is is categorizing this as a school the best option for it um but yeah we are still looking into sort of these options it's in terms of um energy use you know it does use a decent amount of energy um and again just because if
040it's a smaller smaller um sort of surface area that it has but um yeah our kirk are who does all the energy side it could definitely probably speak to some of the more nuances but he's been very um very you know closely monitoring that that site just to make sure there's nothing um interesting going on there and thank you and then when you're evaluating or when whoever goes around to evaluate these buildings and looking at these numbers i mean are you identifying specific parts of the buildings that we potentially could make a change on you know with currently um [Music] to change yeah so yeah i think um with our uh efforts for their energy performance contract that we're going to be uh pursuing that's going to do a really great job at getting us
041an idea of some some of the things that we could tackle to improve these numbers and uh and that's sort of what we're going to be using to sort of help jumpstart that you know in the meantime we've been sort of doing things that we can easily tackle to you know start getting these numbers in the right direction and a lot of that's shoring up some of our just you know operations and our hvac schedules and things like that so we've we've sort of been working on that first you know as we first come on and making sure schedules are correct and that the equipment's functioning properly so a lot of coordination with you know ural staff and also our facilities maintenance staff um to to work on those types of initiatives but our energy
042performance savings contract should also start sort of tackling a lot of the other ways that we haven't really been able to address um to get some even better savings out there i mean and i know a couple of years ago we talked about even just changing the lighting you know in here and things like that are we are we looking at that still so yeah performance contracts you'll go ahead and yes oh yeah so that would be included in the energy reform and savings contract that we're um pursuing it's basically taking all of our our savings efforts that we could do in in sort of a one big package and um the the savings is sort of offset so you know if you know say lighting upgrades uh you know we don't maybe save as
043much than what a replacing our you know hvac system or chiller uh those are offset each other and so basically we have this contract that allows us to um that helps to pay back our all these savings and changes that we're going to be doing and so um our hope is to by pursuing this that we can do some um you know all these sort of list items that we've been wanting to sort of tackle um like you know led lighting upgrades and things like that and and so that would definitely be that would be considered um in in sort of this this evaluation we're still evaluating firms that would be able to do this program for us so we're still sort of the initial stages of it but we're hopeful that it'll be a
044great way to get these numbers down or in the correct correct direction i should say um and get some of our savings in the in the right direction thank you mr [Music] um i'm wondering i'm looking at your slide number 11 that addresses the performance greenhouse gas emissions what is it that you feel we could do as it relates to your statistics here with regard to electricity and natural gas yes uh we're declining in greenhouse gases yes but we are now using our buildings more so is there something that we can do to be more i guess more mindful or is there something we can do to help us to continue to reduce the emissions because we are now as you say back to quote-unquote normal operation yeah um in terms of the behavioral side
045you know we are working on that with our students um you know there's a lot of messaging going out of you like turning the lights off when you leave a room uh you know turning the water off you know when you're done you know washing your hands and things like that so we are trying to convey some of those behavioral sides uh to the students and that's where some of those activity sheets are coming in and hopefully some class lessons that are going to be incorporated with that you know in terms of on the operation side we are trying to respond appropriately to the needs of classrooms and obviously we do we do want to meet you know comfort needs and just the general you know when people are in there we need to make
046sure that everything's running appropriately but with that you know we do evaluate our schedules which helps sort of make sure that you know our systems are running only when needed which is going to be a huge way to sort of cut down on unnecessary electricity usage or natural gas usage and then we are as we're sort of working on these climate action initiatives kirk is actually a lot more involved with working with our our climate action side of things but he is trying to use our our energy performance contract and some other initiatives to try and get at some of the more operational uh savings that we we need to get to get to the you know right place that we want to be okay i have one last question as it relates to natural
047gas um a lot of the um uh schools in their kitchens uh use natural gas are we looking at uh the types of um stoves and things of that nature that utilize natural gas to make sure that they are the most efficient ones that we have in our building so that will be evaluated as part of an energy performance contract so yes that would that could potentially be included and it would you know if we if our contractor sort of evaluates and says this is a very inefficient model or you know it should be electrified those would be things that would be evaluated as part of that and we'll be able to sort of package that all together for making those changes and in that evaluation you would do cost estimates i'm presuming is that
048correct yes absolutely thank you any other questions mr wade uh yes i just had a couple of questions or comments really um and that one was concerning the climate action plan i was surprised that we didn't have an adopted one for the city um and i think that when we get that done it should be done hand in hand with the um city schools because we um we you know we have most of the buildings that the city owns and so that really should be a big part we really should have a big hand in in that um and one of the things that you were talking about lights um and i was looking at the lights outside as they're about to to come on and i know that dominion power owns the lights outside
049of school property but for those inside i was wondering if the um [Music] if they are energy efficient i know dominion power is a program that is cost neutral or cost positive for those and i think that for us that's you know like a no-brainer we should participate in that program because it won't it won't cost the school or the city um any money so anyway so i think that that that is a program we definitely want to try to participate in and leah had mentioned um the gas and and i'm learning more and more about gas i just heard something this morning on npr was not necessarily having gases emits something that may not be very healthy and so we want to just make sure that as we're doing the plan that we look
050for alternative energy sources and and you know as much as possible um and and so i think that we're learning more and more each day and and we just we should have that climate action plan and those these lights i know we've been talking about the lights here for at least six or seven years and and that it seemed like something could have been done in a one of those summer months or something like that because we'll we will recoup the cost you know pretty pretty quickly so that's that is really not a question it's really comments we need that action plan adopted as soon as possible it needs to be the schools really need to have a major say in that so that um we can make sure that our footprint is small as
051possible as we move forward absolutely thank you anybody else mr bryant dr kraft yeah um maybe to follow up a little bit on that um um well first of all to just express appreciation for the team that that the city has in place and for this presentation it's really um very comprehensive and it's really helpful and uh thank you for all the work that you're doing um so this is also sort of a question slash comment but uh we charlotte so i've been really surprised at the number of uh renewable energy companies uh that that are here particularly solar you know and then we also have wind energy and i'm wondering if there are opportunities uh to partner with any of these companies who could actually maybe come in and either advise or you know
052help us implement some of the things that we would like to do here you know in our division and i guess it would be partnering with the city but also with the focus on the school building so i'm wondering if that has been considered at all working with any of these companies who are out there yeah so we are um you know considering solar as definitely a strategy for reducing our energy use um it's going to be sort of hand-in-hand with some sort of you know power purchase agreement or some sort of initiative we do always have to also look at the the you know if we're doing a rooftop installation how old the roofs are and so that's where a lot of the discussion with the on the city side and our facilities maintenance
053team needs to occur to make sure that those changes are going to happen hand in hand and we're not putting a installation on something that we're going to need to replace the roof on in the in the near future so those types of things are definitely being investigated and uh are are you know currently being pursued unfortunately i'm not directly involved with that instance that's more on our climate side and also our energy side but i do know they're actively looking into those types of opportunities i just had one comment um i do agree with um um mr wade that we need to move forward with the climate action plan in conjunction with the city and also look for lots of ways to to save energy for the schools moving in the direction of of
054solar i know a lot of our buildings are you know aged or you know old older buildings but um hopefully we can find ways to put some solar panels in some of the schools i think that will save us a lot of money in the end and lighting and so forth yeah and those will be addressed in our energy performance contract efforts as well which will help actually with some of our savings to help offset some of the other maybe you know installations that aren't as we don't get savings back as fast and so that's going to be really helpful for when we kind of combine those types of efforts together thank you the with the energy performance contracting what happens is you the city is looking at different they're called escos energy service companies
055and these companies this is all they do they specialize in doing these energy performance contracts and the reason it makes sense to replace the lights and replace the water fixtures with low flow low flow fixtures and things like that in kind of a holistic manner and bundle altogether is that there's actually like state legislation that facilitates or allows for these energy performance contracts because the whole program hinges around guaranteed energy savings that pay for the infrastructure improvements that you're making and so you look at the whole you look at your goals you look at the whole you know facilities condition it's a detailed assessment includes kitchens and everything and then you make the decisions that make the most sense to achieve to make a big savings step if you will um and what this also
056does from a financial perspective is it doesn't place burden on debt capacity it doesn't place burden on the operational budgets when you're able to tackle these things holistically using the energy performance contracting tool so i'm very excited that the city is moving forward with um with this i believe they did it a decade or more ago i did one in another school division but it's been a while and compared to shopping for insurance you know the technology changes and stuff and just every night it just makes sense to go back to the market and approach it in that way that holistic way and um i mean it's it's a project it takes effort and teamwork and we have a great team at the city that's looking at this so yeah and i just wanted to
057add that that's that was what i think that that action the city's overall action climate plan needs to be adopted so we can have some goals so that the city schools can be part of that you know have some pretty aggressive goals for us to try to accomplish but i think without the plan we could have you know playing the city and if we're all together on the same page we can move forward we need that plan got got to be together because to your point mr we're we're most of the square footage in the buildings and it and so it would not make sense to exclude us so you're right it's vitally important and along along those lines i mean the team that works um through facilities and and like our cap group um
058mike goddard and kristen and and so we are actually within a couple of weeks we have a big meeting um the school reps and with them to look at our cip projects and and they're always wonderful as far as looking at you know hvac systems and or roofs as we're coming up and needing to do roof replacement so you know there's always discussion and forward thinking as far as um doing it so that they're solar ready or the power purchase agreement so this is definitely on the minds of everybody um you know and and definitely i'm it's it's on the top of my mind um and then you know you've heard a lot of that too and in the presentations from vmdo as far as how they're looking to prepare the new buildings and the
059reconfiguration projects going forward so thank you everybody and if anybody anybody else have comments questions all right thank you thank you and next up we have kim powell again with their transportation update thank you thank you all um we're very fortunate to have garland williams with us here again this evening to talk about this important topic and this challenge that we're continuing to to work through together so i'm going to turn the podium over to him there's certain p there's certainly pieces of this where he's more you know in-depth and hands-on i have additional information regarding the wait list and work we're doing with our systems that i can speak to but i'll turn it over to him first thank you ken madam chair members of the board dr gurley i have six um items
060i want to bring to your attention tonight as part of the update um currently um i want to update you on the pupil transportation how many we have full time versus part time when we first started in august we had 12 regular drivers and three relief today we have 10 regular drivers and three relief which means we lost two of our regular drivers but in addition we've added six transit drivers to assist with pupil next question was currently in training how many do we have we have four individuals that are in training for pupil uh two the two new hires um have gone through the complete training and have passed their dmv road test as of yesterday um that's a big plus we got it consolidated down to that uh uh that time frame which
