June 10, 2021 Charlottesville City School Board Meeting

001and so the webinar started people are joining in now and probably just give them a minute or so to get into the um attendance again if you are speaking make sure your microphone dot is green and i'll do my best to adjust your sound you should not need to constantly adjust yourself for audio and if anyone is streaming and watching the zoom video in front of them just maybe mute mute yourself so that the the feedback does not cause that echoey zoom echo that can sometimes be disruptive and it looks like we are live so i would say in the next 15 or 20 seconds we can get started and um we should be coming up on facebook shortly all right good afternoon everybody welcome to the charlottesville city school board meeting it is june

00210th and we are so happy to have everybody here so if you please join join me in a moment of silence [Music] thank you madam clerk will you take roll call please yes madam chair mr bryant present miss bryson morrisberger miss president here miss per year miss torres yes yes i think you forgot me i'm here i'm sorry thank you um i would like to entertain a motion as we do have a couple of members potentially joining us remotely i move that miss bryson morseberger be allowed to participate virtually due to personal reasons second i would like to make a friendly amendment to allow for myth courier to also rejoin us remotely and mr um johnson as well since he's our school board student rep all right so we'll just add make that all one

003motion that sounds good so you accept my yeah yes okay thank you madam clerk will you take roll or vote on that please yes mr bryant yes yes dr crash yes ms yes yes yes thank you next we'll move on to the approval of our agenda i move the approval of our agenda second and we will continue to have the clerk call for a vote on this since we do have some virtual members some madam clerk will you please take a vote our role on that yes madam chair mr bryant yes ms bryson yes mckeever yes miss per year dr kraft yes ms torres yes and mr wade yes thank you are we able to hear miss bryce and morrisberger okay okay okay or maybe lashandra if you could give us a thumbs up or

004a thumbs down i can hear you all can you hear me okay there's a hissing on my end but i can hear you um moving on to our first opportunity for comments from members of the community so we will have an opportunity here we do have some people joining us in the auditorium for our first in-person kind of board meeting so we appreciate those that are showing up lovely to see you behind your masks i can sense their smiles and thumbs up so thank you and then we will also look to see if we have people signed up so let's start with in person and please state your name and address and keep your comments to three minutes please yes my name is chris meyer 124 oakland court i'm a member of the administrative committee

005for the cces joint pto reopening fund and co-chair of the jacksonville elementary pto we are here tonight and i am here tonight to report for a final time on the collective effort from the ccs ptos to raise funds for virtual learning and reopening during the 2020-2021 academic year as you already know and were emailed we raised we raised over 165 000 to assist students families and teachers and schools the fund committed to equity and meeting the individual needs of every learner every day everyone by applying an equity formulation to the distribution of funds raised overall the fund expenditures are represented by three main categories teaching and learning materials during virtual learning family support and return to learn in person this week we published a final report to share how the money was spent and lessons

006learned from this experience and can be found on the website ccsptofund.org we have many people we want to say thank you again thank you for making this extraordinary effort happen including the more than 200 individuals who contributed to the funds every gift whether it was ten dollars or twenty five thousand dollars of course matter we want to acknowledge the substantial donations from local philanthropists local businesses and with the hutt foundation the grace d riggs foundation boyd and sipe plc tiger fuel sonia smith the bama works fund of dave dathews band and the smith family always am fund we want to thank the charlottesville area community foundation and cces staff some of them over here for their partnerships along with the ccs principals and leadership staff at each school who disburse the funds we know the

007philanthropic contributions play an important role in helping teachers students and families succeed we are grateful to those who chose to invest in public schools during this challenging year and hope this inspires the greater charlottesville community to continue investing in our city's future thank you thank you is there anybody else here in the auditorium that would like to come up and speak okay thank you we do have one person who has their hand raised online all right great mr come on go ahead yeah we'll attempt to chime them in and the last name is s-a-u-l and i will ask that they unmute this is the first time we're trying this so my advanced apologies if this is not a clear sound but let's see if can you hear me yes we can hear you thank you

008okay perfect good evening madam chair board members teachers students and community members each year we know attrition occurs but however i'm concerned that the gains we made and hiring a diverse staff two years ago when i started are dwindling rapidly so what do we do now what can be done to keep those highly qualified teachers that you chose to hire and recruit especially those teachers of color when a teacher shares concerns and seeks counsel on how to address issues the space should be welcoming safe and allow for brave conversations it is my hope and plea that the goal of the board division and school leadership is to welcome communication especially when concerning equity racism and collaboration should there be hoops that are necessary to be jumped over for months before there is a move to

009seek to understand and change if we as a division are not prepared to do the work towards real equity diversity and inclusion then we need to interrogate why we are given the privilege to hold the positions we do thank you for your time thank you we do have some other hands raised in the gallery for our attendees online i'm going to unmute the name is listed as winter broadhurst you should be able to unmute it this time hello can you hear me yes yes thank you so much for hosting this board meeting and allowing for public comment my name is winter broadhurst and i'm the volunteer coordinator at jabba and i manage the friends and schools helping mentor program where we match volunteer mentors with public school students one-on-one or in small groups to assist

010them academically and emotionally of course over the last year we moved to an entirely virtual format using zoom and working with parents directly our mentors are eager to serve students again in the fall and we are hopeful to be able to resume an in-person format as well as offer a virtual option we are hoping for guidance from the school board on if volunteers will be able to return to the schools for the fall semester of school year 2021-2022 do you have any insight at all at this time if volunteers will be able to return on-site thank you for your time thank you um next up in the attendee gallery the name listed is jordan johnson jordan you should be able to unmute and you have three minutes thank you mr cuomo good evening school board

011members my name is jordan johnson i'm the city schoolyard garden program director with cultivate charlottesville i wanted to provide the board with an update to programming that cultivate and community partners have taken on during the past 16 months the copen 19 pandemic at the beginning of the pandemic we heard from community members the importance of school meals to address food insecurity and the concern about meal access during breaks in the school service a group of community partners including cultivate pb j fund frontline foods charlottesville community cares and others came together to cover school meal or student meal distribution during school breaks when ccs was not serving meals over the past year we've partnered with six local restaurants sourced 17 000 fresh meals for students while school wasn't in session cultivate food justice network partners pulled

012together to provide a bridge for service during the challenging time investing over a hundred thousand dollars in the distribution of these meals now cultivating our partner organizations need to return to the work and programming and our organizational funds and time will need to be redirected back to our programs and we will not be able to continue the school break meal distribution we're excited that federal support for all meals from school nutrition programs has been extended through next year it continues to be critically important to utilize school meals to build equity for our students facing food insecurity the school district has been so innovative in building a completely new system to respond to community need and ensure food access when school was in session over the past year they've done a great job at altering school

013meals from in-school to community distribution and with this well-established system of meal distribution throughout the community and the ability to be reimbursed for this work we would like to support ccs in being the bridge for student equity during school breaks we have been in contact with carlton jones to express the importance of continuing to serve students throughout school breaks and he's looking into the capacity we're passing along all our documents and information on how we went about this process during the breaks and wanted to update the board on this as well please reach out to cultivate with any questions or concerns about how we can best ensure that students don't go without food during school breaks thank you for your time and have a great night thank you madam chair at this time there are

014no additional attendees with their hands raised i know we typically give 20 to 30 seconds for last calls and i know you always mention there's another time to speak at the end of the meeting yes we'll go ahead and give a few seconds here and see if anybody else signs up or jumps in the room thank you mr como i think we will move on and and yes there is another opportunity towards the end of the meeting for community member comment just noticing now that we do have an opportunity or we have on the agenda comments from the board so um i don't know if anybody feels the need to make a comment right now we do have an opportunity towards the end of the meeting if everybody is in agreement to keep moving thank

015you all right um so i will now entertain a motion for the adoption of the consent agenda please so move second any questions or discussion i have one quick question on the consent agenda of the personnel recommendations were there any when i open it it says there it's not approved for review yet that means you are not logged in yeah you're in the public one maybe it's under the so you need to go to you need to log in to look at the personnel recommendations so there's a separate school board esb link okay i thought i was on it thank you any other questions concerns or discussion okay madam clerk please madam chair mr bryant yes ms bryson morrisberger yes dr craft yes miss mckeever yes miss purrier miss torres yes and mr wade yes

016thank you all right we're moving on to items for discussion um and our first item is the local plan for the gifted and annual review mr henderson madam chair members of the board tonight dr odie will present the plan for virtual learning next year grades 3 through 12. thank you mr henderson actually we're going to start with our gifted presentation so good after good evening i'm madam chair board members and mr henderson uh tonight we would like to share with you and recommend that the board take action on the local plan for the gifted and annual review for 2021 20 bev catlin coordinator of instruction will present these documents to you at this time miss catelyn thank you dr hoody i'm madam chair members of the board and mr henderson again it's so nice to

017have you there mr henderson thank you this evening i bring to you two items the annual review of the gifted program and a revised local plan for the education of the gifted but i'd like to begin by thanking members of the gifted advisory committee and dr craft for our school board representative for being for their ongoing support as we completed both projects their comments and questions had questions had us pause and reflect on our work as we strive to best serve our learners the next slide for the annual review we delineated four areas of focus identified accomplishments in each area and set goals for the next school year now two slides ahead maybe thank you that's perfect our accomplishments this year's have to start with the hard work of our teachers whether working virtually or

018in person the gifted resource teachers used a variety of formats to offer students rigorous learning opportunities this included our very popular enrichment boards that were enjoyed by all students in addition gifted resource teachers work closely with classroom teachers to collaboratively plan rigorous learning experiences that enrich student learning i'm also happy to share that by the end of this summer a cohort of 17 teachers will have earned their endorsement in gifted education a huge thank you goes to these teachers who completed these requirements during the pandemic and to the university of virginia and the school division for supporting their efforts finally in spring 2021 another accomplishment was the division implemented an inclusive gifted identification process that supports our pathways for gifted education through talent development we considered over 2 600 students in third grade and beyond

019for gifted identification we referred all students who were enrolled before march 1st attended prior nationally norm test data as a result of our process 86 percent of charles city school students in grades three through 11 are now identified gifted looking at the data by subgroups we find that african americans make up 36 percent of the student population in grades three through 11 and they make up 33 percent of those identified as gifted asian students make up seven percent of the population and eight percent of those identified as gifted for students identified as as hispanic those figures are 14 and 13 respectively caucasians make up 42 of the student population in those grades and they make up 46 of those identified as gifted for our first year of implementation and doing this in a year of

020a pandemic an inclusive identification process has has had us make great strides in having an equitable representation of students identified as gifted our goals for next year will have us continuing to classroom teachers with professional learning around the principles of differentiation through co-planning and co-teaching we also will implement our pathways for gifted services at beaufort school there we will respond to the needs of middle school students as we report support the developing of their talents and finally staff and the gifted advisory committee will use multiple approaches to gather feedback on gifted services with this new model we want to hear from teachers from students and from parents that that data will help us acknowledge our strength areas for improvement and set goals for the future next slide another major accomplishment this year was revising charlottesville's

021local plan for the education of the gifted so that it reflects the changes we have made in our gifted services and our identification process state regulations require every school division to have a plan that follows a very specific format for two years the gifted program staff and the advisory gifted advisory committee worked diligently on updating this plan step by step there are revisions throughout so i wanted to highlight some of those changes for you this evening next slide first our definition of giftedness was changed to match our pathways in gifted education it now reads charlottesville city schools views giftedness through a lens of talent development we believe all students are talented and we cultivate their potential through a collaborative high quality differentiated instruction we recognize that the need of students to think and perform at

022high levels is important for cultivating their potential for advanced learning from grades three and beyond we identify students with aptitudes in english and mathematics during the revision process we set new goals and objectives for each of the six state mandated areas and i'd like to share this with you next for identification sure our identification process continues to focus on developing talents in a diverse group of students for delivery of services we will work with classroom teachers to provide students with appropriately challenging educational opportunities in the curriculum and instruction area our focus is differentiation whether it is differentiated curriculum differentiated instructional strategies or differentiated resources for students and teachers next slide for professional development we will help all staff members at the school grow in their knowledge and skills in developing the talents of all learners

023for equitable representation of students staff will analyze qualitative and quantitative data to be sure we are supporting a diverse group of students and the goals for parent and computer community involvement asked us to continue educating the community on talent development as a framework for gifted education next slide the revised local plan supports the division's pathways for gifted education through our talent development framework i'm happy to answer any questions that you may have thank you very much the only request i have mine could you send the data that you as far as the breakdown of the kids that were identified please absolutely absolutely thank you i have a question any other questions from board members yeah that was a question i wanted to ask but she's going to send me that yeah i have a question

024um when you were saying 86 percent of the students um that applied um in grades three through 11 were referred or identified i'm sorry is that can you break that down when you um send the data or if you can now is that was that um what how did it break down along like age or grade uh just trying to see where it falls the who are identified i can certainly give you that data by by grade levels yes okay thank you any other questions yeah um uh after you know we're still kind of working through the new program of the so far as any changes or suggestions just you know already that you would make um but at this point or you want to kind of wait to let it run usually three years

025you kind of get a trend type of thing but i'm just curious i think with this year it it certainly changed the flow and our gifted resource teachers were not able to go into classrooms and work directly with teachers and students they still did amazing work and provided those differentiated experience so i would say you know in some ways we we haven't had a three-year block of time and we we will just need more time the feedback we're getting is been very positive the classroom teachers have been very inviting to the gifted resource teachers the co-teaching has worked very very well across all of the elementary schools and through walker and so i think we are absolutely at a great start but i still think we're at a start and then next year we'll be

026moving that into beaufort and we're still in in the process of designing that with buford as to exactly how that would look i would like to ask dr craft how the um the advisory board is doing and what you see um what kind of discussions that you all have had um around the um we're talking right now not about the local plan but also about the local plan and this review so just generally what yeah i think i mean one of the things when i was sitting in the room is very helpful to me to understand that you know what the conversations revolved around and i was wondering what you you know how the meetings were and how robust the conversations were and you know i think that um as miss catlin said this year

027was so unusual you know and i think trying to just get to understand how it was working you know that was part of i think what was happening at least for the first part of the year um you know just how is it working in the virtual environment and um you know uh i i would say that you know one of the themes you know it's a very tough thing to do and i think one of the themes that probably will be discussed going forward when the kids go back is you know there are there are kids you know we're focusing on sort of bringing up lots more kids and a more diverse pool of kids and then there are those kids you know a small number of kids who are you know at sort

028of the whatever the gifted one two percent of the population and so you know what's happening also with those kids what's going to be happening going forward with those kids you know and how are they going to be how are their needs going to be served that's a small number and so i think our focus the focus has really been on implementing this new model and on the coordination of the gifted specialists with the classroom teachers and i think a lot of a lot of the conversation has just been about that you know what is it like how does it work you know are there any concerns with that but it's it's a it's a weird year you know it's just a weird year and i you know i think we're also going to need

029to talk about once the kids are back in person um you know how has this past year changed what we need may need to do going forward next year so i mean that's that's my i don't know if that's enough that's helpful thank you i also just want to say that my experience just as a mom of elementary school kids this year with respect to the push-in model was very positive for you know my kids and i just they always looked forward to that enrichment time when the student when the teacher came in virtually or now in person and so you know to make school more like that is actually the goal in my opinion so i just hope that we can keep replicating that and engaging our students where they are no matter where

030they are not necessarily you know the identifying them as gifted i know is required by the state but just meeting them where they are is with this enriching activity is was something that was really benefited all of my students so thank you any other questions i have one more question madam chair sure um i don't know if i've missed it somewhere but we're talking about just the identification part and a big thing um with the that new york times article was the outcomes and how children are you know in two different tiers and different in one school so we've identified 86 percent we've identified more diverse students what is the outcome what does that mean when kids go into middle school from elementary school are they um in more unleveled i believe that's what they're

031called classes what what is the outcome what what what is different now other than the identification as far as student trajectory or the classes that they're taking you know when they move up so many of those decisions are are made at the individual school level in terms of the courses they're offering and i know that many of the schools are moving to unlevel courses i guess i for me when i think about gifted education right now i actually think about two parts one is the services we offer and the other is the identification and as as the board knows we began this process by examining our services and coming up with a new model for how to serve students that had us moving into classrooms during that process with dr atkins support we went to

032the state and said what do we have to do about gifted identification what does the state require and we got some very clear direction from the state that we needed to to continue to identify for gifted and we were we could not identify everybody so then our task this last year was to say we're going to serve all students who are in the general education classroom when we as gifted resource teachers are going into those rooms who are those students who will be in that classroom and those would be the ones that we will be identifying as gifted and so that i can tell you has turned out our process this is the first year of using it looks like it has worked that we have done it we have identified the students who will

