February 4, 2021 Charlottesville City School Board Meeting

001foreign okay you miss packers nice to see you again hi thank you for having me please um i will do my best to to pull you in for comment if you'd like to but if there's something i mean feel free to send me a chat you know or poke me somehow if you like to make a comment please okay all right it is 501 folks and i would like to call this meeting to order this is uh february 4th and this is our monthly school board meeting i would like to ask everybody if you would please join me in a moment of silence uh however you would so choose to do that um i would like to personally for me recognize some uh the loss of some family members of some of our alumni members

002here in the community and just the loss um you know throughout the state and the nation and the world right now so if you'll please join me for a few seconds thank you madam clerk could you please um call roll madam chair mr bryant president miss bryson morrisberger president dr craft president ms mckeever here ms furrier president mrs torres yes and mr wade yes thank you manager thank you um i'd like to call for approval of the agenda please i so move we approve the agenda thank you madame uh clerkly please call yes madam chair mr bryant yes is bryson morrisberger yes dr craft yes miss bekeever yes miss per year yes ms torres yes mr waite yes thank you thank you now i'd like to open this up for comments from members of the

003community i'd like to remind our community members please to state your name and your address and to limit your comments please to three minutes uh mr como we we did um have quite a few people sign up beforehand so he will call your name um and or ask that you notify us through chat or raise your hand and then again as a reminder you will be limited to three minutes for your comments thank you madam chair um i am going to unmute and promote to panelists the user is listed as carol bushing and carol you should be joining us now you should be able to unmute you can do video on a video off hi everyone my name is carol bushing i live at 1320 riverdale drive hello school board and staff i'm a parent

004in the division as well as a teacher i would first like to thank you for your advocacy on behalf of the students and staff of ccs as you work to make decisions about safely reopening schools while there are no easy answers i truly appreciate your focus on science and safety i come today to ask for more of that advocacy for the students of our division and state whether in person or virtual the lives of the students of this state and the entire nation have been permanently altered due to the global pandemic yet the vdoe has not altered its course in terms of the amount of material that students are expected to master by year's end as a parent and a teacher i have seen the impact that 11 months of stress and trauma can have

005on a child's ability to process understand and retain information the pace of the normal curriculum doesn't work when the world is falling down around our ears stamina and the ability to focus process and retain information in large quantities with quick exposures are what is required in the current jam-packed curricular journey yet stamina processing and retention are the exact areas so affected by trauma and consistently high levels of anxiety what a gift we would give our learners if they were able to instead focus on depth and breadth of concept delivered with trauma-informed teaching strategies and this is possible without adding days to the year mr northam each time the slls are changed moved or split up the vdoe crosswalks missing sols into the former and latter years this crosswalk ensures that by graduation all of virginia's

006children will have experienced the same conceptual and procedural work this same strategy could be employed now if the vdoe was to decide to do this doing so would allow students this year to have fewer sols to master giving them the time they need to do their absolute best educators would then have the time we need to focus on each student's cognitive and perhaps more importantly emotional needs i hope vdoe thank you for your time thank you miss bushing mr como next so i'm waiting for others at this time to please raise their hand there were a number of people who were registered to speak for public comment and here we have a couple more so i'm going to just go from the top the name on the next public comment is for anne-marie smith henry

007you should be able to unmute your microphone at this time hello can you hear me yes ms smith okay great thank you so much good evening my name is ann marie smith um i live at 810 federal terrace um and i really appreciate the opportunity to be able to speak tonight i'm i'm the mother of two high school students a senior and a freshman my three children have proudly participated in chs are in the city schools since their elementary school days tonight i would like to speak to you as a mother of my children and as a mother of our communities children because at the end of the day they are all our collective children and we are responsible by virtual by virtue of age and experience children often do not have a voice so

008they need us to lift their voice our voices responsibly for much of the past year the school board has been focused on the health crisis caused by covid much of that response has been based on fear luckily we have increasingly more data to help us move from a place of fear to a place of informed safe action we know for instance that children are not efficient spreaders of coved that mitigation efforts such as ppe and social distancing work and i could go on and on but you all each have access to the same data we also now know just how bad it is for our children to be out of school virtual learning is no substitute for the in-person experience the data shows that our children's mental health is suffering teenage suicide is way up

009for example and very sadly including locally we also know that kids learn little through the virtual format kids who were behind before are much further behind and they may never catch up a senior at chs that might have gone to college had they been around a caring adult will never go to college because they weren't around that caring adult the decisions made by the school board about how to educate our children during the pandemic will color the rest of their lives please make decisions with this gravity in mind please keep this in mind as you consider whether whether or not to bring back kindergarten through second grade students in march please keep this in mind when you decide who to bring back and when to bring them back please have a plan and they're ready

010so we can get all our children back in school as soon as safely possible their lives will be affected by such decisions our children are counting on us i would add that i celebrated that um chs or the city schools prioritize the safety of teachers rightly so they're a precious commodity a precious gift to our community and that i'm so glad that everyone has had the opportunity to get vaccinated the first time and we'll soon have an opportunity to get the second vaccine but i would also note that there are fellow um teachers who have been in private schools in person since the fall who have not had that same opportunity ms smith professors like my husband who are in live and not and so let's please you know use that wisely thank you for

011letting me speak thank you okay next on the list we have the lister is jen the last name is m-a-e-n-g should be able to unmute it this time hi um thank you for the opportunity to speak tonight my name is jen mang and i live at 614 rainier road i'm the parent of two johnson elementary students so my comments tonight relate to the proposed 2021-22 calendar and i have three main concerns about the proposed schedule that i'd like to share with the board and then i also shared through the google form which i appreciate the opportunity to use first i would consider urge the board to consider beginning school for students a week or two earlier than is concurrently proposed at the start date of august 25th prior to the 2020 shift to post-labor day

012this school year was slated to begin on august 19th i believe and i believe the start dates for the last five years were the 19th 17th 23rd and 22nd and 21st respectively um beginning a week or two earlier would provide us a better opportunity as a school community to support students who've had as our previous speakers mentioned an unprecedented school year potentially reduce the quote summer slide which is likely to be exacerbated this year and provide more opportunities to use outside spaces in our schools and our school communities while the weather is still nice this would also allow for the potential of a buffer if schools need to accommodate closing or virtual instruction over the winter for a period of time as we know that our youngest learners won't likely be vaccinated by then second

013there doesn't seem to be a rationale for not having school on january 3rd and i would be interested in the justification for this quote no school for students day or anyone finally i would urge the board to look at the fact that there are currently three 40 weeks scheduled for a january right after the two-week winter break removing january 3rd as i previously mentioned moving the end of semester teacher work day to align with martin luther king day reduces the burden on working parents having to find care three days in the same month right after the two-week winter break to two days over one four-day weekend potentially shifting the start date of the school year earlier would accommodate this as would potentially some creative thinking about the end of the semester and when that teacher

014work day falls relative to the true end of semester thank you for your time thank you um next on our list we have uh deborah hellman who can unmute it this time i think i've unmuted can you hear me yes yes great my name is deborah hellman i live at 1401 rugby road um i have one daughter currently at chs now and another daughter who graduated last year um and i also want to speak about the issue of getting our kids back to school in person as soon as possible or i think i concur in everything that anne-marie smith said so i won't repeat the parts that she said but um i do think you know the cdc is letting us know that um in-person education is safe with masking and social distancing and i