061we were hoping to be able to do and then we have two additional transit drivers um who have been through the class portion and they will take their tests on the 26th how many drivers have been hired since august we have interviewed and extended offers to eight individuals two uh have completed that's the ones that just passed their tests one is in process three begin classroom on monday and the other two that we extended office to have accepted offers from other places how many routes are currently available when we started in august we had 13 elementary routes which included doubles for clark and johnson there were nine middle school routes eight high school routes and seven alternative school routes as of today we have 16 elementary routes includes doubles for clark and johnson 12 middle
062school routes 10 high school routes and eight alternative school routes um and then we're still working with as always uh special ed to get additional information that we need to add more or adjust start our efforts with recruiting we continue to uh do as much as we possibly can we just completed a series of six week ad buys uh they were running in the daily press daily press online c-ville and four fm and two am stations we also had ads running in harrisonburg on the daily daily news uh record um in the richmond times dispatch um we are adding facebook uh ads uh beginning october 18th and we will have two uh banners that we have developed pretty large and then we'll display them on avon uh in about two weeks any additional information as
063of this morning we like i said we had six transit drivers with the s endorsement which is school bus endorsement um that are assisting people there are five additional transit drivers with the s endorsement that are working at cat uh we have enticed two of them uh to actually come over and start the training and work uh going to work parts of their schedule um for people that's it questions anybody or kim did you have more that you wanted to present before the only thing that i would add is that if you look in power school right now um so you know we we started school in august we issued new routes we tried to reshuffle the deck and make things as efficiently as possible transportation did a lot of hard work to do that
064and um as of september the 12th this was i think around the same time we gave you all an update we had 887 students that on a wait list now they're varying you know degrees of need there some just are requesting transportation but don't don't have to have it to get to school if you look at power school today it says we have 875 it's not you know still in a waitlist that's not a lot of progress but there's more progress than that that is being made there's still big challenges but um we we've been working out processes to streamline how we exchange information with transportation so that if a student is not using their seat regularly it can be reassigned to another student more quickly so that we can make changes just working with
065the number of drivers we have without having to do everything is one big batch you know let's throw it all in and redo all of the routes at one time so we we're making those process improvements and that's helping we've brought another the schools we have on the school side we brought another car service online with yellow cab in addition to on-time transportation so that's another resource for us to help take some of the pressure off particularly with special needs transportation and once again you know i know people in this room have been helping out with transportation of students and others many others in the community i probably i don't even know what what you know who those folks are but just once again want to extend a hearty thank you to everyone who is
066doing going that extra mile making the extra effort to help get all of our students to school we have a ways to go but um so the situation is still not good but there are um as recently as today i was in a meeting with pat cuomo and patrick mark zuma from our tech team and amy herndon from garland's team and john lee and we meet regularly and we're making some real improvements in our ability to um when we recognize that there is an open seat get someone else into that more quickly and i'm optimistic for for that for sure and i'm also optimistic for the hiring efforts and hearing that you know more drivers will become coming online soon but the struggle continues any questions or comments from board members i had two questions
067the first um when we were updating when you're updating us on the bus drivers uh the last meeting you had an id the number of drivers you need to make all the routes work what was the the number the optimal number of bus drivers is 40. for him okay and we're at about once uh we get the next batch through we'll be at 20. half of what thank you and then um miss powell when you were talking about the 800 students on the wait list are they all getting alternate ways to school are there some kids who are on that list who just aren't able to get to school so what's happening is that when schools identify a student who is just not a you know their clear attendance issues with not coming to school
068when a parent comes forward because their circumstances are changing and they cannot we just for lack of we scramble our resources and we try we try to address each of those situations as best we can we appreciate the partnership with the parents and the community and everyone who's continuing to help make it work but i don't have any um you know answer i can give you tied up with a bow that says oh yes we have a plan but we are responding to the issues as there's an escalation process it goes from the office usually through the principal but sometimes it just comes straight to me because everyone knows that you know i'm the person along with transportation we trying to figure it out you know as as the issues come to us but it's
069not there's nothing pretty about that process or or even routine we have to be creative um we have had families doing the um a gas gas card reimbursement type thing or mileage reimbursement rather you know we've got these things out there that are being offered as needs are identified um and i'm happy to say that everything from julia's church fan that she and i and some others have been driving to the we see families come into those programs and then they get a bus seat and so people were you know we i do see more progress than what that number reflects um as far as addressing our most pressing needs um so that's that's i guess the best answer i can give to that question not satisfied with where we are by a long shot
070because the number is not changing is it just that people who may have had other means of transportation are then now requesting a need or what so what's interesting is you'll see someone a student who was prioritized for transportation and then i guess new information comes forward or they move or whatever and then a seat will free up and then we can put someone else in that spot um so you know or or they just decide that they just would rather do something other than ride the bus it's it's a fluid situation i think you would agree it's a very fluid situation and like i said the good news i was trying to share earlier is i do believe we're we getting better at speeding up the interface between our systems so that we can
071identify the options to try to address the issues as they pop up or you know as they continue to rise to the top it's it's a constant moving target and and i'm i'm also i've come to understand through this how often our students move even within this community i got i got to say i have a new appreciation for that so a student will have a bus seat on a priority student will have a seat but then they'll move and then we've got to figure out how to get them a seat on another bus and but then that frees up a seat for someone else who was waiting on that route so um and we're all we're all you know there's a group of us that are very hands-on in this process i wanted to
072follow up miss pal i'm sorry so i understand that it's fluid but i'm just wondering are there kids who just can't or aren't able like is there i understand like there's other things working behind the scenes but i'm just wondering if they're kids that they just don't they're not able to get there because of the dream there are there are families and students that that have come forward and that and present that and i can't say that i that there's any principal or myself who has allowed a situation like that to remain for more than a week or so i mean we work it out as fast as we can i don't know but but for every one of those i've resolved i got an email this afternoon now the student's been coming to school
073but the parent came forward and was just um at a breaking point you know so it's it's communication and it's a lot of people doing the best they can and it is so far sub-optimal it is so so far from perfect or what we need i can't stand here and say anything other than that but i can tell you that everyone involved is trying to be as creative as possible as responsive as possible i can tell you my mind works on this constantly and i have ideas but i don't want to throw them out there and get people's hopes up because ever i have also tried things my colleagues have seen me do this and then it doesn't work out you know for whatever reason and so but we're we're we're working it our team
074garland's team um so you know i'm not i can't tell you that there are students i do believe i will tell you this i believe there are students who are not attending school as much as because that who are not attending school regularly because of the transportation issue because the transportation they're depending on you know is not available to them perhaps every day i i feel certain of that and so then our message to them is please speak up and reach out to and then your principal and your you know and we will do the we will do the best we can but even then just to be clear it's not like i have whoops where i can snap my fingers and just resolve it the next day i want to manage expectations but um
075no one is turning a deaf ear to this and there are a lot of people with big hearts that are um and a lot of determination that are working on yes but it's it's not what it needs to be right now people need to know that though i mean if you're struggling i mean and to your point we need to know yeah we need to know how a parent is is you know um working their schedule and doing the best that they can to make it work and and maybe they're five minutes late to work you know every day because they're driving their student and and they get you know some messaging from work saying this is not collar you know we can't tolerate this anymore so that's we have to partner with our parents
076more than ever absolutely and it is important that they speak up because there are other reasons there's always been reasons that students have attendance issues sometimes so don't assume that if you're not getting to school that we just chalk it up to transportation we do need people to tell us that it's a transportation issue between covid and and all kinds of things we do need to clearly know it's a transportation issue so we can can put it on literally the lists that we work and we work and we work miss pureer do you have any questions mr bryant miss pal i just want for clarification i know what all the juggling and um all the stuff that you all are good great stuff you all are doing i just want to make sure in my
077mind for those students who are having issues uh getting to school if that's the case what are we doing in terms of outreach to ensure that those students are staying abreast of their studies that's that's a decision my concern and i'm afraid that i'm not um that would be something that principals would need to speak to or folks on the instructional side of the house i'm sorry i don't have the answer but i believe mr williams would you like to add to anything that i was saying earlier because i felt him coming up and i didn't give him a chance to see yeah i just wanted to say the question was asked how many drivers do we need the optimal number is 40. for the model to work we need 30 drivers so the 10
078is designed so when we have issues of being sick or that we'll be able to do active management which is what we need because the bus gets down to 15 20 minutes then we'll have those extra bodies to allow us to insert a bus and keep everybody on schedule that's the 40 number so our number right now is we're trying to get to 30 optimal number is 40. so we'll be 20 when this next group comes through and then we're 10 from where we need to be but optimally we need to be at 40. if i'm not mistaken before covet and the additional challenges that presented itself with that we were making things work with around 20 20 or 20 or so drivers in that ballpark with crowded buses three to a seat that's the
079difference so where we would be with this next batch of drivers that mr williams reported on would be pretty much back back to pre-covered conditions and if we could have kids three to a seat and so forth as we did pre-coveted it would take a lot of pressure off it's still going to be huge and significant but um that just gives you some comparison pre-covered to where we are now to where we need to be and to put into context is reference to that we do want to keep that bar high at the 40 because similar to what the teachers described and what we know is happening with subs and and that is we are experiencing that with our custodial team we are experiencing that pressure in every facet of our operations um today when
080we had our weekly one of two regular transportation meetings we have every week one is for special needs transportation the other is just our transportation routing improvement process team and uh amy herndon the person who does the routing i don't know jamie's exact title but she's one of the leaders i work with her she had to leave the meeting early to drive a bus and that is nothing new so um anyway we're all hands on deck like i said julia and i have been driving lots of folks in our office have pitched in with that um i'm gonna jump over here to our student rep leila did you have some comments or questions um yeah i wanted to ask about early morning buses here at chs are there gonna be any um because some students
081take early morning classes and struggle to like attend because of transportation that's a very good question we are struggling because the drivers that we have are having to drive so many routes and double runs and all these other things the some of the things that are also being sacrificed if you will are support for extracurriculars and those early morning type activities so we had pre-covered we would run buses for things like the fencing club at buford to go to the carver wreck or wherever they do that activity and then the early morning as we are able to bring on these additional drivers we will be able my understanding is we will be able to get back to more normal operations using that driver core to provide those services it's a good question would you like
082to add to that i think that's a fair assessment um but the priority right now is to get kids uh everyone we can the students to school and making sure they're meeting the opening bell um and also making sure that we the number of kids that we take to school that we can take them home in the afternoon uh we've had additional folks ask or inquire about uh employment but they only wanted to do like an am shift uh the problem is if you bring them on an am then we can't we can't take the number of kids home in the pm um so we're working through these models and we're working as fast as we can um it's going to take all of us continue to move forward in a a really detailed way