033be in the classroom when the gifted resource teachers are in there working with students so what does that mean again the students who are in the classroom when we are there they're not being pulled for an intervention or they're not in a another special classroom for all or part of their day we'll have those experiences with a gifted resource teacher how that will look at the middle school level i i am not exactly sure that's again part of what we are planning right now um how we are going to support because it i think it's going to be slightly different when we get to the secondary level than it is at the elementary level but that that's the planning that's going on i hope that answers your question it got me i'm a little closer

034to understanding but i'll think of some more follow-up thank you any other questions anybody and just a couple comments um i would love and i know i've part of the equity committee working on the dashboard and i've missed the last couple of meetings but i know i had put in a request and i hope that there's the potential or possibility for gifted identification and that to be included into the equity dashboard so that we can kind of track and see excuse me what's going on with that so i don't know if you had heard that or if you can pass that on that would be great and then also as far as meeting kids where they are and kids having the opportunity to be part of or exposed to some of these gifted opportunities just

035within the last three weeks i was speaking to my daughter who's graduated but she shared and i don't remember how the conversation came up but she was recollecting that she when she was at walker i think we were talking about different instructors that she happened to be [Music] in a room adjacent to a gifted instructor's classroom and that and she was not in that class but she had a lot of friends and and classmates who were and the teacher invited my daughter in when they had an author of a book that they were reading come to speak to the students and i had never heard her share this and so we're talking about a 19 year old reflecting back on when she was in fifth or sixth grade and she happened to be classmates with

036um mr wade's daughter and she remembered the teacher by name she remembered the author and she just lit up and and i mean that is a memory again and it was just here 10 years later she's able to share it and just vividly describe that and what that meant to her and i think that's what and i hope and i believe that that's what we as as a division you know that's what our goals are and as far as um offering these opportunities to all these kids whether they're part of that and again our model is changing and how we're doing that is changing but here that that teacher who is still with us um you know thought a little bit outside the box and and invited her in and probably some other students and

037and it really it means a lot to me and i know it meant and continues to mean a lot to my daughter so thank you to all of you teachers um who do that who who see the kids and invite them in and include them in these opportunities because you never know what kind of you know that experience and and what impact it might have on a student life lifelong so i just wanted to share that so thank you you know i think this is this example is perfect um you know in really explaining why we made the changes that we made and why we're doing it this way now you know that she had that opportunity now this was a teacher giving her the opportunity sort of out of the box but now those

038opportunities will be in the box and i think it's wonderful i love to hear i love hearing that story it makes me feel like we're really doing the right thing and if that teacher happens to be tuned in right now listening to the meeting we happen to jog by each other almost every morning so that's all i'll say is when i wave to you the next time well i think i would just add you know one of the um the compliments for our gifted resource teachers is they were asked the enrichment boards i've mentioned to you were just so popular this year with with the students during that asynchronous time and they were asked to create an enrichment board for the last day of school and they were like okay we can do that but

039i think that's just reaching out to all of the students with these critical and creative thinking activities that are really engaging and inspiring to them um so that's what we will continue to do i just want to add a comment um madam chair i'm hoping that i'm beth that i know this was an unusual year when you said it was 33 percent of african-american students that were identified i am hoping that um in the next two or three years we will continue to see that number grow among the black and brown children exactly yes and remember it was they have 36 percent of the students in that grade level and then they were 33 of the students who were identified gifted so it's only a three it's a three percent difference but significantly different than

040it was before okay so i'm hoping to see that grow even yeah as we continue to to use this this model that we adopted yeah so thanks to all the teachers for their great work under this unusual year when you send that data and if it's not too much work would you mind sending and i know it's comparing different numbers or whole groups the la the identification from prior years as far as the breakdown of absolutely i mean do you know what i mean let me see what i can pull from and understand what i just didn't say absolutely it will be significantly different thank you and i have one more i'm so sorry i have one more question and maybe it's for follow-up for our next check-in about this but i'd like us to

041think about how we measure outcomes of the success because we are identifying students and that number is going up but it can't just be the identification that goes up the outcome has to change because you know the highlights of the article were about how it's a two-tier system for african-american students or not students of color versus white students so the identification is great all of this is great but if the outcomes aren't changing then the system had we haven't addressed the issue so i would like us to think about how we're measuring outcomes whether it's numbers metrics student outcomes college attendance graduation rates untier classes we have to start measuring for an outcome to see how we're doing all right next madam chair if i could have a few moments sure absolutely um tonight is

042actually miss catlin's last time that she will be presenting the gifted local plan to all of you um miss catlin was the coordinator of of instruction that involved serving esl and their families yes esl students and their families gifted students and their families avid students and their families as well as the liaison of helping us through the class program over many many years so she wore many hats with confidence and she was very effective and efficient and not only will she be missed but her moment in the spotlight in my mind is the movement that we're taking right now to make gifted education more inclusive and her her hard work her work with her teachers will make a difference for our students so uh thank you bev thank you thank you for all you've done

043thank you maybe that's the bonus of doing a school board presentation in your last month before retirement thank you and is the board going to approve the local plan okay yes we are taking i will entertain yeah thank you i will entertain a motion on this please move for approval a second so then let me just clarify so that that motion is approved the local plan i just wanted to i'm sorry yes that's okay all right for the gifted an annual review 2021-2024 madam clerk expand of chair mr bryant yes ms bryson yes dr craft yes ms mckeever yes mr miss torres yes yes thank you thank you ms catlin thank you for all your work all right um next we will be discussing the 2021-2022 title one federal consolidated application mr henderson dr hoody

044are you going to present the local plan good evening again madam chair board members and mr henderson now we would like to share with you and recommend uh for approval that the board take action on the title one federal consolidated application we have with us tonight patrick farrell coordinator of intervention and supports who will present this information to you at this time mr farrell good evening madam chair mr henderson members of the board um each year we submit an application to the department of education for approval for not just actually title one but title one title two title three and title four programming and so um basically the allocations are have remained uh readily um pretty steady each year which we're very kind of fortunate and especially during the last year and we're anticipating the

045same for the upcoming year um the allocations will actually be released uh sometime in august or september for each of the programs um i'm ready to answer any questions if you have any yeah um just for the public if you could just just briefly say a title one is for this program title two is for that just show the public yeah title one programming is for student students at risk and so we primarily use that uh to address students and support school-wide programs for literacy and math and family engagement title ii programming is for supporting teacher performance and so we primarily use that for reducing class lives so we use that on those funds to add additional three teachers to our title schools and then title three is for english language learners uh ms catlin

046has worked with that program for many years and in title four is for academic enhancements and student supports and we primarily use that funds to support our positive school climate and our blood of our mental wellness programming for the closure i needed one i know it's too so i needed a refresher thank you you're welcome and this is an action item folks yes i will move that we approve the 2021-22 title one federal consolidated application second any discussion questions madam clerk yes madam chair mr bryant yes ms bryson morrisberger yes dr craft yes miss mckeever yes miss per year miss torres yes and mr wade yes thank you thank you very much thank you all right next we have um our return to learn virtual options 2021-2022 mr henderson i think doctor ro is going

047to present this now thank you good evening again tonight we would like to share with you our plan for fall reopening here in ccs several of our building administrators are accompanying me this evening for this presentation and i will introduce them momentarily next slide here you will see that we will give an overview of what i'll share tonight i'll start by discussing the 2021 2022 school opening then our administrators will come before you to share what our virtual options are that will be offered at their levels after that i'll come before you again to look at additional considerations for virtual instruction and finally we will share information about what successful virtual instruction looks like and talk about next steps next slide as was shared in the april first school board meeting we will follow the

048pre-covered in-person attendance model in 2021 2022 we will be in person five days a week for all grade levels following mandates as outlined in senate bill 1303 which states that virginia school divisions must offer in-person instruction five days a week we do need to ensure that we are meeting the 180 day and 990 hour requirement and that can be accomplished by having students come in person each day we will continue to follow governor and cdc guidelines and remain informed about updates throughout the year senate bill 1303 states that virginia schools may offer virtual instruction to some students so we have worked to develop what ccs virtual would look like our goal however is to have students return to in person learning in 2021 2022 next slide as a brief overview of what ccs virtual would

049look like we plan to utilize a current staff member to serve as the ccs virtual liaison this person would coordinate the program and ensure that appropriate training occurs for staff and communicate with the home schools of students in the program in addition to other tasks that may surface regarding the program cameras would be required to be on during ccs virtual instruction in 2021-2022 and we are planning to have ccs virtual offered at grades three through eight on an application basis we want to have strong teachers selected for these positions as well as have t interested families participate in an application process these applications will be reviewed by building principles to determine if the child qualifies for virtual instruction based on certain criteria we do have a link here to share a preview of what the

050application would look likely look like and if we could show that for instance and we'll just um if we can just scroll through it a little bit i'll just talk about a few of the things that are there there's identifying information questions about where the application um questions about where the child is in school this year what school they go to uh why the family is request requesting virtual etc we plan to post our finalized application on our website for interested families to complete this is still in draft version now at this time i invite our administrators summer thompson principal of johnson elementary school dr adam hastings principal of walker upper elementary school ceta de laurier and pam davis assistant principals at beaufort and dr eric irizarry principal of charlottesville high school in that order

051to come forward and share what ccs virtual would entail at their levels miss thompson all right good evening everybody madam chair members of the board mr henderson and everyone who is watching tonight uh thank you for allowing us the opportunity to present to you our proposed model for virtual learning at the element so first just a reminder that there is no virtual option for our pre-k through second graders um everything that i'm going to share tonight is only for our third at least from my perspective our third and fourth graders who will be attending uh virtually from charlottesville elementary schools so at this time we're planning on allocating one third grade teacher and one fourth grade teacher for all of our virtual children across the entire city um as far as who the teachers of

052those classes would be as dr odi said they would that would be application based and they would come from any school throughout the city so that means that if you are a johnson student who is applying for this program you would not necessarily have a johnson teacher um and and i want to re-emphasize just this idea that at the elementary level we are no longer having individual virtual schools within each school it's one large virtual program across the entire city our virtual students would come together from all of our elementary schools as part of this program but with that said we do understand the need for the maintenance of some sort of connection to their home school you guys know if you know if any of our kids have been a johnson baby currently pass

053or whatever they're always a johnson baby and i know that's how all of our elementary principals feel and so we've got some provisions that we'll put in place to make sure that our children who are participating virtually will still feel connected to their home school one of those would be just that they would continue to receive the all-school communication so they would know for example when our african-american heritage night would take place so that they could participate and then finally again so student teacher ratio we want to make sure that we're setting up our kids and our teachers for success so that 19 to 1 ratio that you're seeing is the lowest maximum student teacher ratio within all of our city schools next slide please leslie so our virtual students would have access to all

054the special programming that is available to our in-person students and that includes classes with specials teachers our gifted resource push in and i stim teacher and our school counselor and then the school counsel would also be available for small groups and then as needed for acute situations all of the support personnel referenced would come from across all of our city elementary schools that would be determined between building level principals division level admin as well as the content coordinators and to some extent would be based on the number of in-person sections at each school and then finally access to specialized resources for example a math specialist or a reading specialist that may be available to the extent that's practical next slide please lesson thank you so our elementary model uh virtually would operate the same hours

055as our in person will and at the elementary that's from eight o'clock to 2 30 um so for that's for our third and fourth graders um and so this next bullet is a change from how we have been doing virtual school so i want to be really clear about this new expectation because i want to make sure our virtual families know what they're signing up for for this program so the expectation for our virtual program this coming year is that students would be logged in all day for mostly synchronous instruction and that is because the vdoe is no longer allowing for long chunks of asynchronous time like we've been able to count in the past as instructional hours so any asynchronous time other than your typical lunch break your recess break that would sort of

056have to mirror what would be happening in an in-person classroom so for example um in an in-person classroom you might have two children who are not directly interacting with the teacher but they're over to the side working collaboratively on a project we would want to see the same thing in the virtual setting except they would be in a breakout room so that they would still be available to come back to the teacher if necessary or the teacher could call them back as necessary and then i also want to say too that it doesn't mean that every second of the day would involve screen time a student might be moved into a breakout room to read a self-selected text or to work on problems for their math workbook or something like that so it wouldn't all

057be screen time but they would still be expect be logged in so that they could have easy access to the teacher and the teacher could have easy access to them so again i share all of this because it is an increase in the amount of synchronous time and an increase in the amount potentially that kids will be engaged with a screen with a screen in order to maintain equity of opportunity our virtual students will have the same amount of time dedicated to each content area as our in-person children have and they will also be following the same pacing guide as our in-person children do so that if let's say our third graders are working on adding fractions with like denominators in in person then our virtual children would be doing the same thing at about

058the same time all right um so again uh we're going to continue with canvas whether we liked it or not we became very very facile with canvas this year we certainly don't want to lose that because there are a lot of benefits for that um both for in-person and virtual learners so that will be the platform for our virtual learners for next year and then finally and this is important for our families who are considering this virtual option to know the vdoe allows for students to begin the year virtually and it allows there's a provision that allows them to transfer back to in-person learning however the opposite is not true once they transfer out of virtual learning back to in person the expectation is that they will stay in in person and then likewise if

059they begin the year as an in-person student there will not be the option for them to transfer into that virtual program unless there was some potentially like extreme medical need that necessitated it um so in sum there are definitely some logistics that we are still going to need to work out as we go along the way but i am confident that our elementary schools can work together to have a really awesome virtual program for all of our virtual third and fourth graders and with that i'll turn it over to dr hastings thank you can i ask just before that why the choice was made for k2 not pre-k not having any virtual experience i'm going to let dr udi answer that it seems i mean i have my own thoughts what we find is that

060our youngest learners really benefit most from in-person instruction that foundational instruction when we think about teaching young young children how to read virtually their challenges virtually where that in-person instruction is the best and and i will say that we haven't experienced many interested families for uh in pers excuse me virtual instruction based on the survey that we did as a parent of a first grader who just did virtual learning for nine months i i i'm like you know it i understand the benefits of being in person and i recognize that if there are families who have third and fourth graders who want to go virtual there are no doubt families of k pre-k two who want like to go and just kind of seems arbitrary that third grade is there any again the foundational years

061pre-k through two are are those foundational years teaching children how to read teaching children basic foundational skills once they get to third grade um they're we're no longer teaching them to read their reading to learn and and so that's a different level as far as um where the child is in their educational journey but the reality is the vaccine isn't going to be available for any of those children that is that is correct that is correct it's available 12 through 12 and higher right now dr hastings i think is next i'm sorry let me just follow up a little bit i mean there will always be some exceptions and we'll take that for for when if an application comes in we'll review it but i think it's important for what we what we know is

062that we need to get our students reading by the end of second grade and what we do know about reading and math instruction is much more powerful and effective face to face not to say that there could be some students who do very well with that and we'll have to address that um listening to the parents and then monitoring them but um this is the direction that i took away from when we met and so but we can alter it um if we see numbers so please note that this is a flexible program and we're trying to address the needs of our community and also address what the governor is asking us to do and trying to balance that and making sure that importantly is that our students succeed so we will be flexible with

063the understanding that that preliminary survey that we sent out was was that was just very preliminary are we sending are we opening up the survey to everybody or are we just starting it with third grade families the survey i believe was open up to everybody and it's still ongoing and we're still collecting data and it changes every day and so um we keep monitoring that and that's going to kind of drive us drive how many teachers we have but right now we're looking at for example what ms thompson said is that we're looking for one third and one fourth that could change we might only need one so we're just here again being flexible this is new to everybody but what we know and what research is coming out what little research it is over

064this 16 months or so is that our 18 months is that face-to-face is a much more powerful platform in teaching students students but we know that some students have been successful in the virtual world so as i said we're going to put kids first and we're going to move in that direction thank you okay so um did you have a question dr hastings is next unless you haven't i did have one for um so um this is just for clarification so we said we're going to have one teacher designated for the third grade and fourth grade and we want to keep the ratio i think i saw it 19 to 1. so only 19 kids students will be eligible for this that's why we're going to look at have the application and review those applications

065to make sure because those slots i mean i don't know what the demand will be it could be pretty selective is that correct from what i understand based on the survey that those were the number of classes that we thought we probably would need but again i think i heard mr henderson say there may be some flexibility in that and again you know we really want to make sure that we are selecting the students that have a track record of of success in virtual learning and so there may be some that that it's really not the best fit for um and so i think looking at both of those combined we'll be able to make some good decisions make sense thank you i would also add that as because we are required to bring or