015do appreciate the reality that teachers may be worried and parents may be worried that compliance can be difficult and those measures have to be complied with but if the teachers are also vaccinated it seems that it should be safe once that has occurred i'd also add that teachers in virginia are prioritized for vaccination ahead of high-risk individuals and there are a lot of high-risk individuals that are waiting for a vaccine so that our teachers can and i support that i think that teachers should be first because the the health and development of our young kids is so crucial but it's i think almost ethically inappropriate to waste that benefit and not take advantage of the fact that our teachers have been prioritized by keeping the teachers not with the students in school i think that's

016not fair to those who are asked to wait who have high-risk medical conditions if we don't have our teachers back in school providing that necessary education to kids i'll just say that i'm not um insensitive to the risk that that teachers may feel and the fear that they may have i myself am a teacher i teach at the university and i am teaching in person to 70 students now i recognize that university students are more mature and more compliant than than kids are but i'm not being i'm not i'm not speaking from no understanding about how someone might feel in such a situation and i am teaching in person to those students um i think it's if you've taught online and you've taught in person you cannot miss the difference of what that experience is

017it's dramatic it's critical equity is a huge issue for our school system i think it's even more dramatic and critical for our students who are at risk there's a lot of evidence that we're exacerbating the achievement gap among more privileged and less privileged students during this time of online education and i think it's imperative that we get the kids back as soon as possible i also want to flag the fact that we should not be naive about what the fall is going to be like and so if you think oh we're just going to get through this year and then everybody's going to be back and it's going to be all normal in the fall i don't think that's a realistic expectation and so we have to be planning time's up we have to be

018planning now for the fall thanks so much thank you i'm next on the list we have the user is listed as annie s-u-t-t-l-e should be able to unmute it this time hi yes my name is annie suttle i am at 708 park street and i have two children at burnley moran elementary i'm speaking tonight on behalf of the charlottesville city schools joint pto reopening fund to provide you and the community with a short update on its on its progress to date a reminder that the joint pto reopening fund was created to support effective teaching in a virtual environment and allows equal opportunity for each student and teacher to productively utilize the district's mandatory nine-week virtual learning plan the reopening fund has received a total of one hundred sixty three thousand seven hundred eighteen dollars and

019forty one cents from a hundred and eighty donors an increase of nearly 2 620 since our last report 159 000 from the fund was distributed to the ccs schools which have created dedicated committees to select expenditures these committees have been spending the resources to support students virtual learning needs and in some cases meeting families essential needs some examples of how the funding have been spent recently include on december 17th and 18th charlottesville of last year charlottesville high school held a chs cares holiday drive-through event through generous support from the joint pto reopening fund 200 chs families in need were invited to drop by school to pick up a bag stocked with nutritious shelf stable grocery items for the winter break each bag included a kroger or food line gift grocery card to enable families to

020purchase fresh items like milk eggs and fruits and vegetables sixteen volunteers from the chs pto spent nearly a full day working with chs teachers and staff to pack up these grocery bags for distribution and the joint pto reopening fund was used by green bar elementary school to help cover the remaining transportation costs for children attending international neighbors learning centers which are two or three miles from their homes international neighbors serves 30 newly arrived school-aged children who lack the skills and tools necessary for online learning without significant support many school committees shifted planning and purchases recently to support an in-person return those purchases are no regrets in that the materials or services can still be utilized in a post-covered school year if not utilized this school year from the beginning this committee has been committed to

021the transparency of this effort we encourage everyone to visit ccsptofund.org to find out how funds are being spent and distributed we wish you a constructive meeting and thank you for your time miss suttle thank you so much for that update and i did see your email and i apologize it was one that came in late this afternoon so i owe you a response no no worries thank you thank you um the next users on the screen um last name is syed should be able to unmute at this time hello can um can can you guys hear me yes um hi everyone my name is sana sayad i'm a pediatrician at uva um i have worked now uva for the past four years and prior to this i moved from boston um with prior training at

022harvard embryo duke i just wanted to thank the committee for the opportunity to speak to um to you all there were three things i wanted to speak about one i think that teacher safety is paramount two there were things that i've seen on the parent teacher portals online about vaccines that i just wanted to make sure i address with my pediatric and scientific background and the third being of child mental health so teacher safety i just wanted to say that as a pediatrician i completely agree that teacher safety has to be paramount um i think given that the vaccine is now out there all teachers under whichever phase they are should be given the option of getting the vaccine and as such the the option of coming back to school in person should be only

023after all teachers have been offered this so coming to the vaccine i know um what i've read and i've heard concerns from from teachers and parents alike is about the 95 the 95 um efficacy of the vaccine i just want to clarify a few things all vaccines none of them are 100 effective so when we say a vaccine is 95 effective you you can compare it to other vaccines like measles varicella flu enzo when the cdc says that um uh you will get safety and them and decrease in democrats of covid with a 95 effective vaccine they're taking into account the fact that um that that five percent uh part is there so i just want to make the point that um vaccine efficacy is very very good um the last part i wanted to

024bring about is just child mental health so thinking about cost versus benefits so we've talked we've heard about child equity the equity of education and um again as a pediatrician we're seeing this a lot in our clinics there is an undeniable burden of mental health especially the younger children whose education is more about in-person interaction than actual teaching um and they are being severely impacted just in oral clinics we have seen more and more children show up with anxiety depression as young as ages of five and six which is which is a um which is something that we need to be aware of and balance in this and i i also want to highlight that i agree we don't know where the total infection rates etc uh will go in terms of the community at

025large but in general with uva opening with the health system being open we know that wearing a mask social distancing etc the environment can be safe to come back in so if if the concern is that um despite the vaccine um despite measures in place um we won't be 100 safe then i would say that's where we have to think of the risk benefit ratio because in theory every time you get in the car it's not safe to um it's you know you don't have a hundred percent safety of being um um sorry i'm trying to wrap up yes i think you get what i mean okay thank you dr sian we appreciate your comment i'm at this time there are no other hands raised i will give anyone on the phone um they can

026press star 9 on their phone if they do want to raise their hand and i'm all now i'm seeing another hand first name is john last name is w-e-l-l-s should be able to unmute it this time good evening everyone uh thanks for having me uh john wells 1122 east jefferson street and just want to say thank you to all of you for the work that you've put in and attempting to get kids back to school based on the email that went around from the division this afternoon it looks like pre-k to second we'll get voted into face-to-face tonight um i hope that's the case i appreciate the comments from mrs smith hellman and syed i agree with uh with those with those thoughts i want to address something a little more narrow on on the

027call tonight and that is the decision to leave out third and fourth grade for bringing um the elementary school kids back back in person um i don't know if it's been addressed specifically or explained in detail but to me you know if this if this group is about equity and inclusion i i simply don't understand the decision not to bring back third and fourth grade also and imagine the family that has three kids that right now they're sitting at the y um and and one kid is a third and fourth grader and there's a single guardian bringing all those kids up what you know what is the decision-making process here if they have a job you know a 10-hour job whatever they're doing they they have to decide between splitting the kids up or um

028or just making doing the easy thing and leaving them at the y and i think everybody on this panel on this board and in the division agrees that it's best to get the kids back to school i just don't understand how that decision is uh promoting equity and inclusion knowing that the best thing to do for these kids is getting them in back into school so if you could address that at some point specifically i would appreciate it it sounds as though you know we're stuck on on numbers and specific distances for social distancing and all that sort of thing but with 35 percent less kids in in the building at least you know planned based on the last survey i'm not sure i understand either how social distancing parameters um are going to come