083to get out of this but i i do believe that the efforts that we're making and the coordination that we've got we'll get there yeah one more question sorry um and i'm i apologize for not knowing um we offer the drivers now full benefits we are doing a pilot program and that pilot is extending them full-time benefits even though or even though they are working part-time hours that's correct dr kraft um i really feel for you guys trying to to work this out this is so hard you know and um it really is it's um complicated uh just a couple of things questions um one is i was wondering um ms powell are there any efforts or could there be any organized efforts at the school level through ptos to um you know get squads
084of people who could help with driving the schools have been doing that to some extent and i won't even pretend to to know all the things that everybody's been doing behind the scenes so when i give these examples i don't want anyone to think or if any of your principals are listening that i'm i know they're probably doing it in this every school but yes i know there have been organized pto efforts i believe around walker and buford and then i know burley moran for sure had had some parent things going on to help so and that's really honestly one of the beauties of this community and one of the reasons that we can be standing here talking about a waitlist number that looks like what it does without having more absence absenteeism issues and
085things than what we are experiencing i don't say that to lessen the problem and diminish the suffering our families are experiencing in any way but people who work with me know i try to always find the bright spot and i do think there's a lot of beautiful things going on again in the community that's why i wanted to say what i said earlier i just we don't take any of that for granted and i'm sure i don't even know everything that's going on behind the scenes to make it work so if people are listening and um maybe from some of the other schools where that's not happening quite as much would that would it be welcomed at this point to have some organized efforts if anyone if any family wants to step forward and offer
086assistance to other families i would say the best thing to do is contact the principal because the principals the folks in that school office they know the families that they are hearing from who are in strife or they know who the students they're watching that aren't maybe attending as regularly as they would like them to and they may suspect it's a transportation issue so all you need to do if it's in your heart to help out with this is to contact the school office and it'll be great and then just for you mr williams just uh regarding the pool of cat drivers um and you mentioned some encouragement like maybe there are a couple of people who are you're winning them over do you think that is there more potential within that group of um
087of drivers to um add more drivers who could help us out or are they are you maxed out with that effort so in managing both systems we are there's a degradation on the transit side to allow us to take those six individuals we have right now to work with people i dare say that that's as much as i can do right now okay but there is a possibility as we world as we um transit is going to do some enhancements and some route changes in january um when that happens there may be an opportunity for me to slide potential other drivers entice them to come over and help you thank you thank you i may add to it what mr williams just said um we're very grateful for the cat drivers who've always been part
088of making the equation balance for city schools transportation and i want to highlight to anyone out there who's maybe interested in coming to work for charlottesville city schools or you have your your cdl or cdls already and you when you consider your options we are somewhat unique with this configuration of having the cat driving opportunities as well as the people driver opportunities and i like to think that when you combine those together we should be the employer of choice for this area because there are so many opportunities to drive so many different opportunities to drive so for someone who really wants to put that cdl use when you consider us as one organization it really should be a competitive advantage because there's just so so many opportunities to work and especially as we fill out
089our roster i know right now our existing drivers are thinking there's too many opportunities to work but as we achieve that the balance that we're heading towards we really we should leverage that and people should understand that there's more opportunity between cat and people with under charlottesville city than there are with other employers and and more variety all of that um i just i just really have a comment to make and leo may not remember this but several years ago before covert and everything came up she suggested that we have a time during a meeting that we kind of praise and honor the bus drivers because they're the welcoming wagon to the school is the first space that the students see it can you know have that student start off on a good day or
090bad day just knowing the importance of them and she saw that then i think that we see the importance of it now so i'm glad that you know that we need to continue what we're doing and i'm sure that you all are doing some giving them some extra love now um because i'm sure that every bus driver is getting kind of a little you know um enticements from other divisions that seems to come their way so anything that we can do to continue to keep them here um do so let us know if we can do more i appreciate that on behalf of a dedicated staff and dedicated drivers we appreciate the effort and the appreciation that you just gave thank you but i would also say that the team that is in place now
091is doing everything we possibly can to eradicate this as soon as we possibly can so uh sleep well knowing that we're we're not where we want to be but we're doing everything we can to make this go away as soon as we can thank you thank you mr williams you need to remember that um not only are you doing everything that you can but our students are safe um i see buses whether they're the cat buses or our own school buses our students are as safe as we are able to make them and i think that that's why our waiting list is so long the children want to ride the bus it's a service that we have always been able to do pre-covet you're working i know that's what keeps you up at night um
092but thank you for your efforts but more importantly your efforts around health wellness and safety because if the children and their parents did not feel safe on the bus your efforts would just be for naught so it's obvious that people want to be on the bus with the waiting list so thank you well appreciate it yeah now i want to extend my gratitude as well um to the people uh dedicated bus drivers and also the cat drivers who are helping out please let them know we all they're all cat that is correct so it's people and transit right so i just we appreciate them all um and every opportunity i get to stick my head in the door and say thank you to bus drivers when i see them i try to so um i
093i do have a couple of questions before and i know dr gurley has a question also but could one of you speak to your comment as far as waiting on the information from the special education department and how that changes and impacts routes please so because special education is one of two areas one the other is the vpi preschool program where transportation cannot be a barrier to services they when a student comes in if they're new or if their placement changes those things are also very fluid and those students because of our legal requirements to serve legal and fiduciary requirements because this is not something i like saying but people must transportation is not a required service of a school division except for those areas so when something happens in those areas where a student's
094home changes their placement changes or a new student comes in they they um they have it has to be a priority to resolve those things and so sometimes you have to leave yourself which we've actually not done but leave yourself a little bit of room or what your because you know it's going to it's not a question of if those changes are going to come up it's just how fast and what's the change going to be that you have to adapt to so that's what um mr williams was referring to and does that happen i mean pretty consistently throughout the year i mean i understand it happens every week every week wow wow okay um and then a question as far as the two drivers that that passed their tests today and they're ready to
095hit the road um starting monday how does that impact like routes what what difference does that make for us so it allows us to take the office staff that's uh driving and putting them back to dispatching and doing the required work there so we haven't gained anything yet but we are uh we've created uh those individuals put them back on the bench to allow us relief but we'll get the others through as a part of the the next group that starts on running the training class and hopefully get those through the the process as fast as we can okay gotcha and then um last time you met with us you shared that you had i believe it was here changed some routes to potentially help um chs students some cat routes but we changed uh
096yes um we we added some so i got to be very careful because um the feds are required we can't do things are specifically designed for schools um public transit is not designed to do that so what we have what we did is we knew that an existing cat route went by the high school we added additional service to that route it also did it touches other activity points but it also touches the school that allows an additional means for individuals to get there on a 15-minute basis it's not specifically for schools but the benefit is it gets to schools they're the possibility or their routes that potentially could do something similar near buchard for that we want to be very careful about putting [Music] middle schoolers or elementary schools on a public bus which
097is why we designed the additional service for the high school and so i there was some outreach from a parent specifically about buford and routes i i asked them to reach out to you all directly but i just thought i'd bring that up as a question in other places where you do have elementary school you have a security or police force we are not in that situation um that is dedicated to the transit so i would caution us to to allow if we're going to talk about um permanent or or modifications to the existing model let's focus on high school the way we have it and allow the elementary and middle schoolers to we'll continue to try to get service to them so i totally understand all of that if there are routes that are
098going by buford or any of the schools and there's parents writing with or an adult writing with a student obviously that's fine is there any way that we can communicate what those routes might be or highlight them um somehow between what you all have up and what this what we at the schools have so that parents could see what those routes are really easily yes so it just depends on how you want us to display it um we can work with kim and her team to figure out the best way to highlight that so you're the parents and students to be able to see it yeah i mean just the thought but i know that there was some inquiry about it and i just figured if we can be more transparent and it's just easy
099for people to see oh i could pick up this bus at this time and anyway thank you we appreciate you and all the all the work that you are doing thank you for working with the schools and dr gurley i believe has some questions or comments please yes mine is more so a comment um i know miss powell had mentioned um that there are some students who transportation may be impeding them from getting to school and so i know that could be a worry on the minds of people who are listening so i know dr odie and i had discussed this week and i was going to ask since we're talking about transportation and this is in line with transportation that she just wanted to share how we are ensuring that students who are not
100attending regularly are still getting instruction thank you dr gurley and i just want to really stress how as much as this is not an ideal situation with transportation everybody is working so hard to ensure that our students are getting what they need um our we have had some students who have been absent but i haven't received an abundance of calls from principles about students being absent so much that they're missing instruction kim just talked about the work that they're doing when they get a call from principals uh saying that a student is out and and they they rally up the troops and and get those students to school garland is talking about the work that they're doing so as kim said it may not be immediate uh that the children are getting to school but
101they're getting there and and our principals you all know that we have excellent principles and no one wants to see our students fall behind and so they're working really hard to ensure that students have access to activities and and learning that they can do if they happen to be out on a given day or two so we we continue to work on it it's not ideal but i will say that i'm very proud of the work that everyone has done to ensure that our students are getting what they need to be able to move forward and just to conclude with that we will um what we can do too is we can continue to provide you updates in terms of our um absenteeism rate and so we can see we can monitor that data and
102see how things are being impacted if transportation how it's impacting our student attendance thank you madam chair i have one last question um mr garland mr garland um you indicated that the [Music] adjustments i think this will be an acceptable term the adjustments uh for the routes coming to the building where we're currently sitting are there any cost associated with that to our students no our system is running fair free thank you any other questions comments actually and we'll continue to run fair free for an additional two years so thank you all right thank you both appreciate you coming thank you all right next we have our covet update from dr beth baptist thank you thank you and again chairman our chairwoman members of the board dr gurley i wanted to share just a little
103bit of information about where we've been with covid where we are and where we think we're probably headed um there you go you can go to the next slide so in looking at where we've been these are the number of cases that the city of charlottesville has had every month since last december you can see that in may and june we really didn't do tracking because it stayed like four or seven something like that for a long time but we picked it back up in july when we realized about the middle of july that something different had happened which we now know was um delta uh if you look the two months that really sort of have scared me were february of 21 and september of 21. and when september of 21 started i thought