066to offer in-person instruction to all of our students and because we have in many of our schools sixty seventy percent of the families have already opted to send their children back uh we anticipate that we'll have a large number of students that will be ready to return next year and we need teachers in the classroom to teach all of those children any other questions before we move to dr hastings i guess i was just wondering about what would be the reasons for an application to be declined for virtual learning i think we need to as a division come up with some criteria for that um we the application as you saw is still sort of in progress and we haven't really discussed exactly what that's going to look like other than that schools will weigh

067in on that and again you know we have to look across the entire division if there are you know two applications from one school and 16 from another you know what i mean we just need to look at the look at it holistically and decide what do we really think is best for each individual child and also at the end of the presentation you'll see um information that the vdoes sent to us to school divisions about what successful virtual instruction looks like and so part of that you'll see is going to be attendance and so principles will look at how that child learned this year were they engaged did they attend did they complete their assignments on time turn them in and were they academically successful so we'll take into account all of those things

068as applications come in just i mean dr odie i i'm i it's just interesting because like honestly i don't if there was no pandemic i would expect all the kids to be back in school especially in elementary school so providing the option for virtual seems to me to be based on concerns around health rather than academics and i wonder if we have if that if i've just mistaken my in my thinking there because that's what i thought and that's why i'm confused i think because it seems like we're focusing more on the ability of the child to learn virtually rather than on like the factors related to the family's health and well-being absolutely absolutely that could certainly um play into why a family ops or or requests and applies to remain virtual and that is

069something that we would certainly consider and there's a one of the questions on the survey does ask why the family is is asking for virtual instruction and there's a a place for them to reply in the other section there does that answer your question i think so i'm sorry i didn't it's fine i just i'm again like with elementary kids though i i understand and recognize of the importance of being in cursing and so it would be kind of an extraordinary need it sounds like to kind of create these two classrooms and and fill these two classrooms the extraordinary need being though health as a main criteria i mean i think fifth through twelfth grade are gonna be very different i look forward to hearing what they have to say but that's just that's my

070perspective yeah i here again i think there will be some students that third and fourth graders that over there three or four years in elementary school were struggling academically or emotionally and socially and and then they went to the virtual platform and have shown just tremendous progress measured by what they've done in the past and a parent is asking the division can my child continue with virtual learning because it's he's showing progress he's emotionally socially doing better than what he's in the past then i think we need to look at that and figure out that's the best situation for that child is it going to be a large number probably not but i think we just need to take into consideration since we've moved from from a virtual platform going into a face-to-face um and

071we've only done been doing face-to-face for several months i think we need to at least for this coming year to be a little bit flexible but and i think if it's a medical issue then then our system has in place homebound instruction and that's already in place that we do virtual and homebound we also do face to face and homebound so we also have to take that in consideration too but i think these are for for children who have just shown significant progress and and why would we not give them a chance to continue in that same learning framework thank you dr hastings you're up i think madame uh madam chairperson members of the board superintendent henderson uh thank you very much what a pleasure it is to talk to you this evening about virtual

072instruction at walker and i bring you only one slide so when when we look at the elementary programs it's about coordination across schools at walker we are the division but we have a fair amount of coordination that still needs to take place in our building this year on march 8th we brought back just about 400 of our 659 wolverines came back in person what that meant was over 200 of our students stayed virtual we did an awesome job this year in virtual instruction i got to tell you and and really it's thanks to an awesome team max mourinho one of our assistant principals just absolutely did an amazing job leading our walker at home program this year but we have lessons to learn as ms thompson said we had a large part of our day

073that was asynchronous and so moving into a setup next year where our students will be online all day long is a change but we have learned some amazing lessons this past year in virtual instruction so as you heard from the elementary uh from the from the pre-k five excuse me pre-k4 approach we would be an application based uh enrollment system where students and families would select to come in person or select to be virtual and then what we have a challenge the challenges in front of us is how do we arrange an entire school day so you might think in our in our current setup we had electives two days a week whereas in a normal setup we have electives five days a week we have pe five days a week so trying to figure

074out those kind of experiences and make sure that we have an equitable allocation of time and resources for students both in the virtual environment and a personal environment is critical in our decision making so we look forward to a virtual program in which our students have access to all-day virtual instruction with extremely limited asynchronous instruction just as ms thompson said we think about a student reading a text or a student working in independent work but not a student taking 90 minutes to log back into a class later one challenge that we may have depending on enrollment is electives we staff elective classes at about 20 students in a class you can imagine let's say 24 students sign up for virtual instruction at walker next year if two of them want to do orchestra and 22

075of them want to do chorus it will be awfully hard to offer a two-person orchestra section however our electives team has been absolutely fantastic in their flexibility this year and looking at creative ways to provide instruction for students in fact mr brian i know you'll be happy to know we just we just did seven concerts including virtual and in-person students over the last two weeks and they were i'm telling you i was bawling in the back of the auditorium it was fantastic it was it was it was really amazing what we've focused on this year and what we intend to focus on next year is ensuring that our students in virtual instruction are a part of our school community this is a difficult decision for families to make and we want to make sure that

076families are still walker wolverines as they're in our instructional program and as i said we weren't perfect this year but we made tremendous strides in virtual instruction and i'm i'm just excited beyond belief about how we're going to navigate these two programs uh not the least of which to mention that when students stay home for virtual instruction it uses our capacity issues for in-person instruction so there are some unintended positive consequences to this kind of decision making any questions board members thank you very much thank you sir good evening madam board chair members buford virtual learning option we will include all subject areas of the program language arts math science social studies and history health and pe and electives next slide and we will include all of these virtual learners in our normal schedule we

077will build sections for these courses with the learners in the courses and they will be spread out amongst the teachers that teach that certain subject area they will be able to enjoy strive our intervention block as well and they will be in virtual sections and not hybrids so these sections would be all virtual learners versus in person and that is the model for buford i'm just here for backup really but if you could go back to the beaufort slide thank you um it's the same application process monday through friday normal schedule which is 9 8 15 8 30 to 3 15. so essentially it's the same look as what adam mentioned we would not offer we offer algebra one for um geometry for um some of our world languages um as a as the virtual

078option um but that would be parsed out through the application so that's really it any questions dr kraft maybe i i may have missed this because the sound is kind of funky um but how how is the virtual how are how is this being staffed within buford is it right yeah by subject teachers by subject will do both in person and virtual right on a certain schedule is that it right dr craft let me okay so teachers currently teach five out of seven classes and the schedule would be depending upon the enrollment of how many students would elect to be virtual we would create virtual sections and a teacher's schedule so they may have four in person and one virtual and they would then accommodate those students during that virtual section there would not be

079there it would not be a case where we would have some students on online and some sitting in the classroom so it would be a separate section and depending upon the electives and what they what students want to choose and if it's able to be done virtually then it would be limited to those electives so many of the teachers may be teaching virtually yes as well so we would have at least one teacher per subject area that would assume a virtual section of instruction for those students thank you so i just have one quick follow-up to that so you really in order to get your schedule and things together you really won't know um because i assume that teacher will still be limited to whatever that classroom teacher student ratio would be um so you

080may not know if that student is eligible until you get everything in and then able to see like how many students you know wanted virtual and if they could fit in this classroom you're going to have to make some decisions i assume yes and it is really based on enrollment we can say that we can offer at least one section per subject area in virtual within our master schedule for staff with exception of electives we have some electives that are singletons yes so it would be difficult so that's you know why we would have to really look at what students want in terms of electives and if we would be able to honor that or put them in an elective with multiple sections such as uh art so this is just this is for it

081could be for all of the the classes i think it you know parents may be questioning like is my son or daughter are they eligible and so just to be clear it's not someone who can say well they're a late riser and they don't like to get up early so you know that type of thing it's you're going to look at the past performances if over the past year if they didn't do well and participate and turn into assignments then you're going to say that they may not be a good candidate we want them in-house we want to be able to right to talk to them yes sir so the same contingencies that were mentioned earlier in terms of engagement and historical success yeah would hold sure thank you i had a question in regards

082to if a student is in either band orchestra course how will they choose to go virtual are they going to be able to participate in the class and classes planned at home playing solo i'm just trying to visualize how that would look so currently our band orchestra choir electives are being instructed in small groups two to three max of four in a kind of like a private lesson type of format so if there is a student in band or orchestra acquire that is electing to be virtual and has been approved to be in the virtual program then we would have to work with those teachers on a case-by-case basis to bring them into the instruction with that being said any student that is in our virtual program will also enjoy the extracurricular activities and be

083included into the school community just as all buford students are so participation in concerts participation in sports after school will still be open and available for those virtual learners one point i'd like to make if you remember a couple years ago we had quite a bit of discussion on electives at beaufort where many of our students were only getting one elective and we chose that at a middle school experience our kids need and develop their skills through through electives and um so we we made sure that every student at beaufort was getting two electives and so parents need to think clearly that their child is going into a middle school experience and part of a medical middle school experience is to be engaged in activities outside of the content area and so when they go

084to virtual they are giving up something and we're going to try to do what we possibly can to meet their needs but you know band and chorus acquire and and orchestra are are not the same virtually as they are in person and so i think that's just something our parents have to think through and um make sure that that with their guidance and and our discussion with them that they're making the rest the best choice and that that should be a consideration with the application as well yes any other questions miss prairie you're welcome nice to see you i did have a couple of questions and then just a reminder to everybody in the um who's speaking whether you're at the podium or up here at the table please work a little harder to speak

085into your mic we we might be hearing each other okay here but we've got facebook folks trying to listen in and pat's working really hard back there to kind of adjust the volume so just a reminder please and i if i miss this i'm sorry but as far as i think i believe i heard you all say that you're going to when you're assigning teachers to the role of virtual instruction you're trying to spread it out so teachers might have four four sections face to face and then potentially one virtual so you're spreading it out do you all have is that a different i'm not a teacher so is that a different prep time i mean is that uh what does that look like for the teachers and and do we have some lesson planning

086or some materials that you guys have learned and and kind of banked from from this year or this past year that that they can lean into and use uh well that's a great question certainly they are going to continue with the lesson plan or the pacing that they would in for their in-person students what that looks like virtually may take a little of adjustment just for strategies that we know work virtually as opposed to in person but the curriculum would be the same if and the pacing would need to be the same as well students will be on from 8 30 to 3 15 primarily synchronous learning so that's real time cameras on teacher student engagement virtually what it looks like as far as strategies it might differ a bit but the pacing and the

087curriculum wouldn't be the same and it would not i'm sorry um madam chair woman person sorry i don't mean you know at least something um it does not impact their planning so they'll still have common planning together because they're still the the the section that they'll teach virtually will be a part of the five sections if it were set up here a day and forgive me for saying that i'm chairperson thank you thank you any other questions and and just i want to repeat because i believe i have heard from elementary all the way up through buford i want to make sure everybody hears this that their expectation is that students are logged in for the entire the entire day so parents need to understand that students need to understand that and that is from

088the vdoe that is a requirement so i want to make sure that everybody does hear that yes ma'am thank you and camera's on the the expectation will be the cameras are on and so we'll have the tenants established and that will be a part of the application thank you any other questions i have a question madam chair um and it it could be for dr odie or um anyone who spoke previously um will the virtual teaching also serve as a um like if a student needs to quarantine i know this year they would quarantine in the virtual classrooms that were offered is that um the plan for this year as well if in person students needed to quarantine yes ma'am if it's okay we'd like to defer to dr odie we have had some discussion

089about what that would look like if a child does need to quarantine uh we certainly don't want to um the the virtual program let's let's talk about elementary the virtual program will be the teacher has 19 students that are assigned to her or him virtually so we don't necessarily want to place the child in that classroom for those two weeks or whatever it will be for quarantine but we want to be able to somehow make sure that the child does not miss out on instruction we've we've bounced around a few ideas will they go in that class will we zoom them into the class with the teacher we haven't landed on where that will be but what we do know is that we've learned a lot this year on how to support students who have

090to have extended absences and so we want to make sure that we have a plan in place so that those children that need to quarantine can continue with their learning can you speak a little bit more to why you wouldn't like at the elementary level why a student wouldn't be added to that class that virtual class well would i miss thompson would you like to talk about that but what what we talked about is the um interruption as far as the teachers got the 19 children and then you we hope that pacing will be the same the teachers are planning together and um the lessons are flowing and as as they do in the in-person class and the virtual class but to put a child in and then take them back out in 10 to

09114 days could could seem disruptive so we want to be able to talk more about that with our teachers with our principals and see what the impact would be there yeah thank you for the chance to talk about this because we did go sort of around and around about what would we do in this situation and and similarly to how we wouldn't necessarily you know even within a building you wouldn't necessarily move a child from one class to another because the pacing could be off it would just be different it would be disruptive there would be real no real reason to do that but it almost is the same situation if we were to take a person who was in person and then put them in the virtual class for a short period of time

092they wouldn't necessarily be on exactly the same pacing it would actually be a lot more effective for the student as they're in quarantine to be working with their own teacher and that could take a variety of different forms but so that they are still connected with their class they're connected with their teacher their teacher knows what their strengths are and they're working together to make sure that the child's getting what they need during that time so i used in our meeting previously with dr odi the example of you know if a child um just became very ill you know not coveting or broke their leg or something like that what we would typically see is that the teacher would be sending homework that the child would be working on at home either with their family

093or now that we do have this great interface of canvas a teacher could record a really short lesson to teach a child hey this is how we're going to do this math concept now work on this at home again does just sort of maintain that continuity between the child and the existing class and the existing teacher yeah i think what you need what we need to think about is that if a child gets sick and has chickenpox and he's out for seven days in the classroom well he steps away and that classroom teacher does some things to hopefully maintain his or her progress in the classroom we would be doing the same thing we've got a tool now called virtual learning that that our teachers are better prepared now than they were four or five

094years ago and so that will be part of the of their pharmacy of tools to use but we would not be moving students in and out of a virtual program because we've already set that up we've identified kids who are moving forward but they would be given whatever they need and assistance if they're out due to illness or due to quarantine whatever because it's a short period of time thank you thank you thank you dr eye greetings board share mr henderson how are you we are going to talk a little bit about charlottesville high school lma all of our secondary programming the high school experience is is complicated and i think our teachers have done an incredible job at providing just a multitude of different instructional strategies to meet the need while we were in

095virtual and also in hybrid which proved to be equally as difficult with students in the classroom and and virtual so next year what we're offering is we're going to look at the best practices that we've had at the high school we have always had virtual classes and i think they're listed up there econ personal finance uh health and pe creative writing and it's like an eye test and uh and us in astronomy as well we've always had those courses built into our schedule and we've always partnered and supplemented what we have offered with virtual virginia schools as well so what we're going to do moving forward due to the complexity of the high school you need 22 credits to graduate you need five verified credits a tenth grader doesn't take tenth grade math they could

096be anywhere from algebra one to trig so we really just need to figure out how to support our students so our plan will be to continue to offer our virtual courses through canvas and remember our teachers even though you know before the pandemic they were using canvas very well they've gone leaps and bounds in having modules ready to go videos to really supplement what they're doing inside the classrooms and that's not going to change i think they're going to continue to do that and continue to build on those skills and for virtual virginia courses those are courses that we've traditionally used virtual virginia to supplement so let's say um you were looking forward to taking um a sequential you know let's say i'm just gonna make something up latin three and let's just say for

097some reason it didn't fit into your schedule or we didn't have enough uh students to make to have the class make what we call the high school we've always used virtual virginia to supplement that or if you've maxed out some of your mass and there is a math above and beyond what we offer we've used virtual virginia in those in those cases as well so moving forward we're going to use virtual virginia and our existing virtual courses to help supplement our students for next year i only had one slide i'm just reading through other points here on your slide any questions from anybody else dr kraft i was just wondering i don't know much about the virtual virginia classes and i'm just wondering what your experience has been with those and uh have they been

098good have the students receive them well have they been successful we've had mixed to be honest we've had mixed results with virtual virginia um virtual virginia just so i can you know explain to everyone there is a virtual teacher that's not a charlottesville high school teacher so they are licensed in the state of virginia it's a virginia program um but we don't have a lot of control you know we don't we don't know who the you know we know who the teacher is but they're not a part of our staff so it we've had some disconnects uh in virtual virginia we saw we've also had some success students that are self-paced and that have a good aptitude for learning online and virtually do have some success there but it does take a lot of executive