029into play here so if equity and inclusion is indeed you know what we're trying to address as a community i would um i would ask that the board working with the division reconsiders uh the the group that's to be brought back on on the eighth and includes third to fourth grade with the rest of them elementary students thank you for your time and all the work that you've put in thank you mr wells at this time we have emily last name w-o-n-g who should be able to unmute at this time hi yes are you able to hear me hi my name is emily wong thank you for giving me this opportunity to speak i'm a pediatrician at the university of virginia caring for many of the children in the city of charlottesville and i'm also

030the mother of two city school children as a pediatrician i support the reopening of the charlottesville city schools this is consistent with the recommendations of the american academy of pediatrics and the centers for disease control to have children physically present in schools we have seen nationally and locally that schools are places with a low risk of transmission if appropriate mitigation strategies are implemented since july i have been meeting weekly with other pediatricians in the community the blue ridge health department and all the private and public schools in the area every week we review the current local data on covid in our community we discuss symptoms testing mitigation strategies and policies to ensure that we are all working cooperatively supporting the schools to remain open and reducing the risk of covet transmission the schools have acted

031quickly to contain spread lower risk and the pediatricians are all committed to evaluating children as needed in weighing the choices about school opening we must also consider the consequences of sustained closure i've been seeing children in the office throughout this pandemic and in my 17 years of practice in charlottesville i have never seen such a severe mental health crisis as we are seeing now the extent and severity of depression anxiety anorexia and suicidality are significant every day i am seeing children as young as five or six were suffering and i've seen young children left at home unattended and children without enough food at home we will see the developmental and academic effects in years to come recently i saw covet vaccination of city school staff going on at chs and i was really pleased because

032the teachers and school staff should be a priority their work is essential now is the time for charlottesville city to make charlottesville children a priority and their in-person education should be an essential service thank you thank you dr wong i do not see any other hands raised or messages in chat well we do have another hand raised first name is listed as jennifer the last name is g-r-o-v-e-r should be able to unmute it this time jennifer if you're there you see if you can unmute did that work yes there you go yes great hi my name is jennifer grover i live at 609 malcolm crescent i have two students at burnley moran elementary i've been in contact before i'm sure some of you recognize my name and i appreciate the replies that i've received from

033you i would just like to address tonight as other parents and representatives of our community have discussed the issue of getting students back to school as soon as possible including the entire elementary staff i am one of the sorry the entire elementary student body uh my family is one of those families that would be split with some being allowed to return on march 8th and some not and it is the upper grade that is struggling so when i read the email today that said that struggling students would under certain circumstances be allowed to return i chatted with my principal about whether or not that would apply to my child and the short answer is that under the current sort of guidelines it doesn't apply to my child but nonetheless she and many of her friends

034are really struggling and as the last pediatrician said what i'm seeing in my household is is an academic situation what a dear friend of mine is seeing is a severe emotional and social situation i feel that it's imperative that all of the elementary students get back as soon as possible especially given the very recent journal of the american medical association indicating that children under 10 are simply not the same risk as older children as adults so i wanted to reiterate again what many parents and pediatricians have been saying tonight thank you for your time thank you okay at this time i am looking to see if there are any other hands that are raised or any other chat messages right now i don't see any madam chair oh i do have a hand raised first

035name is listed as angel and last names f-e-e-r-o should be able to unmute at this time hey this is uh actually richard firo using uh the computer with my wife 825 prospect um anyways i just just excited to hear the community coming out and uh expressing their desire to have kids back in person so i just want to thank everybody who's come on to do that and i also just want to give a shout out to dr beth baptist and all that she's done to help make sure the communities gets uh working with students gets vaccinated so that's all thank you guys thank you mr fierro okay i'll start my my rant again i'm looking and the attendees list no hands raised at this time and no chat messages indicating speaking i'll turn it back

036to you madam chair for a time of waiting before we move on thank you and a reminder to everybody that there is another opportunity towards the end of our meeting for public comment um and we are always open to emails and and other ways for you to you know reach out to us to share your concerns or comments or ideas we'll give it just a couple more seconds and then we actually are going to roll into an opportunity for public comment um specific to our 2021 2022 budget so anybody mr como we are still um zero hands raised and okay then then specifically i will this now i will open this up for public comment um specific to our 2021-2022 budget please okay i do have one hand raised right now um beth last name

037ike should be able to unmute it this time thank you um my name is beth ike i live at 802 st claire avenue i asked this question in the joint city council school board budget meeting and i haven't seen anything to clarify i'm curious about the raise for administrative staff and who that encompasses i would encourage those staff receiving perhaps higher than two hundred thousand dollars a year to um either forego that raise on their own i just feel like through the lens of equity the idea of giving raises to some of our highest paid and then very well paid administrative staff feels icky to me to say the least thank you so much for your time and all of your work i appreciate it thank you for your repeated message all right um i

038will tell you that i see no chats or hands raised for public comment on the 2122 budget and i will again defer back to you for a time of waiting before moving on okay we'll wait a few more seconds if miss mckeever would do us a favor and serenade please um that would be a very poor choice um all right a few more seconds here and then i believe we will move on one more one more view there mr como anybody sure there's no one no one with a hand raised no chats okay at this time all right then i will close public comment um around the budget and we will move on to student and staff recognitions please good evening madam chair school board members and dr atkins it is my pleasure to show

039appreciation to groups within the charlottesville city schools tonight we are recognizing four different groups as we celebrate principals week school counselors week school board members month as well as school board chicks excuse me school board clerk and deputy clerk week starting with school principals their week was january 24th through the 30th as a small token of our appreciation we did treat them with lunch last friday just just to show them we could not do the important work of educating our students without them our principals are dr elizabeth korab at burley moran mr kenneth leatherwood at clark miss dina freaky at greenbrier dr justin malone at jacksonville miss summerlin thompson at johnson dr erin kirschner at venable dr adam hastings at walker dr jesse turner at beaufort dr eric irizarry at charlottesville high and miss deal

040geo doll at lugo mcginnis academy so we do again thank all of our principals for everything that they do for us [Music] next we have our school counselors this week february 1st to february 5th is national school counselors week and we and publicly we would like to thank them for their work they complete many services for students and our teachers parents and administrators and our school counselors are rebecca baber at burleigh moran nashua taffy at clark catherine sublett at greenbrier kristen ulrich jackson via allison pillow at johnson malika redden at um redden excuse me at venable elizabeth dinwiddie and john crostain at walker joshua epps and william ulrich at beaufort emily patrusky at lugo mcginnis academy and we have at charlottesville high school department chair shamika terrell nikki eubanks david wilkerson brianna hill melanie key

041and hannah doughty so we again just want to thank all of our school counselors for all the work that they do on our behalf now we would like to celebrate our school board members as the month of february is school board member appreciation month our board you all deserve a month and more of daily thank yous for all the work you do on behalf of our students staff families and the community so at this time we will pause just to tell you thank you to all of you for your hard work and doing what is needed on behalf of our students and staff the now last but certainly not least the virginia school board association has designated the third week in february as school board clerk appreciation week so at this time we honor our

042school board clerk miss julia green as well as our deputy clerk there you are liz i had to find you on the on the other grid leslie thacker the two of you are responsible for keeping accurate records of the meetings and proceedings of our local school board a record of all receipts as well as disbursements and a record of all official acts and that's just a small view of what's on your list so thank you very much for your dedication to our school division and we appreciate you both greatly and those are all the appreciations i have uh madam chair thank you dr king very much and yes i agree gratitude and and so much appreciation for every single one of those people that you mentioned and more so thank you um i would now