104here we go um we had 675 cases that month but if you look already or to this point in october through today we've had 81. so i have to look to see how many had we had by the 7th of september since september was our bad month 203 so we're far below where we were the same time in september and i think if you watch the news or listen to the news you will hear many say that we may have somewhat rounded the corner we're not out of the woods yet but we're getting better we're still considered high risk or red along with just about everybody in the state a couple people turned orange this week and i want us to get to orange and we're close to the point that we will be in
105what's substantial rather than high but we're not there yet so next slide please so charlottesville city schools cases since the 1st of july these are the numbers that have been reported to us these are the cases that we've been using for contact tracing and so for the since july 1st we've only had 86 student cases and i say only 80. those 86 we're not happy about but when you look at the numbers that some school divisions have had they're much higher than 86. staff members we've had 26 of all of our staff members and i said this last month and it's still a true statement of all of our staff members and our students for that matter who've had kova no one has had to be hospitalized one went to the emergency room where the
106student was diagnosed for covid but no one has been sick enough to have to be hospitalized now those who've had it don't want to repeat it but have not been as sick as they had been could have been and for all of our staff every staff member was fully vaccinated prior to having coveted but one and one had had one shot so that's one reason why i think many of our folks have not been as sick as they could have been and some of our students that are listed up there have also been vaccinated and have had breakthrough cases next slide please i know some of you follow our dashboard very closely this is the part where we see it graphically shown not where i enter the cases every day but this is where we
107are through today i went in dr gurley's office today and i said knock on wood he said what i said we did not have one case yesterday in charlottesville city schools i was knocking on wood till about 4 15 this afternoon and we don't have a a positive all the way through but we've had a positive rapid so this number may change tomorrow but when you look at it you can see the week in september was our bad week where it was pretty much throughout the country and it's it's begun to go down again i'm not happy about any of one of the cases that we've had but we are looking at trends next slide please this slide is from uva they do every week show their model of when they think the peak will
108be for charlottesville the charlottesville metropolitan area that top dark color toward the right that number has been changing and it's been making me nervous because it started out that they said our peak would be in september then they said our peak would be around halloween then they said our peak would be around the middle of november i'm like uh uh uh nope well if you look and i know you can't read those tiny little numbers but now they say our peak was september the 26th or 24th i can't even read the number myself so hopefully they're correct and we've gone past the peak and we've started on the other side again we're not out of the woods we cannot get rid of our mask we can't do a lot of the things that we've wanted
109to do but if we are truly past the peak we're going to get there we will get there so what have we been doing i've got vaccinations in all caps because that is still one of the main things that we've got to get accomplished to finish going on the other side of this we've had the protocols that we've had in place that we update as new information comes out you've heard from miss powell all about the air quality things we've been doing all of our pb supply everything that's on this list we've continued to do this year even though um it hasn't had as many cases as last year so and when i put et cetera et cetera we're doing nothing i don't even have masks listed there but we're doing things you know like
110mask other things to try to make sure that our students our staff and our families are safe so those are things we've been doing next please so what's going to happen next something you've been wanting to hear more about and i'm very very excited to say that if you look at these two columns on the left is the vista testing that's the pool testing we've been talking about dr gurley signed the mou today so we have been talking to the the staff about what we need to do next our vendor is molecular next that company is also the group that does some of blue ridge um health districts testing at the uh mall so blue ridge is very familiar with them and and have nice things to say about the staff that's working there um
111we're finishing getting some resources and getting ready to post a position for uh the coordinator to work with this and for a nurse these are being paid for from the grant these are not ccs funds uh when we expressed interest in vista i told them we needed six thousand dollars worth of supplies we needed a coordinator and a nurse and they all that's ours we've just got to access it uh so we're getting ready to go with that but i didn't want to do anything on that until that mou was signed so the mou signs so we're ready to go the second part of the testing which is related to but it not not exactly the same is the diagnostic testing any of you who've been in my office have been with me on a
112zoom meeting lately have all you've seen behind me is boxes somebody asked me today if my office had been moved to a warehouse um in that in my office right now i have rapid test kits and today somebody gave me the information more information on the best way to do the distribution and get everything done these will be proctored tests which means every one of these tests will be done on the internet with a live person on the end of it that will be working with the person doing the test and we'll get results pretty immediately so what am i going to do next with all of these boxes i already have scheduled a meeting with our nurses for monday going to explain to them the processes that we need to do what we what
113forms we have to do how we enroll people in this process and what happens next and tuesday i'm going to start getting these tests out in the schools so we can start doing those now our these tests aren't just for anybody that wants to take a cova test these are for people adults or students and if they're well for either one but especially if they're students we will make sure that we have the consents if if families have given consent for the pool testing vista part they have also given consent for the other the diagnostic part but it's say a child is not feeling well we think it might be coveted we don't have that consent we're going to call the parents see if we can get the consent if parents don't want us to
114test their child we will but we will not test any children for whom we don't have consent but we will do that for any students and staff or for anyone who has been identified as a close contact and they've been recognized or recommended to have a kova test so we're not just going to pick out people and say it second graders today are going to get tests you've either got to be a symptomatic or known exposure to a case these are rapid tests rapid tests yes so that's that's pretty exciting that we've gotten all of this done and then the last page that i would mention again is the vaccinations uh we have announced that we had approximately 95 of our staff vaccinated beth chuckle did something yesterday and she said beth baptist you're wrong
115it's 96.5 and i didn't change the slide today but i'll take it 96.5 is better than 95. so what are we going to do with vaccinations we're continuing to vaccinate students 12 and up with the pfizer vaccination we've done it's either two or three clinics so far at charlottesville high school we have another one on october the 15th where we will be doing second shots for some folks and any charlottesville staff listening who had pfizer listen tight because if you had pfizer and you had that second shot at least six months ago any time before april 15th we're doing booster pfizer shots on october the 15th here at charlottesville high school in the morning so if we have staff members we wouldn't have any students who are yet ready for that because of when pfizer
116was released but if we have any staff members who want the booster having had their first two shots prior to april 15th we can do that i already have 25 staff members who have signed up for that i am asked several times a day what about moderna the minute they tell us that we can offer the boosters for modern in the school system we will have that set up or we'll be working to set it up for the children we are confident that we're going to have the okay from the cdc and the fda and all the other folks soon so we already have three proposed dates in november for pfizer for our five through 11 year olds we're talking about how we're going to do it it'll probably be at the end of the
117day or late afternoon so that that children can either get it while they're there or parents can come we might make ourselves available for some weekend clinics whatever we can do with blue ridge health department to get these shots done we will do maybe calling on some of you and some others and listening to volunteer but we're going to get this done and i'm very excited about it and the thing that's so exciting about doing these clinics when we say we are they'll be fully vaccinated before the winter break so that is one thing we're excited about um while i'm talking about covid do also want to put a plug in for flu shots uh i know that the division was offering flu shots this evening some of us got hours i'm trying to move
118my arm around a little bit and but we will have another flu shot clinic here at charlottesville high school on the 18th of october so we encourage our um our staff and their immediate families to take advantage of that so i'd ask what questions do you have about covet oh one question that mrs bryson morseburger had i cannot get the direct answer for you yet about the coveted beds um i check every day on the uva tracker and today or yesterday reported today there were 66 in the hospital at uva with covid and five new admissions yesterday there is a virginia hospital site but they don't give the numbers of um types of hospital stay and i've tried to find that out and i know you sent me an article that i looked at but
119it's seeing it on an ongoing basis i've not been able to keep up with that all right we'll start down this side mr wait sorry gotcha any questions no dr kraft just want to give you a big round of applause or something i i'm just um so grateful and appreciative of all of this work and how proactive we're being with this um so i don't have any questions i i think um do i uh i think i had one but i can't remember it anyway right now but i you know mainly i mean it just seems like we are taking every step that we can take now and um really really working on this for our whole community so thank you you made me think of one other thing though we have participated with a
120couple of uva testing events on weekends the last two thursdays we couldn't do one tonight because of equipment but we've had quite a few ccs volunteers to come out and help with those events and as we have more i will let you know the tasks are easy it's taking a piece of paper from somebody writing the first three digits of their license plate on a piece of paper and walking even i can do this so as we have more testing events i will reach out and see who else would like to have fun with us well i would be happy to volunteer thank you please call me mr bryant i don't have a question but i just want to thank you beth for all the hard work and coordinating and all the testing and everything
121that goes into it it's a team worker and your team beth and team beth and company we're doing all the hard work and coordinating all of this we do appreciate it and also not only sharing the information and updates with the board but with the community at large i think it's very important so thank beth and team forefront thank you sir that's for you not questions vashanda anything else layla you have any questions comments okay i do okay um thank you first off a lot of gratitude um so just wanted to check in tell me a little bit more tell us a little bit more if you can please about this rapid testing because i'm excited about that i didn't know we were going to have that fall into our hands we were able to
122access this because we volunteered to be a part of vista and when they when i filled out the form they said they would give us 250 tests and i answered back that is not enough i need as many as you will give me i didn't know i was going to get 12 massive boxes in the office but you you get what you ask for sometimes and they they they come six to a smaller box and you cannot open these until you're on the phone with the people or they're invalidated so i've not touched them because i don't want to invalidate but whoever administers the test will have to set up an account with um navica i think it is and then for our students whoever's administering the test will set up what's called a monitored
123profile for these students because they're not old enough to do it themselves and they will administer the test and like i said somebody's on the other end and they get the results pretty rapidly and so um i think there's a lot of uncertainty still about the validity of many of the rapid tests i think people feel more certain about a rapid positive than they do a rapid negative so if we have a rapid positive we're still going to ask that they do a pcr but that's we more likely we know we need to get them out of the building if it's a rapid negative we would still report it to families and make sure that they know that about the symptoms or what the the issue has been we will be able to keep up
124with the number of positives and negatives that we've had in the division um every week i will report how many tests have gone out to schools and how many uh tests have been actually used with children or what being used period and then if we run out of the 1032 that we have we can ask for more thank you um so yeah i was just trying to think through you know the protocol of as far as if you have somebody who's symptomatic and we're pretty sure they're positive or anybody who's symptomatic it makes sense to me that you're going to offer this rapid test i mean you can do that right there on site um you know if it happens that there's a staff member who you know was exposed to a sneeze or whatever
125you know i mean that makes sense although there's that three to five day you know incubation period too where they might not be so i mean how is that affecting or except we're not changing our quarantine or what we're wanting those people to do correct what we're hoping is that using these tests will diminish the amount of quarantine that we have to do but we will if somebody is exposed but not showing symptoms we would probably ask them to wait you know a couple of days two or three four days to before we would do a test but if someone is having symptoms we would do the test immediately um if you're determined a close contact we probably would ask folks to steal quarantine but maybe have them come back to the school to get