099functioning to be successful in those classes you've got to learn the time manage you've got to learn how to you know email your teacher you can't find them in the building you know you're gonna have to email and i know mr brian has some experience with that while uh while he was a counselor so it is a we've had mixed results from it i i'm hopeful that with the pandemic and the effort that the state has put into virtual virginia that will be able to that they've maybe strengthened some of those supports as well but for a virtual virginia student that is taking classes at chs we do provide obviously it would be in the school day for most of our students that's how we've traditionally done it they'd have a learning lab where they'd

100have access to one of our staff members to help with some of the technical difficulties but again we've had mixed results but i'm optimistic that some of those obstacles have been bridged by the state and by virtual virginia moving forward um i i believe at the retreat we talked a lot about flexibility for our high school students especially our 11th and 12th graders not that you were there but i just wanted to one of the things that i feel is so missing um especially from the is basically um individual plans for our students i mean because i recognize the kind of labor intensive nature of um it sounds like we're asking a lot from our principals and our staff but like being in partnership with our parents and our families in a meaningful way and

101i don't see in this model especially the high school level you know any flexibility unless you're in the virtual virginia and what i would ask not and and maybe this is the wrong time but i do feel very strongly that we need to consider flexibility especially 11th and 12th graders how they can have school work for them instead of working for school and i really would love to our division to be thinking much more broadly about how we can meet the needs of our high school students who i don't know want to work in the morning or want to go to k-tech in the morning but also be an orchestra i mean there's just a lot of um things that our high school students want to explore and some of the scheduling that we have

102in our buildings makes it very difficult for them and i don't see this virtual experience as solving that problem at all and i know that you recognize that i appreciate that um and i just was i'm just hoping that as a division that as we move forward with this new information that we've gained over the past 16 months that we work to really supporting families and students for making school work for them thank you anybody else that personal and economic finance is a terrible class to do virtually it is so painful um and i i have not talked to a parent yet who hasn't done a module for their student and i just find the whole thing ridiculous and i encourage parents to ask that their students take that class in person because it has

103very info very important information but with all of the work that you're asked to do virtually it's just meaningless and i hate that for our students who could really benefit from a very who who should be benefiting from this class so that's what i'm concerned with that all of these virtual classes will be and i don't it's just like busy work and not critically it's not allowing students to critically learn the the things that they will need once they graduate so that's my also if you have a chance to do in person please do in person thank you um i believe mr um johnson our student rep has some questions he's on zoom oh yeah yeah so i ca can it can i be heard i just wanna make sure i'm on my phone and

104everyone hear me yeah we can't hear you okay i'm sorry i was making sure i ain't no uh uh all right so um first off i wanted to ask um because i was a little confused um so with chess uh in particular will there be like how there is now a virtual learning or like is it gonna have to be like i'm kind of confused like is there like a selection based or is it just you have to go in person unless you're in that program i couldn't hear that 100 sorry i think mr johnson was your question whether there was an application to be part of the virtual yeah so is there going to be like a virtual option uh like there is a walker uh in elementary schools or is it just going

105to be straight in person for chs students yeah jason um the answer to your first question there is no application for these for these classes we will look to make sure that the student is successful in especially the virtual virginia courses um the ones that are uh not taught specifically by our teachers but there is not a 100 virtual option like the k model for the high school it would it would be a combination of face-to-face and virtual classes okay that's all i had i i was just confused on whether that was an option or not i just feel like it needs to be clarified that based on mr johnson's question that what virtual virginia is a separate entity it's a statewide entity with with qualified teachers that are not chs teachers um who provide

106these classes virtually which we have offered as a division for as long as i can remember or it's been around and i think but there's no application process for that not an application but we will have to there has to be a vacancy to get it so you have to apply but there are no criteria there's no criteria you have to kind of let people know that you're interested correct yep working with your counselor you would indicate which classes you'd work with your counselor to figure out which classes would be appropriate uh with your individual schedule um not so much with our classes the same thing you reach out to your counselor i'd like to take you know virtual health and pe whatever your choices you'd work with your counselor on that but many of

107these courses are meant to supplement or augment a face-to-face schedule not necessarily replace and that's still available correct i mean so students could be i mean in person and taking just because of conflicts within their schedule they could take some of the virtual virginia or or canvas courses online and or if we have high school students who want to are choosing to go strictly virtual this is what they will be choosing from a combination of virtual virginia and the few classes that we have offered and and face to face because there's it would be very difficult in most cases to piece together a full schedule that would allow you to graduate on time and meet your virginia requirements and the other barrier we have with virtual virginia is there are still spaces and limited spaces

108with virtual virginia as well so there would have to be a space within that class in order for that student to enroll into that class and there is a date right isn't it by july 1st we need to know july 15th i believe is the date and also those classes fill up quickly they do fill up their classes so that could be an issue so okay so let me i'm sorry just for clarity for my clarity so you're saying for just this next year if a student wanted to do completely virtual you don't feel like that would be an option for them to to continue to stay on track to graduate with this model it would not necessarily enable a student to be 100 virtual and meet their graduation requirements for that year or to

109or for their high school trajectory any other questions yes could i add something please yes sir i know i said i was finished but i just wanted to add something um i was listening to you know what was said about pre-k through to and now chs and kind of stay when it comes to this virtual option i know that you know we're going into this new school year and you know we're having this optimistic view of you know the pandemics winding down people are getting vaccines and stuff like that well i just really want to make a focus here that that doesn't take away from the fact that we still have families who were squaring predicaments or situations that require them to be virtual you know me personally you know i you know with a

110younger brother i have situation now where i have to watch my younger brother while i'm in school if my younger brother doesn't have that virtual option or he does have that virtual option but you know i don't then who's going to watch him you see what i'm saying or if you know if i have to do something around the house but there's no one here to do it how can i get done i think there needs to be you know more you know there needs more attention on those situations instead of the statistics that are going around like yes the vaccines are getting in arms yes uh the pandemic is winding down and cases are getting lower but that doesn't take away from the fact that uh families are not comfortable going out families are

111not you can see here at the school board meeting there's people in person and there's people on virtual that is the perfect example of how some people are in different situations or in different mindsets when it comes to this pandemic and there's not enough options right now that i'm seeing that you know that benefit both sides and can i just say he you know when it comes to vaccine statistics you know yeah they look good but when you look at the equity issue with that you know people of color and like we have different the the numbers of uh what's what i'm looking for they're very different very different and there's an equity issue here where we have people who are not and i don't know what the rules will be with you know vaccines

112and who can you know you need to be vaccinated to come to the school or not but there's a big difference in the amount of people who are vaccinated when it comes to categories so you know we want to go with that so i just think we have to look at other things besides statistics to decide on whether there will be virtual options in some schools virtual objects or not and then you know we're like at chs where there's a different program without students like this it's just not a clear plan to benefit both sides and i think that needs to be discussed and fixed i don't know how we can but or if it is fixable but there's too many families and predicaments that don't allow them to be in person whether it be

113a three k through two that are not you know there's not a virtual option and then for cd just have a virtual option especially for chs to be such a big school and have so many students i just feel like that's not okay i i had to say that i'm sorry please don't apologize those are all great points and thank you again i i would hope that again as the survey is out there or we continue to push the survey out that we are trying to really reach out to all families all grade levels to make sure that we are hearing these points hearing these concerns i don't have a doubt that if if the numbers came back for chs that dr irizari wouldn't sit down with his team and and sit down with mr

114henderson and see how we can meet the needs and and the requests of our students i mean i believe that's what charlottesville city schools is about and i think you know how dr i and his team pivoted um this spring um based on the decisions that we the board made um you know are a prime example of how you were able to do that for some students and we're grateful for that so i trust and hope that we will continue to do that and thank you mr johnson for your comments doctor just mention that you know i appreciate those comments uh mr johnson and i was thinking about the community partners that we had this year and it may be that we could um enlist some help from some of those community partners for particular

115situations in the coming year you know if that's needed so that would be maybe another resource that we could look at as we're trying to meet every student's need and every family's need under these conditions i think you're absolutely it's critical that we understand what every parents need surveys are not going to get us the information that we want we need to do outreach to the families i think and more specifically i think that this division has a great um track record of meeting families needs if we know about them and so it really is incumbent on families if you're having an issue with child killer for example like mr johnson suggested that you reach out to the guidance counselor at your or your school counselor or your principal or your teacher to note those

116things so that they can support your family we're going to do the best we can with these surveys and try to do this kind of more systemically but i think we you know to really on an individual level i want to do that i you know individual plans but for now families need to reach out and ask for the help and support and i know that this division will step up and support you in that case any other questions or comments lashandra i don't have you on my screen so i i will turn around but i trust that one of you all will let me know i'm good i would say something i'm good thank you thank you anybody else thank you thank you so much thank you mr johnson thank you to the administrators

117for your presentations tonight your commitment and leslie if you could put the presentation back up for the additional considerations slide dr odie do you mind taking your mask off while you're at the mic and just making sure that you're speaking into it please thank you i'm sorry i meant to take it off thank you principles okay as the additional consideration slide uh comes back up i want to just talk about some of the things that we have here as i mentioned earlier the virginia department of education did share with us a draft guidance for successful virtual instruction and so here are some of the things that we want to consider for those families that do apply to have their child participate in virtual instruction there we will need to set clear expectations for staff students

118parents caretakers before that virtual learning begins for instance we want to ensure that the student has access to technology internet is ready to have a good attendance student needs to be engaged as we mentioned before assignment submission completion deadlines and be ready to consistently communicate with their teacher there would be appropriate it specifically says appropriate synchronous and asynchronous instruction counseling support for in-person and virtual students and if a student is having academic difficulties we would look at creating an action plan for that student or creating a contract to get the student back on target but if needed we would move that student back into in-person instruction and also if a student does recommend to go from virtual to in-person school divisions are required to allow that right away so we will be prepared to do

119that consistent monitoring of the effectiveness of virtual and learning for instance assessment checks formative assessment checks each quarter or bi-weekly however often we feel that it needs to occur specifically for student having academic challenges and of course planning to possibly transition the student back to in-person learning if needed next slide please so here you'll see some some additional information about the from the draft guidance from the virginia department of education and on these next several slides you'll see these items there's a focus on student engagement whether or not the student has an environment that is conducive to learning with necessary tools that they need again the child must have access to internet and devices and fortunately we have we've done a great job here in charlottesville city schools with providing that access and the devices

120that students need in order to learn there must be regular attendance that is an expectation i can't stress that enough next slide please an engagement is mentioned again with student responsiveness and work completion communication with teachers receiving and providing feedback submission of work in a timely manner demonstrating mastery of learning and participating in services and supports provided by the school organization is mentioned time management self advocacy digital citizenship and academic integrity and of course if a student if a school deems a student is not being successful in ccs virtual an action plan like i said before would be written and return the child to in-person instruction next slide please and here just a little bit more information of some of the things that i've already mentioned there so as far as next steps for us

121we really want to be able to get that application on the website so that we can get an accurate number of what families are interested in virtual learning so we want to uh our next step is to finalize that application so that we can get that out there if the board does approve we'll continue with planning for the fall of 2021 we will of course remain up to date with legislation and governors and the governor's mandates we'll monitor the cdc and vdoe guidelines and what we are always and constantly doing is reflecting on what really went well this year and we're learning from that and what areas didn't go quite well and we're learning from that as well we know that some students absolutely excelled at virtual instruction and some did not so we want

122to be able to meet the needs of all of our students and of course we want to prepare for a safe return to learning for students and staff next slide please so that concludes our presentation and at this time if you have any additional questions i'm happy to answer them i have a question dr oda yes in your draft guidance for successful virtual instruction one of the bullet points was consistent monitoring of effectiveness or virtual learning um other than the virtual teacher um who would be responsible for following up you said in the first quarter in addition to that teacher what are the school counselors going to be involved in and monitoring students especially if we have students of course taking virtual classes at the high school um in the elementary middle schools um will

123you have the principals involved so it's going to be a collaboration between the three of those people absolutely these students are being successful absolutely and as i mentioned earlier we're planning to involve a liaison as well that would sort of monitor the program organize it and work closely with the principal the teachers the families uh to to ensure that students are successful and we know that it's not only academic success that we're looking at we're looking at mental wellness social emotional wellness we're looking all of those pieces to ensure that if if a child does choose to be a virtual student and is allowed to through the application process that they are successful we we are it is it is what we do uh make sure that we are meeting the needs of all of

124our students so we are also going to be doing sort of check-ins when we see things maybe going early on slightly awry yeah there will be an intervention at which point in time absolutely which is at the end of which is why i don't think we should wait till the end of the nine weeks because you don't want to let a child get that far gone uh being unsuccessful so frequent check-ins and if a teacher a counselor or someone sees that a child is starting to suffer or have challenges then we need to jump right there to to provide supports and see what needs to happen next excellent thank you thank you um i just want to make a comment that that return to plan um program that was submitted to that was presented tonight

125we can make sure that it's on the website i haven't been on in a couple of days it may already been on there just kind of prominently presented so that people will know even though it's still in flux because we the survey is still up yeah i think will help a lot of parents right and i think at this point the survey is still there but at this point the the application is where we would start getting that actual intent as we're moving closer to the year so that we can start planning for who who's going to be those teachers i know mr wade you had some questions from a family and i think you were probably referencing this so i don't know i think it would be important that the community understands that really

126we are at this point only looking or we're starting at third grade so i don't know what age those students were at but currently that is what our plan is yes that is correct any other questions from anybody okay thank you thank you next we will be discussing plan for safe return to in-person instruction and continuity of service sorry they sounded a little similar good evening madam chair members of the board mr henderson this evening i'm going to be sharing with you what in a much shorter term than what ms torres just read it's the health plan component of coming back in the fall and sorry am i close enough now and so the health plan is something that's not new we've had a health plan since last july that was the first publication of

127a health plan but what is new is that with the american recovery american rescue plan act arpa there is a much more prescriptive template was released for the health plan and in order to receive our arpa funds that have been allocated this month we needed to get our plan up and available to the public for comment and input so tonight's presentation and what i'm about to show you is part of that process of making sure that the public is aware of what our plans are for a safe return to learning in the fall and for continuity of instruction in the fall and so leslie if you don't mind on our home page right now the return to learn link is his is always in that far left menu there beside the main photo so leslie's

128going to click on return to learn you can also always enter charlottesvilleschools.org forward slash return to learn and also you will get to this page by doing that and then right at the top of the page what we decided to do is to not confuse people all of the information for the current school year which ends tomorrow effectively is still there but at the very top now there we've started to build out the content that will inform our families for next year and so leslie is going to click on the english version of the plan because one of the other things and this is something we do all the time anyway but the federal guidance and regulations around arpa want you to be wanted to be very clear that the plan is available in multiple

129languages and translation options are available and so all of that was what you saw on the screen that lead you to this i am not going to read all the pages of this plan to you but i will talk about br you know give you an overview of what is in the plan and you would also notice on the page leslie was just on there in addition to um and i confess i should have bought a printed copy of it with me because this is challenging my distance vision to see it up there on the screen but on that on that same page where you can look at where the document has already been translated into our top languages there was also an option where you could text for support with multiple languages and then

130also also contact that same number for to provide suggestions and or comments on the plan so there's an introduction that explains our guiding principles lists who the key contacts are i have great partners in working through the these health plans but i do have primary ownership for these plans but all of our names and emails phone numbers are there um the next section is oh this is going to be hard mitigation this is the meat of the plan and it talks about all the different mitigation measures that we are taking our in our layered mitigation approach to support a safe return to learning each of those bullets are part of the prescribed template and so we show we we talk specifically about how we're addressing each of those areas and then after you get past

131those bullets it we we have some extra things in there that charlottesville ski where charlottesville city has gone above and beyond you stop there leslie there's like three different areas and i guess what i want to say and i've been talking with my colleagues beth baptist in particular as we look towards next year truly the only constant has been changed when it comes to the health plan as we've navigated the past year and this summer will be no exception and so what two areas that we're looking at pretty keenly are what are going to be the requirements or the the direction from the state for wearing masks for the vaccinated population the older students we don't know that yet a lot of you know right now i think all of us are planning to come

132back with our masks which you know we were wearing sitting in the audience but oh thank you that's kind yeah memory is a dangerous thing um but uh anyway we're going to have to wait and see because if the state makes a strong movement that the vaccine-eligible population 12 and up if the data indicates that they don't need to wear masks you know that's just something we're going to have to stay in tune with um so there there could be a distinction in the eight the love the age levels and and the decision that's made with masks there we'll see i believe there was some breaking news this evening by the way for those of you about the state of emerge stat the state of emergency being lifted um sometime soon for the state so