043um like to move on and ask that we uh consider adoption of the consent agenda please madam chair i move that we accept the consent agenda a second any questions or discussion from anybody and i'm not seeing everybody so speak up if you do and if not madame clerk if you will call for a vote please it's mad chair mr bryant yes miss bryson morrisberger yes dr craft yes mitzvah keever yes is per year yes it's torres yes and mr wade yes thank you thank you and i need to make sure i'm looking at the right agenda because i have an old one in front of me here all right our next item is an action item and um i would like to address the board and ask that without objection i'd like for us

044to verbally affirm the plan to return to in-person instruction on march 8th following option a so if there is objection if you would please speak up so i can uh madam chair i i object to option a i i feel like i want to affirm the return to learn but i want to more broadly bring children back and i feel like option a is clearly too limiting as one of our principals has already told a parent how limiting it is so i want to ensure that there's utmost flexibility for our division to get as many students back as possible and i feel like option a may be too limiting okay so objection noted i will open this up for discussion at this point so miss mckeever if you'd like to start first and then if

045there's anybody else please who would like to speak up we will receive that as well okay so i um obviously have been pretty firm in my support for keeping schools um remote for the past uh 10 months so i feel very odd um in the this position um but having uh seen many teachers um and staff members able to receive their first shot and certainly before school starts um getting being able to get their second shot i am exceptionally optimistic about um students returning to school uh sooner you know march 8th being um i think a great place to start um i cannot tell you how you can most i mean all parents know um how challenging this has been um and this is not like i i just i i can't i feel like

046i have seen in the past three months more so in the first set than the first seven months just how difficult it has been for the kids in my own household because i just want everybody to know i do have four children of my own in public school this year two at um elementary school and two in high school this has been a very personal journey and um one that i i don't you know all of us have suffered and so the teachers the staff our our community has suffered and it let's just go back to you know start where we we how we started was just a failure of our federal government to recognize that there was a problem and now that i am that that i have we have a government that actually

047acknowledges there is a problem and is is seeking to um get as many people vaccinated as possible and require masks and all of the things that we know helps our community be protected from this virus i'm i just feel like i've turned a page um because of those things um i feel like there is data on both sides and have been for the past 10 months and you can pretty much point to any study um to say the opposite of what you are saying at any given moment so the vaccine really is the game changer here um i would like to see every student pre-k through 12 have the opportunity to return to school um in some form it doesn't have to be dramatic i am um and i would like you know if it's

048staggered starting march 8th that's what i would like to see um i don't want to see the pressure on students to ramp up at that point though one of my kids um she said uh i don't want to go back to school if it means i have to do more work um and that just reminded me how traumatized our community is because she's already scared of the pressure of high school and i just don't want that i want the kids need to have an opportunity to transition back in an approach that is mindful of their mental health needs um their social emotional and academic needs last i mean i don't care if you're a senior in high school or a preschooler the most important thing is to transition back in a way that supports the

049mental health of our community um this all of the decisions that have been made have been uh have affected everybody um and the in our world this is not like this is a thing that is anyway so i i just want to move on we our students are traumatized and i do not want to be to exacerbate that trauma by demanding more from them once they do return to school um i also don't want to see the school year extended i i don't we don't have the budget for that first of all um that's like the least of the problem but that is at this point um i'm happy to look at the calendar for next year but i don't i see this period as an opportunity to transition back to see your friends to

050kind of regularly weekly i also agree with many of the parents the pre-k through two option i thought was um very good when there were other very few other choices so that we could get pre-k through two kids reading right now i would like the pre-k through two and the three four separation doesn't make any sense to me um and i and like i have mentioned i think it's kind of the worst case scenario for families um because for example i'm just gonna point to myself i think i've mentioned my mom is my child care provider and she can't be around children who are going to be going to school so i no longer then have a child care provider three days a week because she can't be around my other child who's now able

051to go to school so it's it really creates i think more problems than it solves um so if we can get more kids back sooner um i would like to see a plan for that it doesn't need to happen the plan doesn't need to happen today i want to see the you know plans that the educators make um but i really strongly support um much of what the parents are seeing here and i definitely acknowledge the mental health toll that this has taken on our whole community uh let's just be frank all the community is suffering as a result of this but that we so supporting the social emotional well-being of our students and our staff to slowly return back to school um i would like to see that a much broader base of all

052of the students be able to return who want to return to school thank you thank you ms mcever um let me scan through my screens here i'd like to yes miss lachandra bryce and morrisberger you're up um i just want um to voice an objection to the october 8th return marching um i'm sorry what did i say it doesn't matter i'm sorry it's covet it's the fatigue the march 8th return um because although teachers are in the priority group and they're starting to get vaccinated they have not received their second shot they can't all through february is booked up um so it's into march to even get the second shot um and i believe the shot we're receiving is the moderna and it's 95 effective after the second shot two weeks after the second shot

053and so until teachers have the opportunity the staff has the opportunity to be fully vaccinated i'm going to uh object to starting before that date i would like to give them the opportunity to at least get the full vaccine um and also um there's been a lot of talk about equity and equity is important you know to the board it's important to me um and so it's important to note that you know kids there's no vaccine for children and everyone the long-term effects and how it affects children it's it's still a developing story um we don't know what we the things we will know in six months that we don't know today uh will it will be a total game changer i'm sure it just changes daily um but you know as far as equity

054if kids can still spread it people who are fully vaccinated can still spread it for equity a lot of our students who we want to be fair to live in multi-generational homes um they live in uh communities where the spread is your life is vastly different if you live in an apartment versus if you live in a house a single family dwelling so you know equity is important for our students it's important to the people in our community that could be exposed and so i think that when we're talking about equity we should really follow all of the different implications and um i love our public schools and i think that it is unfair to compare us continually to private schools just speaking in terms of equity itself if you're comparing us to a private

055school you have the option of going to private school then your leaps and bounds were above where most of us are starting from so it is not an apples to apples comparison um so i just wanted to speak on you know equity comes up a lot and equity the achievement gap those things we want to face them and fix them but we are living in a pandemic and you know equity equity was an issue before the pandemic when kids were in the building so i hope that when we're comparing public schools to private schools and talking about what is equitable and what is inequitable that we appreciate the fact that there are applications for equity that go you know way beyond this discussion and that that we're thinking about it in long terms and not

056just right now in this moment because i hear from a variety of people who come from less equitable conditions who are not you know the first people to say i want my children back in school so i just wanted to add some you know other perspective to say that it's not a one and done with equity because everyone's back in the building thank you mr wade um thank you madam chad i just wanted to start off by saying that i am prepared to support option a and i just think that it's time for us to start the process of bringing the students back in in the building i think that this is a great first step and um i think that down the road you know if if things are going well um dr atkins

057if you can you know let us know and maybe we can you know um bring in more or re-look at the the what we're doing but i think that this proposal starts the process and and um it's not you know i think it's the best that we can do at this time but we're starting the process and it it you know when we looked at this proposal we got input from the principles on how this would work and how you know they felt that based on what the spacing that this would be the best option so um and i understand what my other two colleagues were saying and and then excellent points but i just don't think that we can delay this and study it anymore come back with any proposals we have to continue

058to support what we approved at our last meeting so i'm prepared to support option a thank you thank you mr wade miss purrier would you like do you have anything to no okay mr bryant i'm looking for you um i'm here um i am you know i heard on both lisandra and jennifer but i am in support of option a i think we need to move forward um and if any given time that we can bring in additional students i'm sure dr atkins will call the board together but i think we just need to move forward and get those students back in school um under the optioning option at this point in time so i am in support of dr atkin's recommendation dr kraft yeah um yes um i um i am in support of