126this rapid test all of that has not quite been worked out i need to hear the questions from the nurses when i meet with them monday because you know i've got my idea how all of this is going to go but the real experts are going to tell me some things i don't know right and so we will probably be changing that and then um if i need to i'll have the health department involved in setting exactly what we will do with it but we're going to the best of our ability use this test to help us identify quickly and to reduce the amount of quarantine right yeah now in my head here all those flow charts that i i follow with work and and the schools all different directions so i'm sure there will
127be some change but that communication will be crucial so but thank you i mean that's that's really kind of exciting um and then um you know pcr testing too the follow-up pcr testing piece i don't know i haven't heard lately you know what the demand and delays are in the community but again just want to express gratitude to you know the pediatric offices you know as far as what they're doing but but any of them who may be listening or or you know community members who might have connections to pediatricians or other avenues for those pcr tests that are often needed to validate this one way or or to you know give that negative um you know for us to be able to update you know where people can get those tests is just so
128crucial the blue ridge health department website does include weekly where test sites are and where vaccination sites are and we have told the nurses at all the schools that if you have a family who says they just don't have the means to go somewhere for the test or go somewhere for the vaccination our pediatricians have said they will work with us and we will get them where they need to go for that but i will say after the last year and a half of working with our pediatricians some of the world's best treaty pediatricians are right here in charlottesville alberta county and we're very fortunate to have them we sure are no doubt and we appreciate the efforts um by you and by staff and everybody who's you know you know bridging that piece the
129transportation piece or helping families who might have that barrier i know that that's always a concern so a lot of gratitude about that and thank you for the update as always and yes please do reach out again for volunteers or help with those clinics i love to do it i just was not able to make the last one so thank you for thinking of us all last week i even missed the first quarter of the uva football game to help with one so you know i've realized it's important i think y'all asked me last time what would keep me from missing a uva event cleveland testing and maybe a grand maybe a grandson i'm here he's in stanton congratulations on that thank you i know any other questions board members comments thank you thank you
130very much appreciate it i'm here for the next item we're up then thank you and so we're moving on to our staffing update report thank you thank you um in your um in the school board information you have a written report but this presentation will include some of the information in slide format so that others can see it uh next slide uh the patterns that we had for hiring of teachers for this year and i've given you a couple years in there i wanted you to sort of see how we have been with the with the different races and also different genders um i think it's pretty self-explanatory miss per year did ask uh this morning to have numbers the numbers from this slide for 2122 are on the next slide here you've got percentages
131such as 73 of our new hires which were 67 were are white you can see the number um which is 49 on the next slide so you can look at that next slide so these are the numbers um for the hires for 21-22 and when i first started working with the hr part of this this summer it seemed like we were hiring lots and lots of people but so i was surprised when we had fewer hires 67 for teachers and administrators than two years ago when it was 93 so i was surprised that the number was smaller but you can see on those two slides both the percentages and the numbers that that go with the percentages for our new teachers and administrators uh then on the next slide please when we look at the
132some of the trends for race and gender just with our teachers you can see how we have gone from 18 19 through 21 22 with the different percentages we've gone down a little bit with white teachers gone up with black teachers others would include asian and a couple of other categories in there we've um gone up then we look at it by male and female we've gone down in our females and up in our males and then to the right you've got the numbers for the current year that go with the percentages for the 21 years on the next slide you can see some of the same information for instructional assistance again some big changes in the race the white uh ias went from 66 down to 29. you can see the number of black
133instructional assistants really really went up some of our other categories changed and then you can see female and male we certainly haven't put for done hundreds of females in our instructional assistants with only five percent males and you can see again the numbers for this year next slide one of the things that's very important to us and not just in hr but in our total school division is retention we've had some conversations in the office about which is more important retention and recruitment it's almost like a chicken in the egg thing we've got to recruit before we can retain but if we do a great job obtaining we're not going to need to do as much recruiting so i really believe that both are very important and i could argue either side that one is
134more important than the other but when you look at retention over the last few years you can see what our percentages are and i do not have numbers for that ms per year did not have opportunity to get that but you can see that overall we have not done too badly as far as our retention goes we certainly want to retain as many as we can but to be in 85s and 86s for the division and teacher is pretty good based on what other divisions are doing we did have a little drop in our administrators one thing you have to remember there is that we have so fewer administrators than we do teachers in other groups that one or two will change your percentages much more quickly than in the teacher rank but we did
135drop slightly in the administrator retention next slide please so why did we lose folks for a very a variety of reasons some retired some people probably figured out retirement easier than i did but so we had some who retired i hadn't figured it out yet um some retired a little over 20 moved we can't stop people from moving uh pursuing new opportunities is the largest group we've had some people who've decided to go back to school we've had some who've decided they want to do something other than education they just want to get in different fields so while that is our largest number pursuing other opportunities quite often they don't tell us what that new opportunity is going to be the reason for leaving is i'm pursuing something new some may be in the education
136arena some may not uh but that when they they tell us pursuing new opportunities that's what we have to go with personal reasons generally are things like i'm not ready to retire but i need as a year off this year or i'm going to have a baby or you know something like that um but again that's not a large number it is under 20. and then staff shifts when we move people around it can sometimes open up positions to um have an opening to have to to fill and really when you look at the because of covid that that's very low i would guess that some of the pursuing new opportunities could also be because of covid because some people just have education has not been where they wanted to be during the realm of
137covet so they wanted to try a different field dr craft you have a question could i just ask how do we ask that question of them the pursuing new opportunities because i'm wondering if some of that may be burnout related and i think it i think it is i'm not i can't tell you the exact purpose for the question but i will look at the questions for this year to make sure we can try to to get more definitive answers without getting in someone else's business too much but i want to get more information about that category so where are we on october the 7th next slide there are still some positions we need to fill we still have five teaching positions now one of these positions um will start monday so it's it's not
138like it's totally vacant but i put it on here because we don't have someone in that position tonight we've got a stem teacher venable halftime reading specialist work based learning that is a new position what we did in that is we took some money from the carl perkins cte grant and put it with our virginia graduates grant to do a work based learning assistant and that person just has not been hired yet and then we've got some instructional assistance positions we're still missing our float nurse we were able to hire the nurse for charlottesville high school who will start one day next week she's already doing some days with us already but full time she'll be with us next week but we're still looking for the float nurse position still need a half social emotional
139worker looking for one custodian and then lastly substitutes all in caps because that is an issue for us and you can go to the next slide i'm sorry that the um reading specialist from clark is not still with us after presenting her letter because um i think the conversation that if i i've had most with dr gurley this week has been about substitutes and what can we do about substitutes you've heard transportation and the issues they've got with bus drivers i could just about say ditto for substitutes being a substitute is a hard job people think oh you just go sit with the students for the day no no no we don't need babysitters we need substitute teachers to keep instruction going when the teacher is not there so it can be a difficult job
140so what have we been doing to try to work with this we have been compensating teachers who are needing to fill in during the day if there's not enough subs in the building we are looking at they have looked at the requirements to be a sub and are changing those some so it will be easier for uh substitutes to become substitutes in the past we have required at least 60 hours of college work we're reducing that so that we can get some people who would be great subs that just have not met that mark yet we are looking at hiring i'm not going to say a number because if we don't know what the number will be permanent subs to have so that people are hired as a permanent sub so you all have one
141ready person there in the building i think dr gurley and i both have worked in divisions where that has been done that won't solve the problem and that won't cover every position but we'll at least have somebody in the building and we're not planning on uh this being nine or ten positions when we talk about it we just don't know yet how many of these positions and we're going to talk more about it this week we are offering incentives for subs who work with us for at least 10 consecutive days and once a sub gets to day 11 and continuing on they get long term sub pay which is pretty much like first year teacher pay so that's a big jump for them when colleges and universities will let us we will compensate their student
142teachers and interns as long-term subs some colleges will not allow that to happen until a certain time in their placement and we're really still kind of early in the placement so they might let us do it more in november than they will in september and october but we are looking at that one thing that we talked about doing and happened today was uh some of the news stations will sometimes contact us and say what's going on in the school system this week what can we cover we gave them them the topic of substitutes to cover today there was a session at beaufort today to onboard some new subs and channel 29 came and when you get home look at the channel 29 website because there's a story about it and mexico clemons and his ear
143i haven't seen the clip yet but she was on television today talking about our need for subs so we're hoping about trying to do things like that we will get more attention we've asked our teachers within our building who are the people in your community who are some of your friends who would you know who would you recommend to be in there so it's not that we are not doing anything to get subs we're doing lots of different things and we will continue to do lots of different things some of what we were talking about with the the permanent subpositions or whatever i can't tell you whether that's just going to be the process while we're in pandemic or is that something we're going to do in years to come those decisions haven't been made
144we're still talking about them but we're trying to do what we can right now to make sure that all of our classes are are covered uh one thing i did this afternoon and shared briefly with dr gurley and and also with dr odie and we will certainly do more talking about it later look today at the amount of absences in each of our schools and how many subs we were able to get for different schools and something some questions that we're going to have why are some schools getting subs at a easier rate than others why are some schools having a much higher absentee rate than others so this was dated to start conversations with us today and we will do that because hopefully we can figure out why some of the schools are having
145the higher absentee rate which will reduce the need for more subs so lots of things that we are trying to do on the area of subs next slide miss leslie and so what are we trying to do for all the other positions that we've talked about you can see these and i i don't want to feel like i'm reading them to you but we're trying to post in lots of different places contacts with different colleges former employees those who kind of wanted to be away for a while are you ready to come back we're ready for you see if we can get them when i met with the new teachers i asked them for one thing that they needed to do for me was to give me recommendation for people that they knew who would
146be great employees for charlottesville city schools so tell me who you would want to work with and we'll see what we can do um needy i mentioned that and then just trying to support many of our student teachers to grow our own because if our student teachers and interns are happy during their work with us then they're more likely to want to stay with us later so try to get in and see the student teachers see the great thing they're doing compliment them work with them so just a few of the things that we're looking at right now and then the next to the last slide i think it is uh our talent acquisition what do we really want to do to continue growing and to increase there's where we get the prior prioritizing of
147both retention and recruitment we've got to do both we've got to make sure that we are looking for a racially diverse workforce that really looks like our student body i know that is something that we look at every year at the percentages of our hires and the percentages of our workforce does it mirror our community does it mirror our school division looking at non-traditional ways no longer can we put an ad in the newspaper and expect to get quality candidates not that we won't get quality candidates there but that's just not where they're looking so we've got to look all the different places to try to get candidates and just work with others who are are have access to and are providing um different types of learning and to make sure that we're covering the