133that that has come out since we've been in this meeting um the other thing is on social distancing and what we've already been told you know that the six feet kind of is more like the three feet although we want to maintain six feet wherever we can and we always want to be doing the very best we can uh with all of our mitigation measures and one of the this is a challenge one of the things that that we've we're coming away from this pandemic with there's a there's a couple of silver linings one is all the health and safety improvements we've made to our buildings and none of that's going away another one we we talked about many times is the efficiencies we've picked up with zoom meetings because now you can truly schedule

134so many back-to-back-to-back meetings without even leaving your office you don't have the travel time so we try to find the silver linings in the clouds but those health and safety improvements are really um great and we are always going to you know maintain those now that we have those in place but it's going to be interesting to see what happens with masks and physical distancing we'll just have to see because the situation does continue to change and evolve rapidly okay so again i'm not going to read all this to you then there is section three the continuity of services which was largely about what dr odi and and her team just spoke about our principal team but also in addition to that there's that technology component which i have we have to give huge kudos

135to pat cuomo and his team for everything that was done with um you know we've greatly explained expanded our inventory of chromebooks and also the work that was done on internet access over the past year so those are all things that are spoken to in section three section four opportunity for public comment that we're officially launching that today i would also point out that the department of education is also doing the same thing right now at the state level for public comment on the on their plans around health and safety that was in a superintendent's memo recently and then section five periodic review and revision of the plan we have no trouble meeting that requirement and um one of the things i did hang on to from the previous plans even though it wasn't specified

136in the template the very end of this document is our it's our health plan revisions and you can see where we've kind of tried to keep track of those at least in a summary form and so we'll continue to do that and last but not least making the plan available to the public and again uh when the guidance was released for arpa they had some more prescript more prescriptive language about how where they had less prescriptive language about the mitigation section there was more prescriptive language about public comment and how you need to make it available to the public and you'll see with what i've shown you on the website we are meeting those requirements and and will continue to do so and that is a summary of the plan i'm happy to take any

137questions concerns or comments from you all at this time and then there of course is an opportunity for public comment at the end of the this particular meeting agenda i have a question of madam chair yes lashandra okay um i'm just a little confused if you could clarify um you said there might be additional guidance on masks for children who are 12 and over because they the vaccine was available to him them um we can't ask if someone's been vaccinated so can we still require a mask or that that i just i'm confused on if the guidance changes at the state level if we can continue with our own program the so the school board will ultimately decide on these proto you know any significant changes in our protocols that's something we would bring to

138the board um i will say that there's been discussion and we talked with uh beth baptist and i participate weekly in a call with the whole region with health department officials and local medical professionals in the pediatric community and you know one of the topics that's also being heavily discussed is you know how there's certain vaccines that people have to have and you have to have proof that you were vaccinated that hasn't happened yet with the cova vaccine for public school i can tell you it has happened with certain universities because i have to do that for one of my kids my one of my students that my son has to prove he's been vaccinated before he can interco go to his college in the fall um so we're you know if the state were

139to and beth baptist would be so much better at this but i know there are vaccines that people have to prove they've had before they come to public school if this you know if that change is for covid which it isn't the case right now but just those are things we have to keep an eye on and so there are things that are being actively discussed that we are actively watching and would come back to you with with updates in any of those areas so i think similar to what machandra just asked i mean the locality we would have ultimately we could decide on what we wanted and what our comfort level was and what our guidance was unless something was legislated at the state level that you know unless something was legislated that was

140you know statewide then yes it would be a board level decision to change the health right to change from the health plan that you see here i know we have a lot of other things to talk about but i know i have some strong opinions about masks and and just how quickly the guidance on that changed but i also was hoping and mr henderson's back at the table and dr baptist i believe is over there somewhere i was hoping that maybe in august if it's appropriate because i do know that there are there are a lot of questions around the vaccines i know there's a lot of talk about the variants and about the delta variant and i don't know where we're at with that as far as charlottesville goes but an update from dr

141bonds or somebody maybe come august i don't know if we can i see beth writing that down so she she is a follow-up item yes and and that may change and we may not need it but i think it probably would be helpful whether it's from dr bonds or or from the wonderful team we have here just to kind of update everybody as we prepare to return to school any other questions from anybody about this and then this comes back next week is that correct or at the next actually it next week would be another opportunity for public comment because there's a lot of funding associated with arpa and so when we as we go through the process and we're submitting all of our information the award if you will we know what our award

142is but for the compliance piece of it it cannot hurt to over communicate and provide plenty of opportunity for public comments so that's why we have the information on the website with the number that people can can call or text and i think having it as another opportunity for public comments similar to what we do with budget and publishing that on the agenda wouldn't be a bad thing and telling people to look at it on the website anything we can do to let people know this health plan is out there and available for review and comment were there any changes i seem to either read or hear at the city council level there were some more prescriptive guidance on how these funds could be um used different categories part of me there are categories but

143they're the same categories we discussed at the retreat and the things that the board did for the fy 22 budget the additions and so forth we're all in alignment with the categories it's social emotional learning uh recover learning loss recovery health and technology health and sanitation safety type items and you can go through that budget changes document and every line that was put in is connected with the allowable uses for arpa okay i just thought i had heard that there were some more recent changes in the last week that's the clarification is this coming back to us for approval is this something interesting um it's not it's not something that has to be approved by the board but we have to invite public comment it has to be a very public uh publicly available document

144and honestly as a matter of procedure um if you recall when we went through the large process with preparing for return to learn you know what was it february march and everything that led up to that you all never specifically voted on the health plan nor back in january but it's always just a document that it's a living document that we're always working on always taking input and comment on and certainly if anything significant changed and it wasn't just a no-brainer if you will second it would come to you for discussion it would need to come forward for discussion unless if there were any choices to be made thank you any other questions comments all right thank you very much okay now we are going to just zip right through policies so we are now

145discussing 2021 policy updates um mr henderson and dr baptist correct madam chair members of the board mr henderson uh to finish up one thing that miss um powell just said with the meetings that we are having with the health department and pediatricians every week question was asked by one school division this week on tuesday how do we plan for the fall and the answer was keep doing what you're doing keep all the medication implant in place that you've got now and hopefully we can back off of it but don't back off of it at this point keep moving forward um i haven't been checking our numbers every day like i was at one point but i did check and i mean we're almost zero now i think we had three new cases recently and so

146the numbers really are down but we do know we still have covet in our community and in our state so and you ask about the variance i don't think they really know yet what is happening in this area but you know just constantly watching but i will check with dr bonds or if there's someone else at the health department that can share information with us and ms powell also mentioned that the state of emergency is going out i since we've been in here there was an i saw an announcement online that the state of emergency will end june 30th and so they're looking at how some of the laws will change like you know right before the pandemic it was against the law to have faith covering so that law will likely go back into

147um account but they'll have to talk about you know some people are still going to want to wear masks so you can't really enforce that law so there are a lot of questions that have got to be answered about that and how that will affect us in schools as far as mask wearing and everything else so stay tuned we'll keep you informed as we know it okay i'm here to talk to you about policy which five years ago when i did this i thought it would be the last time i would ever talk to you about policy but here i am sure you're welcome um so how i've gotten this big stack of paper that i have because i still like dealing with paper is i did attend the vsba policy contact meeting a couple

148weeks ago and so i have all of the updates that they have recommended also there were policies and i went through every policy that charlottesville city schools has to see the ones that had not been updated within five years because there is a state law that says every policy needs to be reviewed every five years i found several that were being reviewed this year by vsba and others that had not been reviewed in the last five years and so i made an assumption that they were just going to be reviewed but after some study by a couple board members i've realized there had been some updates recommended by the sba within the last five years that had not been entertained by the board so we may want to look at some of those also have

149one stack is information about the policies regarding transgender i know that the department of ed has come out with a model policy vsba's thought on this and i gave you a copy of something vsba has was rather than have a separate policy on this particular issue they made sure that all of their harassment and retaliation and all of those policies that would apply to code 22.1 22.1-23.3 would be covered in other policies so it's more of an umbrella approach rather than having a separate so i've included in one of the handouts that you had how vsba is handling the eight areas that must be done and then finally um shab has been working on their wellness policy and when i first saw the wellness policy as usual it's very very extensive and shabb has done

150a marvelous job in working on it but those of you been on the board a while have heard my sermon about what is policy what is regulations so i went through and pulled the procedural regulations part out put it into a separate document i've left everything in there that shab had from the policy part to the regulation part and shab did have a couple concerns about that and i have been um in conversation with chad members and in one place in the regulations i have included an item that they would like to have at a certain point but is not required by the state so i've made sure i've outlined that i'm not saying what it should be or shouldn't be but i wanted to make sure the board knew that what shab is recommending

151in that one item is not required by the state and it will still be up to the board to make that decision so those are the um different parts of tonight and i have them in different paper clips and i will be glad to go through this in any way that you would like um first time you can tell me it's all okay enough um thank you dr craft um for kind of going through them and sending in your notes ahead of time um and thank you dr baptist for doing such a thorough job and looking at these we appreciate that i don't know what the will of the board is as far as i mean i think we should definitely go through the policies with revisions or how's everybody feeling i will say some

152of the ones with revisions the main revision may have been the addition of that code 23.3-3 in there so sometimes the wording of the policy may not change it's just update for legal references but when i do policy i don't change one syllable of what's in there without bringing it to the board so i won't bring anything that even just has legal references changed yeah yeah i guess my preference is that um that you know there's anything major to go over those you know that's you know i mean i don't think it i didn't really see that any of the revisions in that one stack were major yeah um i used to when i would bring it to you would bring a major and a minor yeah and this was mainly um in response to

153any you know law updates or changes i know there were some changes and i'd have to look in here to see it about um being able to participate virtually with school board but that may change too because that some of that was dealing with the continuing state of emergency and with that changing i know that is a change how they're figuring that but to me that had more change than just about anything else and that was regulatory that our uh legislative said we didn't have any choice in that at all anyway yeah that's what i saw before a lot of my i mean i saw sherry notes and um but i didn't have any comments i'm sure i don't know if you saw some things that you felt that you wanted to go over as

154a board but you know um you know i don't have any comments so questions on the changes yeah i guess for me this section was was quite clear i thought you did a really great job of explaining exactly how each one was revised and mostly what i looked at was some typos and some confusing language and things like that in this section so i i didn't really have um you know questions about the policies themselves and i appreciate you making those changes like overnight yes ma'am so i have a question i mean i did i think i have a few corrections to some of these again it's just typo stuff minor stuff i'm happy to type them out and send them to everybody [Music] so we don't need to go line by line or page

155by page so i don't know what the will of the board you know what [Music] you're okay with me doing that no you don't have to go line by line no i mean i'm i'm happy to i mean if there were minor things like i think i did find a chairman left in one of them i know you missed one i think um you know so things like that where that she was correcting um i'm happy to to type that out and send it to everybody so that we have it for next week and you can see it is that okay for those types of things okay um there were a couple that under the policies that needed the five-year review it seemed like there were a couple of things that uh either could be

156eliminated deleted um which i listed in my notes there was and then there was one about the alternative schools that i noted that that was also in this in the first section of policies with revisions that the language was revised but then when we got to this section it was the same well it was the old wording so i just thought maybe this was redundant with that all right so i will i'll in that one i will make sure what this is from what you gave me so i'll make sure that what was in the revision right is yeah and that that was all just so you know if there are any that that can be deleted now uh that haven't been looked at but we don't need them then that would be good to

157do one policy that if you all don't mind that i just wanted to maybe have a little discussion about trying to flip to it right now i believe is on page 29 and this was in the group that required or had revisions uh i've had to do a school lunch school lunches um and how student that policy is efb if i'm correct if it's on lunches yes yes policy efb the policies to be revised and um on in esb it's on page 29. i just i guess i personally just struggled a little bit [Music] and i know that that some of these policies and the language you know have come from bsba but just in general i guess it started with parents or guardians whose student has a negative balance status must either pay cash

158value for the meal each day or bring a lunch from home um and it just has more to do with the fact of that that punitive nature i mean we as a division i mean if and within the policy within the context and for the public you know i think um we do make a statement that that no student you know will will be called out on this or or anything like that but i just feel like if if they're not paying their balance and and or if they have that negative balance and then they're required to bring their own meal i mean there's obviously something going on uh when policy i did spend more time with this one than some of the others and miss powell may have comment because she and i both

159looked at what vsba recommended with what we already had and i know she brought in mr jones to also talk about it so i don't know whether you have any input on this comment or not and i'm not sure that my comment was coherent other than the fact that i think i guess okay another question is so when a student when we end the school year and we have a negative balance um an unpaid balance i mean my understanding is that that balance is cleared somehow i mean i know that there's some community members who step up and provide some relief to kind of zero that out but again i just i don't want any student to to not be fed so there are um two things i'll take the second comment first and then

160i'll backtrack to the other comment so with regard to negative balances it is required to be part of the national school you know meal program that all of the um balances are cleared at the end of the year the negative balances and um for whatever is not covered by donations or anything like that um the school divisions our budget balances the school nutrition fund and makes it whole with regard to unpaid charges at the end of the year that's a requirement to be part of the program it's part of the funding that you transfer that you have in the budget to transfer new to nutrition part of that is an allowance to cover um whatever that is at the end of any given year with regard to the other about the language and i confess

161what you just read isn't what stood out to me from the work beth and myself and carlton just did in this policy this year but what i would as i was um yeah the the fact is there's when you look at that statement in the context of the rest of the language in that policy there's a lot more language in here that speaks to the fact that no student who goes through the line will be denied uh the meal the only thing that um is that that the only limitation on that is additional like a la carte items so um you know i think it's that language is intended just to put some responsibility to say look if you're not paying for your meals then the expectation is that you would bring your lunch or

162pay in cash and not be allowed to charge until it's resolved because what happens in school nutrition programs is that if there are no limitations or no statements regarding that no safety if you will then the charges will just go up up up up up and that does in fact happen because of the language that's in there that no student will be turned away and the except for you know a la carte items the full normal meal no substitute meals and the board adopted that language some years back there's no pbj sandwich or cheat you know cheese sandwich it's the it's the regular meal and there's nothing said and that the student does get that so even though that language is in there and maybe it could be improved it is part of what vsba

163it's the standard we would probably check like dr baptist said before we change language we always want to run it through legal if it's part of what's the recommendation is but it's most of the language in there far overshadows that in what it's saying about how no child will be turned away there would no you know you wouldn't be able to distinguish a child who had a negative balance from one he doesn't all of that protective language is in there throughout the policy it does i mean and i did catch all of that but i mean this this out of all of the policies just kind of was a gut punch a little bit more than some of the others and i mean is this something that we haven't charged for lunch in 16 months

164so everybody is getting free lunch right now if no matter what in our schools um and as long and that's going to happen at least the next pool year uh i think policy uh till next year if you believe that we need to keep or change something about that policy i'm good with that yeah so maybe we bring back that particular policy next year at this time just to see if it's more relevant because right now it doesn't feel relevant given that we are offering free lunch through the end of next year so am i hearing not to make the other changes in there or well why don't we take a further look at it we can make the changes this year but also take another look at it next year if that's the will

165of the board that makes sense but also understand miss flores that the policy reads this i've been a part of the school division since 1980 and i've never known a child regardless of what their balance was not i.e negative not to be treated with respect and being given a lunch with the exception of the a la carte issues so something that is in writing would be there but the practice has been we all will be thank you for that and i'm not questioning our practice per se i'm just you know purely speaking to to what we're looking at here in policy right any other um i did have a question about that one as well it did say at the bottom of the same policy we're talking about that the charlottesville city school board is

166responsible for maintaining records that document compliance with this policy and as far as the records you know whether a food isn't allowable and a competitive food how do we receive those um not you mean how does the board receive those sorry caught me in the let's sip over there um so that is referring to fundraisers that that piece of the policy i believe the records isn't that the part oh yeah so that's for the um i'm sorry i thought that is the um yes we absolutely have all those records in our school nutrition department it's our procurement records and they have been heavily audited um like recently in the past two years i've had we've had no less than two and not because of anything that was done wrong just because our number came up

167one was state and one was federal audits we also um oh we can just um i can provide audit reports to you from um i thought you're asking if it was audited sorry i'll come in and look at it and something yeah it's impromptu we have that via the nutrition office but it's also part of the audits that are done through the finance department nutrition is frequently what the subject of what they call single audit which is every year and i see mrs prayer nodding because she's part of the audit committee and she's familiar with this every year there's one or more programs that are singled out for single audit meaning that the auditors do a very deep dive on it title 1 title 6p school nutrition those are done frequently on top of that