059um sticking to our march 8th date as uh the starting point to bring students back um i believe that we are ready for this i feel really good about the work that we have done to prepare our buildings um i feel like we have supported and protected our staff and i i do believe that uh you know the vaccination process will will fit pretty well with that time table and i'm sure dr baptist you'll be able to fill us in a little bit more i haven't been able to get my second one scheduled yet either um but i feel confident in that and i and i also feel like we now have enough data nationally to show that schools are you know in the pandemic a relatively safe place for our children to be and

060for our staff to be so i i feel better about that than i have in any of our previous meetings i would like to see option a as a starting point um i do want to see what we can do to push forward to bring more students back into our buildings um i am very very concerned about the mental health issues um you know i hear about it a lot and i think that the trauma uh the anxiety the depression um i think those you know it's it's hard to get over that and i think it affects our kids development very deeply and i think we just have to get them in the building so that we can actually see them and work with them uh in order to begin to um to heal so

061you know i would like to see um what we can do to bring back our third and fourth graders uh a clear plan that brings them back quickly and and you know for all of our other kids i think there are there are some kids who definitely are more academically at risk than others but i do believe all of our kids are suffering so i'd like to find ways of bringing all of them back in some way shape or form but i feel really good about sticking with the march 8th date and i support that thank you dr atkins would you like to make a comment at all about this before i call the question stories yes i would thank you i appreciate all of those comments um one area of hope is the vaccine

062and the number of our staff members that we have been able to get through to get the first shot um miss powell is on this power would you give us an update on the um probability of our staff getting that second shot certainly dr atkins i'm very happy to report and staff will receive more information about this um via email in the next day or so but um dr baptist and i were part of a call this afternoon with the department of health and our colleagues in albemarle county and we are we have received very clear reassurance that um folks who got their first shot through the um tent at kmart there's a process and a procedure that will be happening via email where people will be offered their appointment slots to go back to

063that same location to get your second shot and we will be having a second clinic at the charlottesville high school martin luther king performing arts center again for everyone who got every person who's in the system that got the first shot will be offered the second shot on time which would mean february 26th and 27th and um vdh said we could send that email out right now if we wanted to but we are coordinating with albemarle county and this is not just a charlottesville thing but we got a very strong um reassurance today and we there was an email early in the day from vdh regarding the kmart site and then we had the meeting this afternoon late this afternoon regarding our uh clinic so we are committed to working with albemarle to get that

064cool communication out to all of our educators in a coordinated fashion thank you miss powell i i will say this bringing our students back march 8th is a starting point and it starts the process of getting our students back in the building so i appreciate the discussion and appreciate us moving forward march 8th date can i ask dr atkins uh i was concerned by what i heard from one of the bme parents around uh the principal feeling like her child wouldn't qualify because you know whatever the guidelines are and i just really don't want the school board guidelines under option a to be a limiting factor um option a has never really been something that we have approved like there has been i i don't recall us approving that um specific option a maybe maybe

065because i voted i don't know march 8th seems like a good timeline but i wonder if we can give a little bit more broader discretion to the division about who gets to come back on march 8th so that we're not basically approving a k-12 i'm sorry k2 return but then next week deciding okay more kids can come back like i think we need to give a little bit more clarity than just like okay option a is the only thing that's going to happen between now and march 8th ms mckeever i'm not sure your question my question is are we going to be accepting more students i okay my question is if we approve option a tonight is that going to limit who can come back well option a does define the students who will come

066back it's pre-k through two students and other students who meet who are struggling right now whether that be academically or emotionally uh and the principals and the teachers are working on that list of the students who will come back in the other grade levels okay so then is there a possibility between now and march 8th that that group of students who would be invited who are not k through 2 would be broadened ms mckeever i think i can give you more information let me meet with principals and and we finish with our planning right now the option a would bring back a pre-k through two students and then the other students that principals and teachers together select that are in need our most needy students we've looked at our students who are in special education

067in their iep team determines that they need to come back we looked at our ill students we looked at several categories of students our students who have academic challenges so there are many categories of students that we have looked at to bring back into the building but you already have that ability to bring those students back under our return to learn plan that we've previously approved of ms mckeever i believe those were smaller groups and i do believe in somebody maybe madam clerk or somebody correct me if i'm wrong but our last vote in january was or included plan a with a march 8th date so i believe okay i voted again yeah i remember that was the report it was taken i all i'm saying is for people who do not have elementary age

068kids in school every third and fourth grader is suffering and needs additional social emotional support by the school division and so i do not want to tie the hands of our principals or you dr atkins in getting as many students back as possible and that's what i feel like option a does so so i um madame madam chair may i make a comment yes sir so i think that if we could um modify the motion or you know make a new motion to say that you know we will have option a but give the teachers or and or the superintendent uh the and or the superintendent the flexibility that if option a if it's rolling out smoothly and they feel that they can safely maybe bring in the third and fourth grade students then they

069can do that without coming back to the board because i think it's the intention of every board member to bring back as many students as quickly and safely as they can if we let's say go through first three four weeks and in march and they felt like they can bring back more students then they don't have to come back and ask for permission i think that if they can do that quickly and efficiently and safely there's no need to come back to us and maybe the mo the current emotion doesn't allow for that if it doesn't then i think that we should you know give them that flexibility um does that make sense uh madam chair and dr atkins yeah we can certainly do that because as we said this starts the process march 8

070will start the process of turning our students to school uh and we would work towards bringing more students back in so if the board wants to offer that flexibility it certainly will allow us to work in between board meetings to make that happen but that was your intention anyway was it not dr atkins and administrators that uh option march 8th is the starting point and as we work through it the following week or the week after that you would potentially have more students and you wouldn't have to come back the option a for march 8th is to allow the schools to open with the groups that have been identified and then move forward from there miss courier that will work very well thank you miss mckeever so i would just like to see actual plans

071in the next month about again my concern is we say today we are great with option a and then but we'll and we're going to broaden it and people are going to come back um and that's great told you know um but i need as a parent to plan and as a as a teacher you need to plan and as a teacher who's probably also a parent you need to plan and so if we don't do anything else but option a and this kind of vague notion that other kids as defined by the division um that's going to be hard to plan around if we decide in two weeks okay we're going to actually include other you know third and fourth grade now okay great we can plan for that but if in a month

072we decide in two weeks you can you know it's yeah we we need to plan yeah i i understand um so madame tara and i understand the parents need that you know that notice and let's say that we start off with option a and we find later that we can safely bring in other students that we won't make that change until unless we give the parents or the public at least you know let's say two weeks notice that that change is going to take place that we're going to you know um will take place so that it's not like okay starting monday now the third and fourth grade students are coming we'll get them give them adequate um notice but we have to start somewhere and i understand that the the concern of giving notice

073and we should give notice but i think that um we want to give them the flexibility and the parents the notice um to do that that's an excellent point jennifer miss miss morsberger did you have another comment you wanted to make you'd reached out to me yes i just wanted to ask um about when we come back the plans because um i know we have our um the cares act money we have all of you know that to help us uh get the extra supplies we need and i just want to know that we're confirmed that we're guaranteeing masks sanitizers and the all the proper ppe for our teachers and staff who are returning to the building and i'm also wondering what type of training will be available to teachers before march 8th so that