148cultural competency pieces that we need that is so important we don't we're not as interested just in somebody who has the skills to teach a content area as and someone who also has the skills to work within the cultural competency responsiveness that we know is so important and then just following our employees talents to see what they can do to help us in the different areas and to use their strengths to continue to grow them and to grow others and then the very last slide i was asked to provide some information about different trainings that our staff members have every year we have certain things that everybody's required to do and we do it now via canvas people are tired of hearing me do my presentation every year in bloodborne pathogens so we now do
149it on canvas um and then on the in the right column different positions require different professional learning so you can see some of the types of things that we're doing educamer is a system working with our data and then of course the social emotional work that we're doing different things that dr odie needs to do in her shop with curriculum and instruction and then i provided links in there for what we did at the beginning of this school year for our new teacher orientation and um each of our schools does their own professional learning plan now we're doing more individualized professional learning than we used to we finally figured out that putting everybody in one big room to listen to one thing and expect them to get it might not be the best approach so
150we're doing more individualized by school and by position so this is a sample from one school's plan and then also uh charlottesville high school's plan for what they did on this most recent um pd day so that's if you've got any questions about all the things that we're trying to do to recruit and retain our staff talking about i have a question under the slide subsidy's big issue you mentioned altering the requirements are you looking at reducing the number of credit hours yes substances are required do you have a specific number in life we are looking at reducing that um i don't know if we have landed on an exact number i know when dr gurley and i talked most places have done 60 so the number 30 was flow to the number 48 so
151we're looking at reducing it we just haven't i don't think we've sat on the exact number yet okay so we've been low in that number so when will we know i meet with him tomorrow afternoon at three o'clock so i hope that we will have that answer tomorrow okay thank you i'm gonna start down with lashandra you have any questions comments i did um have a few questions and comments um the i had wanted to discuss um the retention because over the last year a lot of the well the cheap some of the people who left the division um have been with us for a long time and it just made me concerned about our retention efforts and um but when you look at the reports that we get with the consent agenda most of
152them just say personal reasons personal reading burden or reimbursement but when someone is leaving in their teaching in another division um or going somewhere else it it makes me pause because we have openings in our division and i i just wonder what our efforts are to like stop people from leaving um you know if we make an effort to move them around in the division more and um the the exit interview we're asking people like if we could have done something differently i guess i just wanted um us to really with the data and the numbers i understand people leave for a variety of reasons but i would like to discuss more the retention and the people who have left for particular reasons uh that we could maybe address better in the future um and
153so that that was what i wanted to talk about because on the report it'll say like someone has been with us for 15 years and they're leaving and they're not retiring to me that's a that's a red flag something that you know what could have been the issue and so when we get the reports it would be nice to break down just the data in a way that gets at it better because um that's all i just the retention part is the part that's getting to me because we can do all the recruitment but if people are leaving then that's the the part that i feel like we need more follow through with so is there when people are leaving what are our retention do we do a counter off like what do we try
154to do to keep you to stay to get you to stay in our division we have done some counter offers just as other divisions to counter offers when we're trying to recruit from them one thing about charlottesville we are smaller division so in certain position or certain areas there's not as much room for advancement as it would be in other schools i can think of two people right off that left us this summer for another school division and one of them it was uh um it was a promotion to the other school division into a position that we isn't in the same organization that we have so the person would not have had the same opportunity in charlottesville just because of the organizational structure the person chose to do that because they the the title
155meant to them meant a lot to them i know another one who has been was a teacher with us for quite a few years wanted to see what another school division was like to see whether she wanted to be an administrator in that school division or would return to us later so sometimes you know it's various reasons i tried to talk that one into saying she's it's not against charlottesville i just want to try something different so i haven't barred the door from any to keep them from going out but we do talk to them and to try to find out is there something we can do um and i've i've tried to talk to several and we well we had one who resigned this fall who changed the mind so sometimes what we do
156does work but some have just in their minds they're going to make that shift but we do want to try to do what we can to keep the great folks that we've hired because for every hiring decision over the lifetime of an employee it is a large financial investment and an employee and we want to make sure we're getting the return on that investment so but we can continue to do better in that regard and then the um the other question i wanted to ask was about our hr procedures um for when we're hiring because i i've spoken to a lot of people who and then we had one meeting where there were teachers from this effort my my brain isn't working from one of the schools and they were saying about the the hiring
157process and so i i would like to us to look at our how we deal with internal applicants because it's that's a lot of what i get when people are reaching out to me is how internal applicants are considered for positions and promotion our internal applicants are given at least as much regard as anyone else we are looking for the best person in a position but um we're also always going to look at our internal applicants if they're qualified for a position i can't always promise an internal applicant that they will be the one chosen but we will certainly give them as much attention as as anyone else that's all i have for now miss peru i too am concerned about retention it's one thing to bring someone here it's another thing to keep someone
158here and i think if you look at your written report on pages four and five where we're talking about next steps dr gurley has hit the nail on the head when he talks about culture of care and equity initiatives he spoke about that in the information that he recently posted on our website and the information that he sent to the community in a letter and i think we need to begin to look at our school divisions and see if the types of things that he's discussing in his um culture of care and equity are things that we are doing there may be some new initiatives in there there may be some things that we're doing that we could do better but when we look at our schools and we say that we want diversity equity
159and inclusion and the schools don't mirror that either with the instructional staff or the administrative staff then what message are we sending and just because we have a diverse staff does not mean that those individuals feel included and so if i'm hired and i'm a diversity hire because i'm african-american and i'm female but i don't feel included in anything that happens whether i'm here five years one year or five months that brings about a negative effect for that individual and at some point could bring back a negative response to this division no you can't stop people from talking but if i'm talking to five or eight or ten people that look like me that see the mass exodus of people that look like me what are we doing to say we want them here i
160am a product of public schools i am a product of a public school division in the commonwealth of virginia every school i attended with the exception of elementary school was an integrated school and the preponderance of my instructors looked like you dr baptist or look like mr cuomo there were african-american instructors in my school division and some of them i had and some of them i didn't things are different now than when i was in school and people feel that it is important to have someone that they can relate to and someone that looks like them and i'm not saying that we aren't doing anything but i hope people understand that we can always do better and it's very difficult to see the positivism of our school division on one side but then hear that
161people don't feel included and inclusion is more than sitting at the table inclusion is respect and if the instructors and other people in our division that look like me and mr wade and mr bryant do not feel included then they will leave and if they leave are they going to honestly say why they left and so maybe when people are leaving we need to make sure that the people that they're talking to are people that they may feel comfortable with in saying why they really are legal because if you have a mass exodus and everybody's saying personal reasons then what really is behind the personal reason and i think we need to um follow dr gurley's um gotta put my glasses i had a birthday dr girler um culture of care and equity initiative and
162we are a small division with 5 000 students cops and i'm sure we don't have 5 000 employees we call ourselves a family we say for every learner every day and the people that are employed by the division are learners too teachers learn every day cafeteria workers learn every day and we need to make sure that when we close our eyes at night we have done the best we can not only by our students but everyone that is in the ccs family because without the staff it doesn't matter how many students we have mr branch do you have any more questions more so um of concern um and this entails um retention and um not feeling included um this goes back for many years when i was in the system teaching and um many people
163then felt especially those employees who had worked for the school system for many years who had applied for certain positions and didn't get promoted or even granted an interview they just felt disenfranchised and when they saw others coming in the new ones coming in these were folks who had worked for many years for charleston city schools and i saw this up close and personal um this continues to go on even to this day there are individuals in our school system teachers we've been told to go back to school and get your credentials and get certified and once they've done that um then they apply for physicians and um are not hired or sometimes they've not even been granted an interview and um a lot of folks are questioning that and i don't have the answer
164because i i'm not in human resources but i think we need to take a look at that especially our employees have worked for a long time in this system to ensure um that they get a fair shake um i have a personal testimony i could i could attest to but i won't go into that tonight um in regards to that but um i really think that we need to look at that seriously getting them here is one thing retaining them is another but also looking at the folks we know that a lot of individuals are not going into education now everybody's pulling from the same food so we're gonna have to work on sort of growing our own but in doing so we have to if we encourage them to apply and they're never even
165given an opportunity to get an interview that's that's a concern and those concerns are in our community because a lot of times they will come and say well you know i applaud but i didn't get an interview so that is a real concern i think we need to take a look at that um as a school system in this award thank you draft um well i have some some of uh what's on my mind is similar to some things that have been set so i won't go i don't want to be real redundant here but uh just a couple of things uh one is you know the substitute situation and i'm really hearing the distress of school staff over this issue so you know i don't have the answers personally but i really think it's
166having such a negative impact on you know our ability to really function and operate the programs that we want to operate in the schools if everybody's being called out to have to you know fill in and so i hope that we are going to find out a little bit more about you know why is it worse in some schools than other schools and are there some things that we are just not picking up on yet that are contributing to this problem and i really do appreciate all the efforts that are being made to bring in more subs but you know the distress level uh over this issue is really um to me quite serious um as far as you know some of what others have said other board members have said um you know i
167i do think that maybe it's important to make sure that they're we are conducting either exit interviews or some kind of exit process in a way that people really do feel like they can say the truth and if they've had some negative experiences if they have felt a lack of support and if those kinds of factors are contributing that they really that we we really can find out and that they feel safe enough to express those things so i you know i hope that we can um make sure that we do that um and one other specific thing that i've been concerned about is uh the you know stress level and sort of mental health and wellness issues amongst our staff and the lack of services provided to our staff within our division to address
168those issues and you know i don't think it's good enough just to say well we can refer you out to the employee assistance program um you know being in the field i i do know a lot of times that that whole process can easily fall apart for a variety of reasons so you know i do think it's important that um we have some options within our division that teachers and other staff can access uh during the time that they're here if they need to and you know so that would be another thing that i would want to flag and i'm hoping that um well i you know i'm wondering how much that's related to people uh leaving so i'm just hoping that we can really focus in on some of those things i'm so happy
169dr gurley is here and he's such a good listener and i know that he's hearing all of this and uh yeah so i think just as others have said we really want to do everything to have a kind of environment in our school division that um you know people will feel like they want to be here and continue to be here and when they're having a hard time they will get the support that they need here yeah i just you know i agree with what everyone says i think a lot has to do with it economy i remember when we had we had to cap the list at unknown three or four hundred people because we had so many on it so i think right now it's a lot of reluctance because of covet and