168we've had separate audits from the state nutrition department and they come in and do separate audits as well that do a deeper in this area happy to get happy to share those reports with you the only thing that i've ever come back on our audits though by the way were the free and reduced lunch issue where we gave a student free lunch that should have gotten reduced lunch miss prayer's nodding because she remembers that as well we had one case of that and i think we may have had a second one since then but those are the only findings we've ever had and the record-keeping is certainly part of those audits don't get your referral policy but there's no been no findings happy to share the results thank you i am scrolling desperately to get

169to knaj um law enforcement yes i feel like we talked about changing that um and i just wondered what the status was when i looked at the chart it looked like we thank you i'm at 193 now so i'm almost there let me see what changes okay so you said that basically we could do one of two things there we could delete it because of the sro thing and so the chart said one thing so this policy can be deleted with the removal of sros or the remainder of the policy can remain is what the chart says and then the there's no changes on the um it means a very limited changes and i didn't change i didn't change anything because i wanted to bring it to the board as is even though we are

170removing the um school resource offices i still wanted you to see what was there and get your direction if do you want it removed since we can't or did you want it to remain and i think miss powell yeah she and i spoke a little bit before the meeting and yeah if you could update the rest of the board on kind of the work that's being currently done certainly so with regard to the changes with the safety model um the first draft of a new agreement and i don't even know that it will be called an mou because of sro is not being ability it may be called a protocols document because that's what toronto called theirs but um over the past several weeks we've created a first draft there's been an internal review by

171stakeholders who were part of by staff members who are part of that large committee what i'm doing before i involve other members from that large committee community members who those in particular who expressed a strong interest in this document as it's actually in the school board attorney's hands right now and part of his review is is i have specifically asked him in addition to checking all the code citations to check it against our policy and come back with the recommendations for what the best you know what his recommendations are for adjustments to our policy specifically in light of the document that he now has in his hands so i'll bring that back to you and then once i get it back from the attorney that's when i would um the next step is going to

172be then be reviewed by the members of the larger committee there's at least three who expressed interest in being part of this process and then depending on what comes back from them that would determine whether or not we get additional review from wade anderson and then then once we've done all of that then we start the collaboration with cpd by the end of the month is my goal and deadline so that they can start to collaborate around that document with us [Music] then with that policy you know going through this process then replace the one that we're talking about now this would update it so there are multiple policies that i'm sure mr anderson will need to look at in light of the document that's been sent to him for review and so outside of

173this policy review cycle we just didn't want to come to you with recommendations and then have him make other recommendations surrounding those policies so um we would come back to you with um as part of that whole item with that new agreement with the police the policy adjustments would be presented to you at that time as well i would ask that we take the policies out of our um take those specific policies out of the packet for voting on next week kim you don't think sorry that won't be done the process that you're working on currently the review for mr anderson and then um the other commit committee member that won't be ready by next week correct no okay i think so and there is the part where this will need to go to the

174police department and there and it'll have to be reviewed in light of their um now i doubt very seriously anything that would come out of that process of looking at the new agreement in the context of their policies requirements etc would ripple back to change anything that you know mr anderson recommends for our policies but um no i don't think he would have that by next week there's a chance there's a chance but it won't have gone through i still then want to get it to the other committee members that are non-staff members for them to start looking at it and i mean we're going to be moving at a pretty fast clip when i send this out on now that we've got a document that everybody can provide input around that's been involved previously

175i want to keep things moving because i do want to get it in the hands of cpd for their review to start by the end of this month [Music] thank you and then so all of that happens before it comes to the board correct or is there a board member on that committee that is part of that with you so we did have two board members on the committee um and i would be happy for either of them to be part of that next step now that the staff working group has agreed on a first draft and there are some holes that we need mr anderson to fill in to be clear i really and i talked to mr henderson about that i felt like there were some areas where i needed his expertise before

176we got more people involved with reviewing it but um certainly um i'd be happy to share it with board members at the point where it comes back from mr anderson i mean i definitely don't want to slow slow the process down but what is the will of the rest of the board here i would just like to say that this is related specifically to knnj can kn aj something that we've been talking about for more than a year and i don't think that this policy alone will be the limiting or slowing down factor it sounds like there's a lot of other things kind of i and i just want this policy to accurately reflect the practice which you guys are working on right now one thing i would note a couple of the sections in

177the policy are going to be in this document because i've been serving on that committee too so it might be that for the short term we can remove the part that has sros in there but we're talking about serving papers at school that's going to be a part of it development of programs that's really what we're doing right now uh is doing that the things in there that need to be reported are going to be in there too so portions of this policy are still going to be in effect so i think to keep something in here for the time being about working with law enforcement agencies we can remove anything that says sro so we have a policy and then when this other work is completed we can come back and bring a revision

178of that policy well what i was suggesting is that we continue to keep the policy that we have and not take out or make any changes to it until we have the revised policy i feel like making a change right now and then making another change in a month or two will also send the wrong message and i want to be clear that the um many many items in that policy do need to be changed um that are out that simply removing sro from it is not going to um i think reflect the will of the board but but it seems like we can at least remove that part because we don't have srs we've made that decision and so you know why not just take that out and then leave the rest as it

179is because we have nothing to that other first of all we um i think making a change you put revised there and my concern is that if we put revised as something that happened just this month and we make a change you know like it might just fall through the cracks and not come back again because it's been revised and we've talked you know it's very hard to keep track of all of these things um we've been talking about knaj for a year now and so i'm just concerned that if we decide to make these changes they will not we will not see this policy because we were going to make the changes but we actually want a firmer stronger stance in k and aj than just the sro changes and we've been talking about

180that and i just feel like that even though we don't have sros we don't actually have an mou right now either and so there's a lot of things in flux about that and it's just really urgent that before school starts we approve a policy but it has to be accurate in reflecting the practice so for now i've got to keep until we have the new program and then revised please that would be my suggestion how's everybody else feel about that you know it's fine i mean you know i i would just take out the sentence about the sros but i guess it doesn't you know it's not that big a deal because i guess we are going to have a new policy before school starts i mean there is so that first paragraph but it

181there is you know it's embedded in a couple of other places in the in the last paragraph too i believe so we'd have to look at that well much of the first paragraph will still remain about talking about um uh presence of a parent or guardian for any use but there'll be the wording be some wording changes in there but the gist of that or the um major part of it will remain i just really don't want to base anything on how a law enforcement agent feels like that needs to be changed like well there's just a lot of things i've already submitted my suggestions for changing this policy and none of that has been reflected in this these changes which of course you weren't even doing that back then i was going to say

182i'm not saying that you know [Music] there's been there needs to be some changes to this and i added some changes as well i keep ringing the bell now thank you about the law enforcement officers um having access to the children and so we talked about that um and we did send in drafts i can go back in the email and resend them but are we saying we're going to come back to the policy before school starts to revise this definitely yeah we have to do that so if maybe i can ask either you shunder or jennifer to find those revisions that you had sent i believe to dr atkins and resend them to dr baptist and mr henderson so that they have copies of those please okay i'll go back and uh let you

183know what i find and see see you on it thank you and if i may it may actually be appropriate for um the board's legal counsel to be part of the discussion as we wind up this process because they're just a lot of considerations with regard to our intent and mission and purpose and these changes and what law enforcement can or can't is mandated or not mandated to do so we have a lens around all of this that's very much from our perspective our you know our perspective on the school side but there is the legal side of this and the law enforcement side of it and um it goes beyond my expertise to maybe necessarily bridge all that we're in that we're just starting that process right now we've kind of conveyed a document

184that we think is a fair representation it was jody murphy patrick farrell beth and myself beth chuck eric irzari some other school administrators we all huddled up and just got a draft done and those were all folks who were involved with the original committee that are you know ccs staff we felt like there's some holes and things in there that we needed to tighten up before we asked the members of the public who are part of that committee to get involved and please get back to me and let me know for that next step after it comes back from mr anderson as to if you do want any or all board representatives just to start looking at the document at that point i don't know but you can just get back to me on that

185but right now the folks who from the committee who expressed expertise and a willingness to participate in the next review those that's who we're going to be sending it out to and um so just let me know what the role of the board is as far as your involvement at the step after it comes back mr anderson my goal is to make sure that we have everything in place that we need by the time school starts so the sooner we get that to say people who care a lot about this and who would want to make sure that their you know their concerns are addressed the better so that we can make sure that it's in place by the time yeah i would like if anybody else has any other policies but i would like

186you to if you would um if we could talk a little bit more about the um the wellness policy the shab i didn't quite understand what you were saying and i'd like to look at that um and dr kraft you're on that committee correct so if you have any input regarding that i'd appreciate that please well you know i think that um what dr baptist was saying our policy is very thorough and comprehensive and um in many many many pages long and it what dr baptist did was go through it and make sure that the things that were actually in that that the actual policy contained policy statements and then the the things that were more regulations like implementation and more specific details were in a separate section so that the policy itself was just

187more um it was clearer it was more you know it wasn't like 40 pages long it was like seven or eight pages long like most of other wellness policies so just separating policy statements from regulations details that's what she did she went through it and i think that was needed i think i really felt good about that so were there changes inherent changes to what was put i mean is the rest of the committee had input on this and are they okay with that yes yes yeah this was discussed at the last shad meeting as ms kraft said the document that you have that's marked regulations was embedded in the document that's marked policy so where i saw language that looked more procedural than policy i just totally lifted it and moved it and the

188only thing that i have added into or anything within the policy was so that you would know where what what uh what shad would like to do is beyond what the state requires us to do just so you would see it and you can i mean what you do with the passing of policy is one thing but if you look and i don't even know what page of the policy it is i think it's page 11 where it's talking about physical education shab has in there that charlottesville city schools will provide 200 minutes per week of physical activity for all students and that's not including recess and all i did was to add have a goal of doing that and put a note in there in all caps just so you would know that the

189state only requires a hundred minutes per week for k-5 and for the other grades and then looking at master schedules and i've even spoken to mr henderson about this it would be almost impossible to include 200 minutes of pe within a weekly schedule along with you know the reading and math and all of the other things we do we certainly want all the amount of physical activity we can do but it will not fit in the schedule and we don't have the capacity within our pe teachers to do each class at that amount so if you pass the policy my recommendation in here has been to have a goal of rather than to say that we will definitely do that because i don't think even though we want to do everything that shab would like

190for us to do because shaft has worked so diligently i just don't think we've got the capacity to do that so what you put in parentheses there and bolded that was just for our information you're not leaving that in the final draft when it when the policy is finally passed if you pass it at 200 i will take this language out or if you pass it with has a goal of we i'll still take the bold out but i just i don't want it to be left in here that charlottesville city schools will do 200 when that is something i don't think we can do saying it is a goal and that's the way it has been in the state standards is to have a goal of a certain amount if a school can do

191it that's awesome but to say that you've got to do it would really be a hindrance without adding to the school day you remember when we had a wellness policy back in 2011 just yeah you were intimately involved so do you think that this changes the that what we approved at that point um i think the the policy and the regulations have been changed to include some of the newer thoughts in student wellness so i don't see anything that is bad in the policy or the regulations you know i know shabb's job is to have the the best wellness program we can have and we all would like to do that too we just have some barriers to keep us from doing some of it now i will tell you one concern that some shad

192members have is that we all know that one of your duties is to pass policy yes and we have a policy says you have given the authority to issue regulations to the superintendent so the superintendent generally issues the regulations based on the policy that you pass some of the members check would like for there to be something written into the policy that says no changes will be made to the regulations without their approval and i have tried to say that we don't generally make changes to regulations without involving uh an advisory committee if one had been in you know working with us on this and that the administration certainly does not have the will to just go in and change regulations against what jab would like but the ability to change regulations still is in

193the authority of the superintendent and doesn't have to go to any board whether shab whether cet advice whether special ed advisor or whatever um you know it's the job of the advisory committees to give us advice and then for it to be followed so i've tried to you know tell the members that i've talked to on shaft where we're not trying to do anything to hurt and we would not just you know the minute the policy is passed we definitely would not just say oh let's forget the regs that's not what we're going to do if shab wants the regs we're going to do the very best that we can but we may have to look at it you know in in conjunction with all of the rest of the things that we're doing and

194i'm sure while mr henderson is here or with the new superintendent we'll make sure that everyone understands the importance of shad to this school community and the importance of the work that they have so we're not going to try to hurt our children or the families by just making a change to chad but that is a conversation i've been having with chef are there any other policy things that we want to look at or i appreciate your advocacy at the shop level obviously we typically as a school board try to let the superintendent create those regulations based on our policies some of those policies we do ask that the regulations come back before us at least i assume that any regulation that a superintendent would gait would probably be best served by them going through

195the shop so i just feel like a savvy superintendent knows to go through the shop and we've been looking at this since i came in 2005 and have worked since 2005 and we've never had anything in there that said that shad had to approve regulations or anything i mean that's when you look at what the what your role is and what superintendent's role is we're only following what we do with all the other policies and regulations i think that's the correct way to look at it and you know i think legally the superintendent does have that right so i don't think we can really change that in this policy thank you any other comments on this i mean do we need to speak to this specifically and how we want it um or is everybody

196comfortable with the goal of and leaving it like that [Music] with the goal of the way the wording was as far as the goal of 200 hours instead of minutes or minutes yes sorry some tired kids i think that's really it's a very smart move to make um you know because i i think as dr baptist was saying that it may be very hard to implement that that you know the 200 minutes in all situations and so i think putting it as as an aspiration or goal i think is more appropriate and protects us a little bit more i think when we passed this though in 2011 there was like a physical activity really meant also risa and meant being outside it wasn't pe for example it was a more broad sense of what is

197physical activity and i have to say that it did increase the level of recess and physical activity especially at the elementary level and so i can see the benefit of having the policy be that we would like again our students to have the goal of 200 minutes a week um and i don't know that we need to necessarily identify what the state requires i don't really i don't have thought about that but i do think that having the pe and having the recess kind of with the goal of having some giant number especially for elementary kids is important if we do not state it then the default will always be more more instruction and not the physical activity we've seen that we know that i mean we even even though the research says that physical

198activity is so critical um so i i just humbly say maybe the goal is that and we need to actually try to find a way to achieve that uh miss mchaven we've been working on the master schedules within the divi our master scheduling guidelines for the principles and we have been using for pe an average of 100 minutes and then adding recess for 30 minutes a day so that's 150 plus 100 so between the two that's 250 where what this is has been asking for is 200 minutes of pe plus 30 minutes a day of recess to make a total of 350 minutes of physical activity and back when 2011 that you were speaking of when it was broader the goal was 150 minutes of physical activity so that included pe and recess so now

199with what we currently got in guidance for principles would be 150 a week so that would that's that's really more than the state actually requires because the state requires recess but does not give an exact amount so we're giving 30 minutes or proposing 30 minutes of recess each day so we're actually going a little bit beyond what the expectations would we love to do more yes but it would take the extension of the school day to handle that plus all of the other academic and and intervention and sel and all of the other competing factors that are all equally important that's the problem um before i retired i was working with elementary teachers and defining um the verbiage of structured and unstructured play and then that that line of thinking is that structured play is

200someone who's structuring those activities and we think of that as our physical education teachers but we also think of unstructured play where teachers are either having their kids in a playground setting either structuring it somewhat but in a more informal manner and if we if we talk structured unstructured play we are really close of getting to the goal of 200 minutes and i think we should never just say for certain but i think if our goal is 200 minutes my guess is after we do it a year and come back and report on that we're probably going to be close to that or a little bit above and still maintain the right amount of time for reading and math and in our content areas what i'm hearing principals say during this past period of time

201when they were dealing with the framework of virtual learning and then moving back to face to face they actually incorporate as a little bit more structured play and they found that the students were more intentive attentive to what they were doing when they came back in the classroom and so i think even the principles are beginning to focus on the necessity of unstructured play so if i think if we just if i don't know if the board wants to use those those terms or those words in our policy we can easily put it in our regulations but i think that keeping it as a goal of 200 minutes look at where we are at the end of the year i think we're close i'm just calculating my head right now is that i can see

202us easily getting to 180 190 during the course of a day at the elementary school but but there could be ways where we're getting really close to two but just to say we're going to do this amount of minutes for recess and this amount of minutes for for recess i would rather us see how we we use play which which is a term that actually comes out of early childhood in kindergarten and is actually being utilized now with our principles for for what we're finding out is that it's really good for all our elementary kids that's my thinking i think parents really want i think that's what our parents really want and our and our students benefit and our teachers as a result so well i think for our purposes this evening uh i think