074you know they know the procedures the protocols when they're back in the buildings um just a training because you know it's a it's a different it'll be a different face to face and so you know we're talking about the cdc um and their recommendation that um their their guidance that i find conflicting to say that we're the vaccine is very important but we can also bring teachers back without it as long as we do everything perfect so um since we're not going to at this point there's no guarantee the teachers will be fully vaccinated i would just like to know you know as far as spacing as far as ppe because you know we live in a society where teachers oftentimes pay for their own supplies i just want to know that like our guarantee

075is that we provide ppe and sanitizer and all that that teachers will need and that students will need and i also want to know what training will be in place for teachers before they come back into the building face to face miss morrisburg bryson morrisberger we did talk about giving teachers at least a week to prepare to come back in the building and during that time they'll be working with their principal to review the protocol to make sure that everyone's familiar with that protocol during that time as you recall at our january board meeting we made sure that we gave each of our schools and each individual school the flexibility to assign that time for practice for preparing classrooms that works best in their building um so each each school will have a different schedule

076to prepare for the students coming back in the building and as far as mitigation is concerned um we have have equipped down our buildings with the uh all of the cdc recommendations for mitigation and we have gone far beyond that mitigation we have supplies that we have ordered in advance that's available to all of our schools we have well-equipped all of our schools and stocked our schools with the the supplies that they will need to return okay i am asking that because i hear feedback from teachers who are buying their own equipment now for when they go into the buildings um for whatever reasons when they need to go in at this point in time so i just want to make sure that we're we're providing them with what they need and what we're saying

077that we're providing them with and also um i think that was my question i got the covet fatigue i think i may have forgotten a little bit of what i was asking but i just want to make sure that oh i know what i wanted to ask um we're always talking about the spread amongst children and how they're less likely you know to spread it although that could change with the next study um but the older students there's data you know and we can interpret data a variety of different ways it says that they spread it a little a little more like adults so as far as the high school it would be nice to see what those plants look like for teachers like what they're training or the mitigate like what teachers get when

078they walk in the door like if we could see or you could provide it maybe on a site just to show you know the measures that we're taking and that teachers are getting the adequate training to be able to operate in a brave new world thank you anybody else dr kraft for you raising your hand well yeah i i guess but i i want to see us um you know move ahead with uh this affirmation i guess is that that's what it is and just i guess from my perspective um i feel like the important thing is to convey this the uh sentiment of the board um to our sentiment that we really do want to um you know to get started with our in-person education and we want to uh find ways of bringing

079as many of our students back safely as quickly as possible so that's how i feel about it i do you know i i don't want the board i guess mr wade said this i i don't think the board needs to be in the middle of all of the details of this um i do trust the administration you know to carry this out effectively i think we've done a wonderful job um you know doing this so far and being prepared for this moment now so um that's what i would just like to see us move forward with our affirmation and expressing you know the sentiment of the board of where we would like to to go now thank you um i just think that there's a confusion with what the sentiment of the board is with

080since option a is actually limiting right i would like to be more clear about what our what our intentions are as a board specifically it relates to five through twelve or three three twelve miss mckeever i would like you to spend a couple minutes if you would and try to come up if we feel like we need to um amend this slightly if you have something but i'd like to ask miss packer if she has any thoughts or or would like to speak at all or share your thoughts please um so from what i've heard option a um correct me if i'm wrong option a will bring back targeted students to um for all of the grades is that correct so that's including pre-k all the way up through high school option a would bring

081back our pre-k through two students whose families indicated that they wanted face to face so it would bring back all of those students and then in grades 3 through 12 it would bring back targeted students okay so basically i do think option a should be approved because it is a step in the right direction a lot of us would like to get back to school in person learning and taking this step it will allow the administration and us the board members to see kind of what protocols need to be in place to bring back the majority of students so i do think that option a we should go along with this thank you all right so i'm pivoting back um at this point you know i would entertain a you know an amendment or um

082tour affirmation to what i had read prior miss mckeever if you have something and if doctor that's okay with you yes please thank you okay so i think my my option a you know i love the idea of well first of all my option a this would be mckeever a my let's just okay so i gotta write this down so i would want um starting march 8th um i would want pre-k through four back um and then maybe the following week doing walker and um and buford and what i would like to see there as a again i would like the principals to be in charge of or you know the division to come up with i don't want targeted students i want all the students who can come and want to come to be

083able to come um and that can be uh it doesn't have to be every single day i like twice clarify is that the students and families who opted to come back when the survey was sent out that is the baseline for yes i mean and that's i mean again i know you and i've talked about this we've got transportation is an issue or a consideration to this and we also have you know that our planning my understanding is that planning was based on the numbers of students in that survey that opted to come back so to you know to pivot and and say any student wants to come back that's not what i said that is not what i said i said all students who would like to come back based on the on the

084survey that's the baseline okay i didn't hear the based on the survey so okay that's fine but that's what i meant i'm sorry that's what i meant by as defining who would come back but um and i don't think it has to be um every day i think if we could go back to that initial plan of the committee basically the two days a week at buford and walker whatever the again i'm it doesn't need to be this specific i i can't hear you is it me or is it no i can't we can't hear either jennifer sometimes it helps to turn off your picture and it might help your internet when you're trying to talk can you hold on a second thank you so much gary hi okay sorry about that so yeah i

085just um so i don't want to be as specific as this but basically you froze and we couldn't hear anything you said so if you could turn off your video and repeat what you said it would help because you froze all we heard was say excuse me i need to stop for a minute so whatever you were saying we couldn't hear you okay can you hear me now yes okay sorry about that okay so my um theory so get everybody back as soon as possible or anybody who would like to come back based on the survey from the fall um [Music] five through twelve on a regular basis um and a staggered roll out basically before spring break um and then um but yeah but get pre-k through four back um starting march 8th four

086days a week so it's basically expanding option a to be like the option from the fall so um um motion and i'm not and if you could just make that and you're freezing [Music] i would like a clean motion and then second and we can discuss it i'm not sure what her motion is i would agree please um can we get the um the powerpoint or the options from the fall that the committee recommended where the february first start for the high school and um can we can can we see those because right now we don't have any of we don't have any of these proposals in front of us so it kind of makes it difficult to talk about them miss mckeever we would have to um i would have to work with staff

087to pull those up to get them in front of you i would like to um i mean miss mckeever if you're comfortable making a motion to to you know expand um or amend our plan a you know to pre-k through four for starters um and then we'll see if we get a second on that can we start there i mean i feel like i would be delighted to make that yes i mean i mean i feel like we're muddying things here um and i know it's not you know no intent but i mean i feel like we need a solid starting place please okay so basically i would like to expand option a and the first expansion i want is that pre-k through instead of pre-k through two we do pre-k through four starts on

088march 8th that's your motion that is my motion okay do we have a second okay so i just want to clarify that option a then literally does tie the hands of our division if we're not saying anything more than targeted students okay great i would like to call the question so there is no question it wasn't the motion failed because it didn't get a second well i meant my original i guess motion that what is that no fear is not allowed to make a motion so i would dispute that you've made an emotion gotcha never mind thank you so if we have to make emotion i thought that in january we said that you know we revisit i thought we had already done it but if not then i would make a motion that we

089should question that recommendation of option a with the condition that if they're if it's going smoothly that they're able to um add additional students the third third and fourth grade that they're able to do that with proper notice i'll second that and i will open that up for discussion at this point miss bryson morrisberger i'm seeing you first do you have any comments please i i would still just reiterate the point i made earlier that um i i still think that we should let the staff be fully vaccinated before we go back to the building thank you um mr bryant can you repeat because he was in and out with juan what was the motion i believe his motion and i'll repeat it and correct me if i'm wrong please somebody um is that he