170other things um and we just gotta plow through this as best we can i know i've seen the other side of it been on the board long enough that we said you know we just won't take any more applications we have enough on that list we we can't take anymore but a lot is going on now it's a lot of reluctance the economy is um hurting because people are not working because of child care because you know coveting things so we just got to just stop with the bus things we just got to plow through this and in about a couple of years we'll be talking about well there's too many people on the list so that's so you're here long enough you see things come back around so thank you well i've been here
171a few years and i haven't seen this change yet so i'm gonna hang on to your positivity and and hope that it does but um with that being said um thank you for your report first off and and i know uh thank you to everybody for your efforts and in in addressing these and receiving these concerns because these concerns are huge um i did not have time to to go back two or three years i know that we we're in a similar situation so i'll reach out to board members and and then maybe camera renee i'm not sure if you were really here dr baptist then but we did have a situation with substitutes and we had something built into our our budget you know as an incentive and and i don't know if this
172is similar to what is is being presented today um and i and i'm wondering if maybe that because we did build it into our our budget as an active way to try and um recruit and and get substitutes and and maintain them if it kind of got dropped with covet and with people not being in the building but i just want to make sure that that's something that we are continuing or if this is the same thing i guess is my question first off so the um plan that was worked out when dr king was still here and um and dr hubbard and and all of that it was worked out i believe it was dated and it was issued it was publicized it came to the board just before the coveted closure it wasn't
173long before that and so all of those measures to my knowledge have been have been resurrected as we've gone back to more you know normal operations this year so the um i know that payroll has already started to receive the um the requisitions were extra pay for people covering the periods and stuff now that right that doesn't address the the fatigue and things that were talked about and then the same goes so all of it i mean to my knowledge no none of what was presented and agreed to by the board has not been implemented yeah okay thank you um and i appreciate the fact that i mean it's it's concerning to me you know i understand that that different buildings have different needs i mean the elementary schools are smaller walkers bigger you know
174we're hearing um you know concerns being shared and coming from walker right now not that other buildings don't have something maybe similar on a smaller scale so i appreciate the fact that you're looking and having this discussion about you know why something might be happening at one school or why there might be an increased absentee rate at a school or why one school might be able to obtain subs a little bit easier than others you know so i know that we had talked a few years ago about incentives you know to try and decrease absenteeism but now with kovid like if you're not feeling well please don't come in the building so i'm sure you know there's there's part of that and so that's that's another piece that we have to to balance um you
175know and then then as a board um or as a single board member i'll speak for myself i mean i i am concerned and i know that that the admin team the principals you know the building leadership they're doing the best they can to to fill the needs of open positions in each building and you know i've heard that you know people who who thought they were going to be um a classroom teacher might be needed in a different role or vice versa and you know and that's part of i guess being an educator and and i understand that but that's also hard and i guess i i have a concern about what's happening to the kids and not that everybody else doesn't but you know if you pull somebody from one say they're a
176specialist the reading specialists say and and they're being asked to do something completely different then how do we ensure um that the kids are really getting the reading intervention and i know what's happening i mean this is just more of a conversation and it's it's a it's a big concern i think that we all have and and i think it's not unique probably to charlottesville city schools and and that we're having to do this but i feel like we need to acknowledge it and and let you know staff know [Music] i don't know if we have answers i know that as a board and as a as a board member i want to support dr gurley um and and give him some time like tomorrow um you know to go out and take a look
177at this and and for you to support your admin and admin to support principles and and but you know and ultimately that our kids are getting what they need and i do have concerns you know i want our kids to read i want to make sure kids who have ieps are getting those services that they need and i need to voice that i'm a little worried about that and and i again i don't have answers and i'm not really directing anybody to do anything but i think hopefully we can all come together and and be good listeners and and try and figure out um and prioritize you know and and again it's not to add more onto anybody's plate you know and we as a community at this point in time with staffing and everything
178else that's going on might need to accept the fact that maybe we need to do a little bit less in certain areas so that we can free people up to really get the kids what they do need and so that it doesn't feel like it's more and more so i hope i mean that's what i want um because i am concerned about the staff that we do have um i'm concerned about all of us because we're all working really really hard but when it comes down to it the hours i mean most if not all have been teachers and and you know i don't want um to lose sight of what that feels like to be in the classroom and the amount of time that people put into prepping for classes and and then also
179the added responsibilities of ensuring that everybody's safe and healthy you know and ultimately that's what we all want but again um to be supportive of that and really to step back and prioritize and get the kids what they need but to do it in a way that everybody understands you know again we talk about equity and sometimes equity means some people get less so that everybody gets what they need and so i just want to acknowledge that again the concerns i want the people at any building you know if you're unhappy to know that we are hearing you and i trust that that you and your team you know are looking at that and and i know you are hearing this and and everybody else here i take to heart everything has been said and
180every school division is people everybody is people and and i get it that we all have different strengths we've got different weaknesses we've got different levels of comfort in different things i just ask as the person who's currently heading up hr that when you're hearing these concerns as board members please encourage them to come back to us some of the things that you've just mentioned i pretty much know the situation which i'm not going to to get into but there are times that we've got to make decisions that are not going to make people happy and i would be glad to listen and i would be glad to try to explain but you know when we have positions that have a group of children sitting there we're going to have to put somebody in front
181of children and we may not for a time period have some of the other ancillary but very important services we do offer every employee an exit interview can we do a better job with that absolutely and we will do our best and if there are people who don't want to come to talk to me i will find somebody else for them to talk to we want people to be comfortable we want to retain and i want to listen so i hear everything i've taken a lot of notes of what you said um sometimes it's just hard and during the pandemic yeah the stress level has been up to here with a lot of people and so you know we've tried to work with them we i don't want it to just be go ceap because
182i don't think that is the thing i can tell you from looking at health claims not of people's individually but of claims we have quite a few staff who are working with individual help and we want to do as much as we can and we are there first i won't say we're there first but one of the reasons we're there is for the children so all the social emotional workers that we've hired i think are working more toward the children but they are still there that can maybe be a first stop to help with some of our adults we've got lots of challenges right now i said during the covid report we might be turning the corner but it's not over so the stress level that we're all under because of covet is not over
183and do i think the stress level is going to be gone when they finally tell us the pandemic is over no i don't so we've got to keep working together but we've got together is the one of the key parts of that if people are unhappy got to realize a lot of things that the division you as the board have allowed to happen to help our employees and just like when any of us have our own personal problems we have to plod through it and get to the other side and that's what we're trying to do right now but if we don't know the individual issues that people are having i can't help them absolutely i mean i agree with you 100 i think you know here we are at this this juncture um you
184know new superintendent who um i'm very pleased we're all very pleased with you know is is a great listener and then i think as a division and here we are with a lot of things going on you know to be able to to sit and listen and receive information and as you said dr baptist and and i'm sure you know dr gurley will be in a situation where you know sometimes we have to make decisions that aren't aren't the best but to listen to understand to have the conversation to understand why things are being done i think can decrease a lot of you know the angst and it just helps if you understand why something's done it just makes it a lot easier and and we all know that and i appreciate you and everybody
185and what you're doing but i also want to make sure that that we as a division and i know we are you know we're hearing people and and we are here we want to help yeah we really do um so thank you for that i did have one final question though and i'm sorry i forgot about covet and it was nursing so with that pcr program or with a rapid testing program you said we wanted to hire a nurse for that but we're still visiting that's for the the vista part of it is where we will get the coordinator and the nurse because even though um molecular necks will do the pool testing it's still in case we need an assistant not to that we were still pulling on all of our nurses it would
186be somebody to help molecular next and a coordinator to help coordinate are we going to jacksonville this week to pool test second graders or we you know what are we doing so it's not to take away what our nurses are doing it would be an assistance for the vista not for the diagnostic our nurses will be working with diagnosis but what if we don't get somebody for that position i mean yes i'll be helping okay all right okay i think that was it for my questions thank you so much i appreciate you and everybody all right okay we um are now moving on to our second opportunity for um comments from members of the community we have a couple people here in the media center and mr como you can check and see if there's
187anybody online at this point who would like to make comments uh sure thing madam chair right now i would ask anybody who's in the attendees gallery if they wish to make a public comment simply raise their hand by using the raise hand icon tool or to post a message in chat and i'll be glad to set you up for your three minutes of public comment okay we do have a hand raised the name is this uh listed as the sean johnson and so i will be sending you to sean to be able to unmute it this time for your three minutes of public comment hello mr johnson welcome hey can everyone hear me yes sir all righty good um well i first want to start off by uh congratulating dr gurley for his new position
188as superintendent very excited to have him on board as a student and i've talked a lot of teachers and they're very excited to have uh dr gurley um i wanted to say first off i'm kind of happy that i joined this meeting today because a lot of what i wanted to talk about is what you guys have been talking about the past uh 10 minutes and um that's you know retaining staff and why you know staff are like leaving or like you know unhappy um and i've sat down over the past uh we've been to school about a month now and i've talked to staff members and i've talked to students on you know what's really been troubling them and a lot of things you know you guys have touched on um but you know
189there's a lot of deeper other deep reasoning reasons as well sorry i can't talk um and one of those reasons is like for staff they really don't feel appreciated or heard within the board or hr you know we have staff members that are covering for other staff members and i'm not talking about you know just teachers covering teachers we have instructional coaches and other teachers covering for uh nurses uh they've been the nurse for some schools for months now uh waiting for new nurses to be hired we have um teachers who are subbing for classes each and every day giving up their um planning period and um you know i know that's you know like uh i can't remember who said it but i know someone had said you know that's their job as an
190educator to be able to be flexible in that way but you know when you have to do it so consistently to where you're giving up your period almost every day you know to sub for a new class you know it takes a lot of you know it takes a lot of a lot out of you and a lot of teachers are frustrated with that we have i know personal staff members who uh work in the office and who you know are teachers who aren't eating lunch we have staff members who are coming to school not eating breakfast not eating not being able to have their lunch at school and then coming home and they have to figure out whether they want to take a nap from how tired they are or eat lunch or eat
191their dinner because it's the first thing they're going to eat today um so that's one thing that's making a lot of people upset you know appreciation-wise and just uh being heard and then you know transparency we have a lot of you know i've spoke with some staff members they're very upset with the transparency from hr and um the board you know we're having a lot of and this is coming for me personally but i've heard from staff members that we have backstage or behind the scenes decisions being made without the consult of families or staff members that are um making them not trust um hr and school board so i know my time's running out but those are just some of the things i've heard personally uh for some of the reasons why staff members