203we're talking about um that wording of just using the term goal and it seems like that's you know that we're comfortable with that uh so that's what we need that's what we need to [Music] decide that that's okay and i feel like that's really appropriate and goal is just more flexibility yes it does and i think that's helpful i think if some parents or community members have comments on this wellness policy that they should email the board because we are not approving it tonight it's something something that will be approved in a week and if there are changes that you believe strongly that need to be made then this is the week to we have public comment for this these policies so feel free to email the board about it but i do think the

204goal of 200 hours is perfectly reasonable thank you um mr johnson or lashandra any comments from you okay thank you no comment all right thank you any other questions comments about any of the other policies i'm good i thank you i thank you to you for all the time that this took i know it took a lot of time glad to do it and while i'm recommending following vsba's approach to the transgender policy i want to make sure the board is okay with that curious i mean i did i did read through that and i did take note of all of the changes that you know were made throughout the policies can you or someone speak to how that translates to what we're doing within the division as far as registration forms or other forms

205as far as identity pronouns those types of things have we have we made those changes that's something that's in progress and they're going to be times that we miss one like i missed one but the sba's approach is to look at the eight areas that are required by the policy and make sure that all of our policies meet that rather than having just one policy for one particular group if we have the umbrella policies and if every policy protects every group then it doesn't really make one group stand out more than another all of them are protected equally so that was the their thought behind it and they were able to show in our current policies with the addition of some language in places that i've shared with you how each of those eight areas

206has been covered and to me it really sounds like a good approach because we don't want to say just one group of people is going to have these protections we really want all of our students and all of our staff to share them equally and when you start doing it for one versus all it can sometimes you miss something yes ma'am i have um one experience um regarding names um and i just wondered like if we could because if you you can't legally like a pic i have been told that um you can't change what's on like power school or [Music] to reflect the name that you have chosen until you are legally changed your name which of course if you don't have parents who are supportive or if you don't have um you know

207i don't know that's 26 or whatever it costs to do the court costs to get your name changed then it's a challenge right like you know so i i was hoping that we could get a little more flexibility around what is on your record as your name if um it wasn't illegal i don't know if that's possible i just was hoping to support our students who are identifying a different name but who have not legally been able to change their name because they're not grown um but are but everybody recognizes them as this particular name so uh i'm humbly asking if there's any any way to support those students and if there's not that's fine if it has to go this way but i would just like us to double check to see if there's

208a way to kind of put their you know because it's very upsetting to like see your birth name and not your chosen needs i will check on the flexibility but i know in some of our systems that's almost impossible even if it's not about gender identity clearly i can't get beth in my personnel records i am june and personnel records so you know sometimes it whatever that legal name is on social security card or whatever is what the name is but i will check to see if there's any flexibility i know that on some recent work applications that i've looked at with my daughter um that there it seems to me i'm seeing a lot more of you know your legal name and then another like preferred name um and and so that that is

209just automatically given i've seen that a lot lately um so i don't know if we if that could be factored into some of this you know or at least hopefully our teachers are sensitive to that and asking you know so that and i think most of them are not all but i would be supportive of that i will check them let's say that those teachers have been incredibly supportive that's not the issue it's just kind of seeing your name on the report card or seeing your name it's kind of startling thank you any other questions concerns regarding policy i think we're good and i will send you those few little things i'll send them out to everybody so they can see them and once you approve them i will go back and get all the

210formatting correct i know it's a mess the way it is now i apologize but i will get it correct thank you all right oh we are now at superintendent search updates by me so i don't know if i need to turn around i do have a little bit of a powerpoint and thank you to the clerk for printing me something so i don't need to cream my neck so thank you um i do want to just kind of update everybody our survey for our superintendent search has has been up and running since may 20th i believe it continues to be available and open through friday tomorrow june 11th so that survey is is there for anybody in the community who would like to provide feedback and answer a few questions today yesterday and today boy

211i'm not sure what day it was so yesterday and today we've had multiple community um forums um some in-person options some zoom options by the team that is working with us from hya so we've had meetings with multiple community partners so invitations went out we we made in our work session a month or so ago a pretty comprehensive list of community partners as we all brainstormed and miss thacker and other people have been working hard to to send out invitations to them so community partners have had opportunities teachers and staff had opportunities there have been some open meetings we did have an in-person meeting available as an option at buford last night i believe there was a chs today for teachers and anybody who wanted to meet in person and and there is also a

212zoom open meeting that is available saturday so anybody who has missed prior meetings or invites there is an open meeting there is a zoom link that is available on on the website and behind me i believe that you can click on and join it's a wonderful opportunity my understanding is they're taking general comments and then you know sitting down and making notes so the notes are not attributable to any one individual but they're just getting general themes all of that information um is being gathered and then they will come back um next thursday to meet with us in person and present at our board meeting next week all of the information that they've gathered which will then kind of create a profile for what this community hopes to see in our next superintendent so that

213i hope that you all can join and that will also be publicly available on the website for people to view as well i didn't even look at my slide did i miss anything so yeah next steps again so next week june 17th at five o'clock we we do have another board meeting where we we will be taking action on um policy but also the uh superintendent leadership profile will be publicly presented which i just said august 4th the board will be meeting with hya to receive a seminar and some training on interviewing question determination as we and the slate of superintendent candidates will be presented to us and and then moving on into august and this timeline is kind of open as we're not sure how things will flow we will have the first round

214of interviews conducted by the board the board then deliberates and chooses finalists [Music] i think we're all leaning towards and and we can all discuss this a little bit more about um having a confidential community panel that might participate in the final interviews and then the board again will interview finalists and we will identify our finalists which would include a comprehensive background check and the first week of september 2021 we hope to be announcing our new superintendent and we are grateful for mr henderson and all that he um is is doing currently because we know he's working hard and we appreciate you sir so i want to thank everybody who was able to participate and everybody who um participated in the survey please share it out it's not too late again all of the links

215and and the option again for saturday are available and we appreciate dr drager and and ms monday for for participating and being present and meeting with all of us all right that is it um the next item we have before we go to the next item if you don't mind um beth chuck is in the zoom and um she can respond to the questions that mrs mccann you address regarding the names because right before i left we were working on that and that's why i thought we could do that so she is going to address it now if you don't mind her absolutely absolutely hello can you hear me thank you good evening everyone i wanted to give you a little bit of update about the questions that you all had about uh flexibility in

216uh the power school uh poor uh profile and also on the registration forms we've added several new questions that are in uh keeping with the state's guidance on transgender students that also in the last couple years we've made some changes gradually that support as we've said before all students there we have a whole variety of students just as people on this board use a different name other than their legal name and so for years we've been asking if they would like to indicate a preferred name and the difference is that the state is really encouraging school divisions to put that preferred name as widely and as broadly as possible before people so that teachers will not have to unlearn a legal name and then relearn a preferred name and that when parents get mailings come

217from us in the mail it won't say to legal name it will say to preferred name because we know our students and we want to treat them in the way that they want to be recognized and honored so that's one change that we're making and that's a change not only in the registry well that's not so much a change on the registration form but the way it's that preferred name is disseminated throughout powerschool and other programs that will be new and that is again in keeping with the state's guidance a few new things that are on the registration forms are the option to declare pronouns and the option to declare gender identity and again the state's guidance is very specific about how schools handle legal name and legal sex those are um cut recorded and

218captured from very for some very specific state purposes but the state's intent is for school divisions to um keep that sort of on record in a more private way so that people who need to know that information will know that information and that the the the way that the child identifies and what's just to be um acknowledged is seen in a more public way by uh teachers excuse me staff members other people throughout the system that's amazing and like moved it's amazing so thank you and and truly that that's um um i think that's the will of the community in charlottesville but it is all in keeping with what the state has kind of set out as a model thank you for that update that's great yeah thank you all right um the next item

219on the agenda is a board response to written report and it's a report specifically about the playground for walker [Music] i would like to ask that we consider this and kind of look at this report i don't know if miss powell wants to come up um or if you want me to kind of go through the steps of this my understanding of what has happened here with with the walker um playground so again i think everybody is um aware of um that there was a group um that have worked to um and this was all based on i think the students really voting and wanting to have a playground at walker upper elementary school and um so a group of parents set out to make this happen it's been in the works for a couple

220of years um i know that um some parents were were involved and and they got together with the city to look at um if and what it would take to happen there was private funds or philanthropists you know donated funds to it i believe a construction company was was tapped and to work with them there was a hiccup i believe that had to do with ada access from uh crow pool to the actual site which was um an unexpected kind of big financial hiccup and then i think there was a change in in the construction company's availability or ability to work with them so then that kind of left the group um searching for another um group to do the work for them and and and so with all of that being said there was

221a lump you know um sum of money that that they needed to come up with then um and i think that was mostly for the ada work entirely correct um the so the ada accessibility issue is not for the walker students to access the playground but it is for the public to access the playground if they're if you're parked at crow pool and that wasn't an unexpected expense that came on the report that krista bennett provided is really comprehensive it gives a almost a play-by-play and all of the details about how much money has been raised which is quite a bit where exactly the money is going and then what the remaining differential is and what happened is with after the ada issue came up they did go to the city and um because she

222had secured a matching grant of fifteen thousand dollars but needed the fifteen thousand dollar match because i believe um the total amount needed after the ada issue came up was fifty six thousand and some change and um so with the fifteen thousand the city did take action and this is all in the report um earlier this week i guess monday and they are you know to provide the 15 000 so then that's 30 000. and then that leaves when i was looking at the report it leaves 26 thousand i think eight hundred fourteen dollars i'm going from memory here but it's in the report and when i looked at that dollar figure and i consulted with renee hoover that's well within the range of funds that we typically have available at the end of a

223fiscal year when we're balancing all the accounts and closing out the year you those of you been you know you're familiar with that process when i saw that 20 some thousand dollars i just i just thought it was worth really drawing to your attention because once we know that that money is secured and available which it could be from our year in settlement that enables that walker playground to be installed and ready for those students when they come back in the fall because the equipment has been purchased and delivered and it's sitting in a secure location uh behind the lock gate behind grove and um the installation is paid for i mean we're they they are i say we truly that the the community has gotten it to this point it's this close so thank

224you for that yeah so um i mean i saw this report too and and had spent some time just chatting with kim and i knew she had talked with renee and so i wanted to just open it for discussion um to the board to get your your thoughts on um utilizing the year-end funds to kind of help make this happen for our students for next year and i think kim is available you know ms hoover is available for questions if we have any questions i believe but i don't know for sure miss bennett is available um you know if there's any questions but anyway i'd like to hear what people think and it would happen so that it could be installed this summer and and ready for students um in august yeah the pre-construction meeting

225was actually last week because again they're so close and that you don't think the team did not want to miss the opportunity to get it installed i i attended that pre-construction meeting i also wanted to mention that the reason this is coming to the board because this amount of money in the context of year in funds is not necessarily a big deal but this project came to you all as something that would not take funding from the school and so it's very important that if any funds go to this project from the school board's budget that you all i think authorize it because it's not the way the project was originally presented to the board that said this ada accessibility issue not for our students but for well for our students but if they're coming

226from home or from the direction of the crow pool they everyone can access this playground during the school day as is but fixing the sidewalk issue was a 50 plus issue that that group did not foresee when they embarked on this process [Music] do we need a motion because twenty six thousand dollars is separating us from probably getting this i believe that the um suggested language would be something to be effective that the board would authorize staff to um [Music] to contribute up to 26 000 whatever that exact amount is in year-end funds if they are available to facilitate completion of the walker playground this summer it was i believe it was and i see leslie raising her hand i believe that when if you wanted to act it would be something like that because

227we want to be on record that the school board acknowledges the contribution and it needs to be your decision when will we know what our end-of-year funds uh look like we we know from projection right now that these funds will be available i mean you have to understand we usually have a favorable variance of even a fraction of a percent is well over twenty six thousand dollars and we've looked at a number of things some additional radios that we need to get for chs to implement the new safety model that's three thousand dollars we're checking these things off that are needed and because we've closed as part of pros as part of cl um handling the budget for the for the um school board ed gillespie used to say it's like landing a jumbo jet

228on 29 i my analogy before i ever came here was always like you're trying to stop a high-speed bullet train on a railroad track which is your revenue before you run out of track there's a little bit of an art to it at around may all of the departments and principles there's a freeze on their spending they have to put their allocations and at that point it becomes a division budget and we're making decisions to stop the train land the plane so that we're balanced and have some favorable variance is always the goal i mean you just you never you can't well as you know legislatively we cannot be negative right but it's hard to stop it precisely so there's always this little variance around one percent or so you see that every year when

229we report the closing we we're far enough and now we're three weeks from the end of the fiscal year we know that the funding is available in year and settlement funds to address this as well as a few other needs that we know that are smaller again this project was never when it was presented to you was not presented as something that would take any school board funds so you need to be aware of this of course my question is if we take this 26 418 and put it towards this before the end of the year balances would we then subtract that from our end of your balance and then split that 50 50 with the city correct it does mean when you make this decision the 26 000 is not available for the end

230for the revenue share um process that that's also part of the settlement ms mckeever is speaking to and i can certainly call him a server to the podium if you want more details about that but you're familiar with that the first step this is going to would it be counted as spent money rather than spent it doesn't fall into the split that's right let's do that and clearly the city is in support of this they've they put up the 15 000 already to enable the match or they've authorized that so we're getting a 200 000 playground for 40 000 of taxpayer investment okay i would authorize that we do that i mean just as a reminder too as far as the process you know that that this um you know so this i believe started

231in 2018 um with the walker sixth graders participating in you know some design thinking sessions you know they had community feedback sessions um facilitated by the architect there was online surveys that received responses from 429 community members including 360 charlottesville city school students so i mean there was a lot there's a lot of engagement um you know in a really great process to get us to this point and it's really exciting to think that our students i know we're so close that our students could have that you know when they start school next fall a rising fifth grader so i feel very invested in making sure this happens at some point because so much of what we do is happening a long time from now and none of these kids will get the benefit from

232it so that something can actually be benefit somebody could benefit from it starting in the fall so did you make a motion i would like to if we yes i will move that we authorize the expenditure of twenty six thousand dollars up to four twenty six thousand four hundred and eighteen dollars i would authorize [Music] okay i just like to author um make the motion that we authorize spending up to 27 000 for the walker playground um and thank you very much walker playground people second any further discussion questions i think it's a great idea i'm i'm excited that it's this close that we can do this yeah i want to thank christa bender for kind of hitting this up for years she's been working on this so and i know she has a lot

233of volunteers as well but she's been spearheading it yeah i think this is a great thing to celebrate any other questions concerns mr johnson behind me lashonda behind me somewhere no questions all right all right let's take a vote please thank you mr bryant yes ms bryson morrisberger yes dr craft yes ms mckeever yes this per year yes miss torres yes and mr whitman yes [Music] thank all you we are now to um our our final opportunity for comments or members of the community um a reminder please um to state your name address and keep your comments to three minutes please and mr como do we have some anybody um yes let me just scroll to them there's one person with their hand up and it looks like it is uh christa bennett so miss

234bennett you have three minutes you should be able to unmute it this time okay great thanks well if i could have unmuted 20 seconds earlier you would have heard me screaming with delight um so thank you so much for it i am beyond um words grateful that you have voted to provide the final funding for a playground for walker um i am officially listed as a construction activity operator for our land disturbance permit so if you could just get me a hard hat we will all be set that little cushion and money should help you yes i i will no i will not spend that on a hard hat they're doing all of this 100 going to the playground i mean i could talk about this all night but i also want to address the

235changes that dr baptist has made around the wellness policy i am a shad member have been for four years i am the person or at least one of the people who is raising the concerns that dr baptist mentioned are coming from shab i am talking with some other shad members about what we want to do about these proposed changes dr baptist presented them at our last shad meeting but we weren't asked our thoughts on making the change where the wellness policy is divided into policy and regulations beforehand and i'm not sure that all the shad members realized the fact that that was going to have which is in the past the school board has approved the entire wellness policy now it will approve the policy part of what is created but the power over what

236uh dr baptist has now made regulations will be held by the superintendent and i started to ask some questions around this while she was presenting it during the shad meeting but i didn't want to take up our whole meeting and now i am taking the time to talk with other members about how they feel and it may be that shad decides to push back on this in a more concerted way so i just wanted to let you know that this is some of what is happening behind the scenes and i really appreciate miss mckeever highlighting how wise it would be for the superintendent to get shab's approval which was my suggestion to dr baptist and i believe i understood uh miss new keeper there correctly as a parent i found that can be really hard

237to know how to advocate for our kids shab is one of the best ways for parents to influence the district and i don't want to see any of its agency taken away one final thing dr baptist said we're not going to try to hurt our children and those kind of exaggerated statements make it a lot harder to talk about this because it's insinuating that you can question this process means that you're accusing someone of wanting to hurt children and another thing that she's told me as well the superintendent and school board have the same goals anyway and no one doubts that we all want what is best for our kids i really do believe that about every school board member and every um ccs teacher and administrator but we do have different ideas about what