090moved to adopt plan a with a return to learn start date of march 8th and allowing some latitude to include grades three and four with proper notice to parents or communication to them and i guess my concern would be um i guess dr atkins would have to go back and talk to the principals since they already had planned for what we were discussing the night option then yeah so so um mr bryant this is um we're in discussion now so i understand that and and and she can and the president's documents can donate they don't have to come back to us as a board to say okay now we want to try the third and fourth grade they have the option now that if things are going well and working smoothly the principles and like

091things are going slowly they'll come back to us they can give proper notes to the parents and say in two weeks a week or whatever we're going to be able to roll out more and that's all that um that's you know that's the ah change that i'm adding on there so and now and and that is to you know to try to appease some of the concerns that some of my colleagues said um tonight and and they're very excellent points so um thank you i just don't understand what we mean by running smoothly how do we know that and and i just feel like we gotta we before before march 8th we should have a plan or could have a plan to bring third and fourth graders back and i do not want to tie

092the hands of the administration by or their print or the principles by saying if it's going smoothly if they decide they want to have that starting the following year then i would like them to have that flexibility yes i understand and smoothly is not something that you can measure but they will know after a certain period of time after through second grade do they have for that grades we can win and they can incorporate more students that's what i'm saying so um and so down the road whatever you know um that time period would be um then we can they will have that ability to say okay i think we can add to more students without coming back to us so i don't think that i'm going to you know my emotion is going to

093appease you or um lesandra and so that's that's you know that's what we're here for but it just may not work out nothing we can do or amendments will appease you but you know we need to come up with the something to get the ball rolling and this would do it and i don't want to keep having staff to go back to look at options go back and do surveys and things we have to get the ball rolling and and and that's what they put us in for to make these tough decisions so and and i don't think anybody's asking for any of that in fact i want more kids to be back before on march 8th that's what i'm asking for and i feel like we're doing more harm than good by splitting up

094the third and fourth graders those first graders and second graders and pre-k and kindergarteners are going to be going back to their homes and exposing their families to what's happened in school and those kids who are at uh who those third and fourth graders who by the way are suffering dramatically and are falling behind significantly despite what i would deem heroic efforts by our staff that and they desperately want to see their students i think it would be very helpful to have not have to qualify their return by if it's running smoothly or if it's going well if the principals and dr atkins before march 8th decide this is a plan what we're going to do instead of having this nebulous third and fourth grade thing we're going to do this on march 8th we're

095going to bring the pre-k through two back on march 16th or whatever the next week is we're going to bring the third and fourth graders back the following week we're going to bring this this cohort back i would like that to not be a barrier to that and i feel like the qualification that you have placed on that motion is a barrier and i would like them to be able to plan now for everybody returning in whatever fashion that is over the next 12 weeks miss mckeever i mean i'm a little confused i mean so are you saying that we would make this motion right now with these specific criteria i mean we you know i i really um i mean i hear everything that everybody's saying but i feel like i haven't heard anything

096from the superintendent or staff that that they aren't wanting the same thing that that you're saying that that we're wanting that all of us are wanting then let's actually be very specific and clear rather than putting qualifications because i think qualifications that mr wade has placed on the motion limits them okay so what are your specifics that you want to state in a motion i i would like to have a plan for returning to school beginning march 8th of all of our students in some fashion pre-k through four we've talked about this this is muddying things remember um so i want the pre-k through four back and i don't want to limit i mean our current plan i um and option a limits that and i want to be more expansive that motion already died

097though okay um i would like to quit not quickly but if anybody else would like to discuss this otherwise i really would like to call for a vote on this now we do have presenters who have been waiting to present so i would like to be mindful of them or if there's a way we can table this and and continue our discussion towards the end oh no please let's vote i call the question okay we even know what we're voting on mr wade's motion why don't we have a repeat of what that is um madame um chair and and dr atkins and i'm going to repeat my motion and please let me know if if if you don't understand it or if it's not enforceable or if you need clear direction my motion is that

098we adopt option a and if it allows if if we able to incorporate or bring back to 30 and four students third and fourth grade students with profit with proper notice and that could be a you know month after it could be in april sometime whenever students or um whenever the principals believe that the second and the pre-k and second graders are are in and things are going smoother they're like you know we can bring some additional students back in that's all i'm saying and it may not be able to happen maybe they they think that they need to you know need more space or whatever but i just don't think dr atkins do you understand what i'm saying that makes sense yes so what i heard from mr wade was that we uh returned

099um using option a with an additional caveat that with proper notice we return the third and fourth graders if the principals and administration believe that they can bring them back because i think the second the pre-k through the second grade is is going smoothly okay that's a different motion no no it's not i think that you are trying to muddy things up um dear um colleague so i um i think that it's been moved and properly second and um i think we're i call the question madam madam chair but we don't even know what the motion is because one time he says there's gotta basically the students have to the second and pre-k through two has already started and it's running smooth the the last time he said it it didn't he didn't say that

100so i would just like to leave it up to the to the staff to decide when um like third and fourth graders can come back with proper notice and that doesn't necessarily mean that pre-k through two has already started i i can't explain it anymore i'm madam chair i've stated my motion several times the superintendent understands it and um i i'm if you need further guidance or information with me i'm i'm prepared to offer thank you i i'm going to repeat it if i may please because i'm a little confused the motion i heard from you sir was that we adopt plan a for a return to face to face which does include pre-k through two starting march 8th with latitude from principals and teachers within the building to bring in third and fourth graders

101with proper notice and when they feel it is safe to do so that those were my words but not to muddy it but is that what you meant okay perfect thank you and it was seconded by who please me i seconded dr kraft madam clerk i would like you to take a roll for this please her vote yes here mr bryant yes miss bryson morrisberger no dr grant yes miss mckeever yes miss per year yes miss torres yes and mr wade yes thank you madam chair thank you um dr atkins quickly if i may make a statement um about this i just want to acknowledge um quickly all correspondence that we have received relating to this return to learn our face-to-face instruction i want to acknowledge actually more than acknowledge all of the extremely hard

102work and dedication the before school hours the home visits the after school hours the hours spent on weekends that our teachers our staff our principals invest in preparing for students whether face to face or virtual thank you everyone who has worked tirelessly to ensure mitigation measures are in place for those of you who may think this transition is easy or will be easy or have asked or think that we can pivot and make this face-to-face happen tomorrow i ask that you understand that that it isn't just that easy that there's a lot of time and preparation that is going to be needed and support that will be needed to make this happen even with the date i'm asking our community to try to understand that this entire change will be trying it will be emotional

103and as much as i know our teachers are excited to be with their students i know that with this change will come some apprehension some fear anxiety yes it's face to face but it is nowhere near a return to the normality or the normalcy of a year ago i ask that we all continue to work together to support each other to reach out a hand to each other and to not or to try not to add more onto the plates of teachers or each other as we together adapt to what this new normal will look like it is time to get the kids back into the building we as a board are committed to doing whatever we can to offer offer necessary supports as we move to this new part of this journey i am

104in support of this but please do not underestimate that because i support this i also that it also doesn't mean i don't have ongoing and significant concerns and worries i trust that we as a division have done what we should and can to prepare our spaces but this is not one-sided there is a responsibility of families and students to do your part of us to continue to do our port our part in keeping us all safe and healthy and i want to thank everybody for their time and their discussion around this thank you all right moving forward we have some items for discussion and first up we have a discussion um around inclusive curriculum and social science dr atkins would you like to thank you uh ms torres uh first i'd like to um we