192are leaving or have been frustrated thank you sir anybody else mr come on um at this time i do not see any other hands up and i do not see any chat indicators for public comment give it a couple more seconds all right thank you um we're going to move on to board member comments and i will start down with mr wade no comments okay dr craft um just a couple of things um first of all i do again want to welcome dr gurley and uh um just express my appreciation for your being here joining us hearing everything that you're hearing you know it's it's a hard thing to step in and then all of a sudden here there's this flood of uh issues and uh you know i just really appreciate having you here
193and being part of the team to work with you look forward to that um i would like to get uh some kind of an update at a at a board meeting coming up on the more specific activities of the social emotional mental health positions that we hired i really would like to understand more about what they're doing who's doing what so if we could do that at some point at a board meeting i would really appreciate it and i guess just uh you know hearing the various things that are going on tonight the topics that we talked about it just you know really brings home how interdependent we all are on each other we are really a village and you know we rely heavily on each other and when parts of the village aren't there
194the rest of the village has trouble doing the doing the work and um you know covering for each other and all of that so it's a it's a real sense of gosh we're all in in this together and it's these times are not easy um but i'm actually grateful to be part of this division and grateful to be part of this board uh as opposed to a lot of other school boards that are on like saturday night live skits uh i don't think we're there and uh you know i think we really uh we all want to do better we want to be we want to do our best as board members if there are things that you know you feel we could be doing differently or we could be doing better i think i
195know i want to hear about it um so um i guess that's really it we're all on the boat together and uh we're all working really hard to all stay afloat and do what you what needs to be done mr bryant first i would like to thank all the community members [Music] who wrote to the school board and their support of reconfiguration and that report is now in the hands of our city council and so i want to give a shout out to city council for agreeing to move forward on reconfiguration also um i'd like to thank mr gala i know it's tough with the buses and transporting students here to info thank you and your cat staff members or bus drivers and staff members follow your hard work and for the update tonight we
196are all in this together and i know over time that that situation will improve so thank you mr garland and the bus drivers and your staff members also um i want to thank um chris myers and for galvanizing the parents um in support of reconfiguration and and i think i did sign that um petition so i know my signatures on that so thank you chris myers and all the parents who wrote us and the city council in support of reconfiguration and finally um welcome aboard dr girl charlesville city schools i'm sure you've been off and running but we are very pleased that you are here and we are excited about the good work that you are going to be doing for our teachers staff and our children of the charleston city school congratulations and welcome
197aboard thank you his career every learner every day everyone tonight's board meeting was the epitome of that it is going to take everyone every day and each day we learn something i think with the pandemic what has possibly been the most difficult is no one knew being in education if you ever had a question you asked someone and they generally knew but if they didn't know they said well i'll ask somebody well we've never been through a pandemic and things change on a day-to-day basis ms powell knows that because what the mitigation strategies were when we started may not be the same mitigation strategies now mr garland knows that as well so does dr baptist and all of the members of her team and we get up every day and we put our best foot
198forward to do our best i had the honor and privilege of introducing dr gurley the other day at our public education meeting he came to the pef meeting i hope i did in prague when i introduced him and i only hope that all of us that are a part of this family continue to have the enthusiasm and i don't know energy that dr gurley has he has taken on a position with a lot of challenges but a lot of positivity and so each of us will rise to the occasion to help him with the challenges and to continue to move our division forward i'd like to thank everyone in the ccs family whether you are a student a parent custodial worker a food service employee an ia a nurse a teacher or any level of
199administration whether it's building level or central office level because i know that each of you are doing your best with what you know and what you have at that time and please know that i and the other board members are here to support you dr baptist knows if i hear anything she's gonna know because that's how i am i don't want anyone to ever be in a gotcha mode and not know and we are here to support you in any way that we can and i want to personally thank all of you for all that you have done and all that you have continued to do to make the charlottesville city school the best thank you rashad uh yes i just wanted to take a minute and um my thoughts i didn't articulate them very
200well i was thinking in hindsight and so i do want a second to make sure i'm um doing justice to people who reached out to me um i work in hr and i know everyone on the board is tired of hearing that but there's there's what it's supposed to happen and there's what actually happens and so in a perfect world we could all say like i have this problem i have this issue but that's not how it works um you know there are a variety of reasons people don't feel comfortable when they have a problem in the workplace or they don't feel hurt or seen and so when people to me because they're um they don't know what else to do and they don't feel comfortable coming forward it you know it's frustrating and saddening
201and um you know in the year 2021 it i sometimes it feels like the twilight zone but we have to figure out a system because a lot of people don't feel comfortable coming forward they don't feel comfortable saying things and it's all kind of tied together because we talked about internal hiring people worry if i complain will i get a promotion will i be considered and we just have to figure out a way so that people can feel comfortable there are a few brave souls teachers and administrators who are comfortable coming and speaking but a majority of people aren't and for us to do our equity and diversity work we have to address it because it's been stewing for a long time um and so yeah i just wanted to make sure that i was
202articulating you know when people come to me that they really are afraid or they feel intimidated and so i just hope we can we have to find a way to do that better um and that was all and like everyone else i am excited um for dr gurley to be here and join us and look forward to supporting him in any way i can thank you thank you everybody for your comments um i think i've said a lot of what i needed to say already but i did have a couple of um announcements um wanted to make sure and it's gone out on on facebook and i think maybe twitter too that we have a couple of wonderful events coming up um family engagement event october 30th they're calling it their fall festival that will
203be here at chs from 11 to 1 and there they will also be offering pfizer vaccines at that event so another opportunity for vaccinations um and then another response to essential needs event which has been very successful i believe there were three of them last year and that will be november 20th from 11 to 1 here at charlottesville high school as well i did notice um and we talked a little bit about this as far as what is october and there's a lot of things that and disciplines that are recognized during october and it's kind of hard to keep up with with all of them um but i did notice a couple people say that i think last friday was national teacher recognition day and i just hope that you know every day we recognize
204and acknowledge all of the teachers and every single staff member and wish we could do more but you are appreciated um every single day and then also i'm gonna put in a plug because prior years um we've had a resolution and and i just didn't see it come up at the at the state level but october is also dyslexia awareness month so i'm always going to highlight that it's important to me and important for all of our students and the community and bullying prevention month so a lot of good things everybody's appreciated and um what else i think that's it um i did i will i will save my next comment for at the end and now we are moving on to superintendent's comments so dr gurley thank you so i did want to say
205good evening to everyone and i do thank you all for being here this moment is very important to me and so just as i give my um just my final remarks i do know that the end of the marking period is coming up and i just encourage our students to finish strong and our and our parents if you need some assistance with helping our kiddos get to the finish line um just let us know um you did mention october and so october is also the national elementary school principals association and secondary principals association recognizes this month um as uh principal's month and so i do thank our principals for the all their hard work um with regards to the teachers who spoke today and we have heard the concerns and and i do think dr
206baptist she's been just very responsive to a lot of my requests already and so we've already started looking at some of the data with regards to the absenteeism of teachers and how readily we can get substitutes and so we're going to work on that and we are we're going to meet we'll have some time tomorrow to meet but we're going to also meet on monday as a senior staff to talk about substitute qualifications um for me my recommendation is going to be just love children and so we can take all the other stuff off and just put love children i think we might be able to get a bigger pool so we're gonna we're gonna work through those qualifications and i just want to thank um um dr hastings and mr mourinho and miss thompson
207i did get a chance to get out to clark and walker and johnson and there are a lot of amazing things happening there and the energy there is just electrifying and so i just had a great opportunity to meet with the students and i think along that lines i just want to after hearing what the comments been said today i just want to say that you know as i'm walking through the buildings i'm i'm looking at myself in these students and i'm wondering when is the next time they're going to see a teacher who looks like me and so it is i just want people to know that it is equally important for me to ensure that we are trying to seek and retain um highly qualified teachers of color um because as i'm walking
208through the building i do see an absence of people who look like me and i do think that all children whether you're white blue green brown or whatever color you should have an opportunity to experience a doctor girl when i was mr girl in the classroom um because there's a lot to learn from just the diversity of thought and so we'll work through those things and and i know that there's some things happening happening already and and the professional development pieces and we're just going to get smarter together and and people will and people will see that and we have the tag meeting which is the superintendent's advisory on monday and i'm really looking forward to that because what i heard tonight is as people who um who don't typically feel like they have a
209voice and they're not heard and i believe this will give them a space to be heard and so what i hope they hear on on monday is that you can ask your questions without a fear of being retaliated against and that someone's always going to be in your corner to support you and so i believe monday will be the beginning um i want it to be the beginning of a new era as they say um where people just you know you don't have to run um you don't have to run from you can run two and so we will be that place that you can run to and the last thing i thought about is that i received a card um prior to getting here um miss backer handed me a sack of cards and
210one was from a teacher in high school um who sent me this really sweet card and it literally left me in tears all the way home and so he asked me to give him a call and we had not spoken in over 30 years and in about 20 years i should say i'm sorry over 20 years well over 20 years and so what if this moment and the things that i heard people say teachers have a lot on their plate and we are all in it together and the bottom line is what is the last thing that he told me on that that call he said remember when you were running cross country all i just i wasn't good at it i'm gonna say but he said just remember to keep putting one foot in
211front of the other and we'll get to the finish line and i'll be waiting right there for you and i do believe as long as we continue to move forward together we're going to achieve our final goal which is the success for our community and for the students and so we're going to be better together and i'm looking forward to the work the hard work which is doors opening for children so thank you thank you dr gurley thank you so much um [Music] all right work work session wrap up talked about this such as looking at the exit interviews overall hiring process internal candidates services for mental health for our staff so those are all things that i'll be working on and then the report for the sel positions thank you um okay and upcoming
212meetings our next meeting is november 4th and that will be at five o'clock here at the charlottesville city school board media center um a reminder that two days prior to that is election day so everybody go out and vote there's early voting that's happening and the two saturdays prior to that they're that you can go and vote on those saturdays so that's an option for students college students that might be able to make it back into town um on those days to vote and also just real quickly i wanted to just bring to everybody's attention that the 18th is the council work session now it was my understanding at this last meeting at city council they actually did take action to move forward and support the plan for us to continue with reconfiguration as standard
213in our resolution that we unanimously approved and at one point it was thought that it was going to go back to them on the 18th i don't believe it will but i do want to draw attention that that is a council work session so it's budget development so it would still be important if you can to tune into that please and you know to sign up for public comment if needed so just to continue to support um moving forward with reconfiguration i think it's important for us and the community if um and hopefully it is something that you support that you will continue to be a voice for that all right with that i will adjourn the meeting thank you everybody you