238that means and we need to include as many voices as possible to get to the best solutions and shop is one of the ways that we do that and i'll be doing everything i can to ensure a shop has a strong voice all that said thank you again for the playground really really excited about this and um hurrah that we made it through this year thanks guys thank you um there are no other hands raised at this time give it a couple seconds here a couple quick seconds all right we're going to move on um and now we are to comments from the board um and so i don't forget that there are people behind me i'm going to start with la chandra if you're if you have any comments please um my only comment

239um be added for a follow-up is that um we're talking about transgender students and the pronouns and nicknames that are used um we might want to include um some of the counselors in the discussions because some of those changes in the system you know are you know we're keeping up with state policy but a lot of the um work has been taking place and so um like the thing with the nicknames and the systems and pronouns in the classroom um if we want more information we should talk to the counselors and the principals because there is a lot going on on the ground that we were doing before you know the state law mandated it and i think that was my only comment thank you mr johnson thank you and um you know i just

240want to start by saying you know this is going to be my last um meeting school board meeting as uh the school world rep as school years ending and um i say that not only not not to get a round of applause or anything like that but i say it because this is one of my last chances with this type of position maybe that i will be able to advocate or speak on some of these topics that should be spoke about and you know i really hope that over these next few months that there is that advocate on the board that can speak on what i feel is right and what this board is the head and direction of and you know my last bit i could say you know comments wise for what's been

241said today is you know about the you know virtual and you know the schedule for next year which has been on my mind the entire meeting um you know with with virtual learning i just really believe that if you can make it so the vaccine is available uh for it for choice like you can choose to get it or you can choose okay you know i've been good this you know this far i got my mask you know i'm social distancing i'm not going out that much you know i'm good if you can make that choice i think you should be able to make the choice of virtual or in person there are so many factors with you know that we have to consider that it's just really not fair that parents or you know

242students and parents and their families cannot make that decision you have families who have family members with disabilities with health issues and we're asking them to or in other words forcing them in some grades to come to school with no other option and putting their family at risk and i don't feel like that's okay for us to make our families feel like that and i spoke on this with um in the march meeting as well when it comes to really working together and not making this a one person decision or one group decision this has to be a decision when it comes to you know school next year it has to be a community decision along with the board along with staff it has to be a full group decision you know we have teachers

243who are very frustrated you have parents who are very frustrated with not having their voices heard with uh just the direction of the board and it's we we have to we have to figure out a way to to help their frustration and to get their word and and make them feel included and you know what we do and that's why i've loved this position because i've been able to you know been able to do that but the board should be more inclusive in you know allowing the voices of staff and um you know communities to be heard because i you know stu student uh reps won't be here throughout the summer so throughout the summer there has to be that connection there has to be that you know somebody has to be that bridge between

244the community and the board so and you know surveys you know i know we love to use surveys i've you know done that in the past in december with the um sros but surveys will not be enough to help bridge that connection you know we have to be able to reach our um community directly and in a more uh broader way so i think we just we got to come up with other ideas more creative ideas to get you know our community involved um and i think we just we need a better plan on to fall back on because there is no guarantee that this pandemic will continue to lower you know we have a very optimistic view like i said but that could all change in the next couple of months not everybody is

245vaccinated not everybody you know not everybody is safe so we just have to make sure that we have a plan that if everything does go south we can fall back on that you know that we do have virtual learning to fall back on so if we need to keep everybody virtual again we can do that so i just want to you know put that out there that we just really got to make sure that we bridge that connection and going into next year i really i really really believe that there needs to be an option both pre-k through two and in high school for our families to have that option to protect their families to be able to feel comfortable with their child and what they're doing to be able to have that choice to

246do virtual or in person like they have the choice of vaccine or no vaccine thank you mr johnson again it's going to start at one end who's ready it's prayer dr craft let's start with this per year i'd just like to say it's been an honor to get to know mr johnson he and i have emailed and chatted through this last quarter and i'm just very proud of the types of students that are part of our school division although his term may be over i think that he is a young man that we will be hearing a lot from whether he is speaking during public comment or whether he is writing uh us through email or other forms of communication uh he has a very strong network and i think that he and his colleagues

247make a lot of sense i hope that we as a school division will continue to be sensitive to the needs of all of our families i think that we are doing the best that we can it does not mean that there is not room for improvement and i hope that um mr johnson and his colleagues will continue to express themselves in order that their voices are heard because they are the individuals who will be doing what we do now because none of us around this table will be able to continue to do this in perpetuity and he is the type of student that we pride ourselves on here in the ccs family i would like to thank everyone in this division for all of the work and the efforts that they have done during the

248past school year whether you are a parent a student or an employee within our division it has been a heavy lift everyone is tired but everyone has always risen to the occasion when asked and as a member of the school board i am very impressed with that and i'm honored and privileged to have had an opportunity uh to be a part of this division during this pandemic thank you miss prayer miss mckeever i wanted to um advocate for volunteers being able to come back on site next year as mentioned by ms broadhurst of the java do you think volunteers our communities vital role in our school division so i really appreciate her comment and just a reminder to the extent that it's safe that we are looking for ways to incorporate more normalcy to the

249extent that's possible um i think um [Music] i wanted to say thank you to everybody for the incredibly quick graduation i'm just so proud and how we are a model of efficiency when it comes to our graduation i mean we could have been there later like obviously we were there for a very long time but um and the graduates were too but the ceremony itself only took 50 minutes 5-0 and i just feel like that's a model we should continue to emulate and i'm so proud of our students and of course my own child and and our staff for all the hard work and that heat was pretty pretty extraordinary um so thank you everybody for sitting through that and for all of the support that we had um to make sure that people had

250water and transportation to their vehicles um so yeah graduation very cool um i hope that we continue to look at the virtual model k through two in particular in the high school but also i was confused and i didn't ask this question about algebra at beaufort that was confusing to me why we didn't have algebra at beaufort um as potentially one of the virtual classes so um i just think that there's some work to be done i expect that there will be and it's going to be an evolving process over the summer and i definitely would hope that to the extent that families like mr johnson's um need to be reached out to and it's not just his family if there's a lot of families in that that our principals and staff are reaching out

251to those students and i i am exhausted just like miss purrier set up we're all tired and um i can't imagine if i was teaching the school year um and doing everything else that we expected the teachers to do so thank you very much to our staff and our teachers and our families for um you know holding on with us throughout this school year and i hope everybody has a really safe summer um i just wanted to thank the students particularly mr johnson as he's um very eloquently um spoke on his position on a lot of different things and and i know that we like leo said we haven't heard the last of them last of him and also for the graduates that um graduated last saturday congratulations and and best of luck with you

252all in the future endeavors that's all i have to say [Music] mr bryant first i want to say to mr johnson thank you so much for your willingness to serve on the student rep on the school board you've done an outstanding job many things um there are good things coming for you in the future i want to say thank you i'm proud of you continue to do good work you're in the neighborhood so whenever you have questions concerns i'm just right around the corner sitting on my front porch so congratulations i also want to congratulate the class of 20 21 congratulations to all our graduates um i'm hoping that you will go out and make your mark on the world also i want to give a shout out to especially our parents i'm not going

253to individually go into descriptions because i don't want to prolong things but our parents have done an amazing job of keeping our students on task this year virtual learning um was challenging for some i know i had a nephew who did virtual learning and his mother stayed on um and for others um many did quite well um our amazing teachers our amazing instructional assistants amazing administrators our amazing school counselors at the elementary middle and high school i know you all had a tough job our mental health counselors who piggyback with the school counselors i also want to make a shout out to the walk staff at charleston high school i'm quite familiar with that program and for many students walk was a program that enabled them to to make that step toward graduation and thank

254mrs poe and her staff members are doing an amazing job with our walk students a nutrition staff who provide nutritious meals for our students throughout the year our custodial staff who go far and beyond the call of duty and ensuring that our buildings are safe and clean our bus drivers who safely transport our kids to and folk and last but not least our students thank you so much for all the hard work and our community members who served as that village it takes a village to raise a child so many of our community members stepped up in one way or the other to ensure that all of our students were successful this past year i want to end on a concern that i heard earlier tonight and i'd heard this before um the young lady

255who spoke earlier during public comment for the lack of diverse staff and teachers of color um as you know i served in um in the school district for many years i think when i came on the board several years ago there was a group of african-american teachers back there taking pictures and as i was leaving um the convocation they were there taking a picture together and that was the first time that i had ever seen in my years of working for the school system that diverse group of teachers african-american educators and i didn't quite get all of what she said but the majority of what she said her concern for lack of diverse staff and teachers and i took note of that and that is a concern for me so i'm hoping that we will

256continue being that we're looking at everything through the lens of equity and diversity that whenever we have an opportunity to hire a person of color that that person be given an opportunity to move forward in the hiring process and this is a discussion in the community so we need to take note with this young lady said i'm not accusing anybody but when she said it it caught my attention so i'm hoping that we will continue to work to move forward and ensuring that not singing out african-american educators but making sure that they are also given equal access to moving forward in the employment process thank you mr bryant yes dr kraft i would like to echo thanks to first mr johnson uh for being an incredible uh voice on our school board and i believe

257you're you're still going to be around and maybe you can reapply next year we'd love to have you back i think uh you've been very valuable uh to us in hearing hearing your voice and maybe take your concerns very seriously um so i i'm thinking um by what a year we've had and i'm thinking uh of how many huge initiatives we have going on right now here we have you know it is exhausting we've worked so hard we have you know in top of our all of our return to learn issues we have a reconfiguration we have our superintendent search we have the renaming of the schools we have you know there's just so much and i want to just take a minute to thank our central office staff all of you who are here

258or even if you're on the screen it's been such a heavy lift you've had so much work to do and i can't imagine how we would be really functioning as well as we are without you um i was asked in my interview with the superintendent search firm about what are our strengths and one of the first things that came to mind was our our people our central office staff in addition to you know our principals and our instructional staff but i think that you guys are just rock stars and i really appreciate all the work all the extra work and the heavy lifting that you've done this year um and to mr henderson just officially um thank you for doing this and coming back and giving us your heart and your your head and uh

259i know it's a lot uh but it means a tremendous amount to us and then finally you know i think to the community i want to say that these big initiatives are they're community initiatives and we really need you i know we're asking a lot of you we're asking you to be in focus groups we're asking you to be on committees we're asking you to tell us what you think and this is something i mean it's a lot of work but we really need your involvement and if we're going to do the big things that we want to do if we're going to have you know if we're going to dream big and have you know big visions for our school division um to take us to the next level we need the entire community

260to be with us and to be supporting us in doing these things so i know it takes time and and effort but um we really we do need you so please stay with us please you know i know fill out surveys and come to focus groups come to meetings contact the board where that's why we're here so anyway i i do hope that we have it's going to be a busy summer i hope it's a good summer but it will be a busy summer and um yeah anyway that's that's it thank you um yes i thank you mr johnson i won't repeat all of that but you are we appreciate you we value you um and your opinion matters so thank you so much for all that you've brought to our meetings and and i

261do hope that we continue to hear from you so thank you again i want to congratulate also the class of thank you to dr irizari all of his staff everyone who worked to honor our graduates it was a great celebration i loved the fact that it was right here in our stadium um maybe could have started an hour earlier just to beat the heat a little bit but thank you it was wonderful to everyone gratitude um to all of the teachers staff the principals as we navigated through this past year a year like no other i hope we don't see a repeat but i do you know think we're not quite out of the woods and there are a lot of unknowns i think we've learned a lot and there are some knowns that we

262can walk away with i know that the teachers care the staff care that you know everybody worked really hard whether it was face-to-face whether it was virtual to show up and my wish and hope for us as a school division is that we together continue to work to make sure we can meet those kids where they are when they return in in whatever form that looks like and whether they are face-to-face or virtual i mean i think we need to be prepared um and and wherever they are is okay and it's perfect in in this moment and in these circumstances and we need to celebrate them and i know we as a staff do do a great job of that but i think we all need to remind each other of that i want to

263thank the families um also the partners um but mostly the students for showing up in whatever way you could in whatever way that looked like things are going to be different next year but i i feel like we can pull together and we can we can get through this i hope that everybody can embrace the summer break get some well-deserved rest for those of you who have signed up to help out with summer school thank you i hope you get some rest as well you're appreciated everybody's appreciated everybody deserves the break um the students are rock stars you know and i think whether they know it or not and i think maybe we do i mean they've learned you know whether it was standards or whether it was just life lessons and how to get

264through day by day or how to juggle um watching your siblings or or whatever that may look like we learned a lot of valuable and powerful things and i know that we're going to take those forward with us and that the students will take them forward and and in my opinion much more important than a standard um you know on an sol assessment but again that's my opinion um know that we the board will continue to work hard over the summer with mr henderson and the staff you know to ensure that we're ready for fall 2021 walk our students i'm excited for you because you get to start with some with a wonderful new playground and again i hope more than anything that we are all ready to meet and greet the students you know

265come august where they are and support each other in that so thank you to the board and staff and everybody for supporting us thank you mr henderson appreciate you again um that's it for me and i will turn uh it now over to you for superintendent [Music] comments first i'd like to give a shout out to all of our chs graduates i wish all of you the very best now and in many years to come also would like to thank the staff for your hard work your careful planning and your perseverance and getting us to this roller coaster ride of starting with virtual planning and development and implementation to changing gears and then going back to a face-to-face model your efforts are amazing and we truly appreciate what you what you've done and helping our

266kids succeed and lastly to thank the the families of our community for your flexibility and patience and working with our teachers and our schools and maintaining some expectations that we have that your child will succeed and um we look forward to bringing some sort of uh knownness if that's such a word to this coming year i know we've dealt with a lot of unknowns um this past year and it's um i'm looking forward to making sure that we have some stability um um so that we start the school year um where we're on the right foot moving forward and making sure that everyone is aboard to succeed the day they start and walk to the school doors thank you [Music] absolutely dr odie our unsung heroes award please thank you as you all know we

267have enjoyed recognizing several of our great staff members this year starting with our vips earlier in the fall and then we've ended the year recognizing many of our unsung heroes and these folks are those folks that are ex that are our exemplary support people our cafeteria workers uh bus drivers nurses instructional assistants there's so many different people that work sort of behind the scenes but really do an amazing job and we could not do the work that we do to support children without these great people so we we have several we finished our unsung heroes for the year uh with this last mondays for not recognitions but i'd like to share uh the last several weeks with you starting and we don't have pictures for everyone but we do have their name in their position

268so we have derrick lee a custodian at chs and sandridge who is retiring of course this year school nurse here at chs kathy showalter instructional assistant at the hospital education program victor witcher custodian at burnley moran those were from may 10. for may 17th we have ma stixx instructional assistant at jacksonville roger inge custodian at greenbrier dell mega custodian at walker and henry rush bus driver for jacksonville excuse me for johnson walker and chs from a24 deborah fields bookkeeper at buford waverly miler instructional assistant ed johnson karen warren instructional assistant also at johnson and carolyn washington custodian at walker for june 1st tracy casarez admin admin tech at the hospital education program donna churchman instructional assistant at greenbrier rachel hoff another instructional assistant at greenbrier annette kaufman horner edmond tech at the division annex and

269our final group of unsung heroes again nominated by their colleagues for june 7th chamira banks that's a small print there um we don't have we didn't put the location for these folks and i don't have it with me shamira banks is at walker tammy clements at clark j smith ed buford and ellen muller scream briar so that rounds out our list of what's that it does take a village thank you so much leslie uh we certainly have enjoyed recognizing our great people here in charlottesville city schools and we look forward to continuing with this next year thank you very much thank you and now we have work session wrap up dr dr baptist your microwave micro microwave oh my gosh i'd like to see the microwave from the gifted presentation more of the data broken

270down demographically getting the gifted data into the equity dashboard looking at gifted data from prior years and also by breakdown and to also think about how to measure the outcomes the slide presentation about returning to learn in the fall make sure it is on the web page if it is not already in august have dr bonds or someone else similar to her to talk to us about the status of covet in our community have the nutrition port reports available for the knaj policy make sure we have that ready before the beginning of school or any of the others dealing with that topic and then although beth chuck did answer the question about flexibility also talk with the counselors and others to see if there's anything else that could be done thank you um and then

271up for upcoming meetings we have a school board meeting next thursday june 17th right here five o'clock and that is it and with that i will adjourn the meeting thank you much thank you everybody