105have two presenters for um we have several presenters but we'd like to start off with dr king and she's going to lay a foundation for the work that has been going on with ms minton and with dr douglas at the uh heritage center so dr king would you give us that foundation and then we'll move into the other presentations thank you dr atkins this evening i would like to give a brief update on the model policies for the treatment of transgender students in virginia schools it is the document that the virginia department of education had to develop no later than december 31st thank you miss thacker and it was mentioned last at last month's school board meeting with the equity update the initial implementation of the model document was dated to start today february 4th

106but it has been postponed pending board of education review of the public comments which could lead to a possible adjustment to the document an overview of what the model document states includes school board policies will be adopted prior to the beginning of the 2021-22 school year the goal is to minimize stigma and foster an inclusive school climate for transgender and other gender non-conforming students additional professional learning for staff will occur including required annual training for mental health professionals school divisions may take an inclusive approach by incorporating educational content that is gender affirming into the education curriculum and research indicates that an inclusive approach leads to less hostile less hostile learning environment better academic mental health and academic attendance outcome at this time i would like to invite miss nilly minton she is our coordinator of

107social studies as in world languages to present an update for inclusive curriculum and social science in charlottesville city schools thank you dr king appreciate it um good evening dr atkins madam chair members of the board thank you for your work tonight i know it's a long night and we appreciate your work i'll actually be co-presenting tonight with april brown who's an amazing fifth grade of virginia studies and ela teacher at walker and rachel caldwell who teaches third grade at venable and we are going to present about our focus on anti-racist and anti-bias social studies instruction in charlottesville city schools so ms thacker if you can change the slide these are the dual purposes of our push for anti-racist and anti-bias social studies instruction in ccs on the student side these are the goals that we

108have for every student we'd like every student we'd like to validate every student's identity and multiple identities for every student to see themselves in the content and for every student to engage in rigorous anti-racist and anti-bias material that's relevant to their lives but we know that we can't just get those outcomes immediately the way to achieve that is through teachers and other educators so on the teacher side if you can go back sorry on the teacher side our goal is to build teacher capacity to confront our own biases core values um learn truthful historical narratives and to teach in a rigorous anti-racist and anti-bias way through something called critical inquiry that we'll get into in just a moment you can change the slide so before we get into talking about the cc ccs changing the

109narrative teacher cohort um i want to take a moment to recognize the work that we've built upon much much much good work has been done before we started our ccs changing the narrative teacher cohort in ccs so i want to take a moment to recognize dr andrea douglas executive director of the jefferson school african-american heritage center who's going to present in just a moment um and dr julian schmidt who is a uva professor both dr douglas and julene schmidt co-created the idea for and the implementation of the embracing our narratives teacher institute and that was designed to teach local educators about local african american history and through that experience we really um came to realize that african american history is u.s history and so i want to recognize their work and recognize that that was

110the impetus for our work in charlottesville city schools so thank you for that um our work also builds upon my predecessor annie evans work with the kellogg foundation and virginia humanities who held a changing the narrative conference during the summers of 2018 and 2019 and it also builds upon the work that dr atkins and the african american history education commission have done and dr atkins has chaired that commission they've done a lot of work to dissect and recommend changes to the virginia standards of learning in social sciences and the curriculum framework to the standards of learning and i'd also like to thank my core planning team for the ccs changing the narrative cohort and that core planning team consists of alexis mason charlene abney sherry bryant bria williams and ben nussbaum who have all partnered

111with me to plan and facilitate our cohort so in ccs we started our changing the narrative teacher cohort last year last school year where teachers teachers grappled with identity and implicit bias truthful historical narratives and rigorous pedagogy many of these same teachers who participated in our cohort went on to participate in the jefferson school embracing our narratives conference we're running a second teacher cohort now and we're partnering with uh facing history in ourselves and public history experts and i'm going to turn it over to april to describe her experiences in our cohort changing the narrative is the perfect forum to have an open and honest conversations with teachers from across the district we hear from experts write and talk about our own experiences and face our own identities all to better serve our students thank

112you april um okay so one of the outcomes that i intended to have happen as a result of teachers participation in changing the narrative teacher cohort was that we would create a new inquiry-based social studies curriculum in all grade levels k through 12 that centers on truthful narratives is relevant to students lives and causes students to grapple with rigorous content and take informed civic action we're preparing students to be citizens in our democracy and that's really important that they take informed civic action we did accomplish that goal by writing coaches and teachers and i collaborated to write our own in-house inquiries which mostly focus on local history we also collaborated with a group called the virginia inquiry collaborative consisting of school divisions across the state museum and public history experts to write inquiries at different

113grade levels and we took some existing inquiries from c3teachers.org and adapted them to suit our needs so we do have a nearly complete inquiry-based curriculum in k-12 and we have a second round of curriculum work happening this summer and teachers and instructional coaches who will be writing curriculum this summer have been participating in professional learning through the virginia inquiry collaborative throughout the year and actually um mr bryant joined us to serve on a panel to discuss school desegregation and we are very happy to have him there and learning from him so thank you mr ryan for that and i am going to turn it over to rachel to describe her experience learning about the inquiry design model or idm and writing third grade inquiries this summer and working to make them virtual this year thanks

114neely like neely said many teachers from our division participated in the virginia inquiry collaborative this past summer and we met with other teachers from around the state in grade level teams so for example i was um on a team of other third grade teachers and we worked on creating an inquiry for ancient china along with a museum partner from the smithsonian's freer and sackler galleries who brought her expertise of the museum's artifacts that would fit with our unit and this fall we obviously had to shift all that to virtual instruction so we've been adapting the third grade inquiries to an online format since many of the artifacts used in the inquiries were digitally accessible anyways it was a pretty seamless transition to create google slides and interactive lessons that followed the inquiry design model so

115we've you know we've adjusted and adapted and we're still implementing thank you rachel um so an inquiry this is what it looks like if you change the slide um an inquiry rev or an inquiry unit revolves around a compelling question and ask students to analyze primary and secondary sources in order to construct their understanding and knowledge and formulate conclusions backed up with evidence each inquiry culminates in having students take informed action to impact society based upon what they learn in the inquiry and april actually carried out this inquiry last year and i'm going to turn it over to her to describe her experience teaching through this particular inquiry in virginia studies one of the first idms we completed was establishing a new nation did our founders and founding documents protect liberty or slavery the topic

116opened a can of worms of discussion about our racist history from the actions of our founders to the founding documents of our country as a class we were able to honestly synthesize and discuss quotes and documents from that period to answer each compelling question one of the most amazing parts of my job was to hear from a parent over the summer about how they were able to have more deep and meaningful conversations about race and racial inequality because of what we did in these inquiries students were able to connect our past issues with what liberty means to our issues with what liberty means today the taking informed action section of the idm involved students identifying instances when liberty is in doubt in the united states by interviewing community members about their own experiences this was

117a very impactful activity especially due to the racial inequalities that we are seeing all over the news every day the idms help our students understand how much our past influences are present and what we can do now to change our future april thank you so much for describing that and actually i had the privilege of observing uh april's classroom last year when she was engaging in this inquiry with her students and it was phenomenal i just heard really rich discussions and i appreciated all her work around that and her leadership in her plc team to carry out these inquiries last year and this year so thank you april for that um and so if you want to go to the next slide the next slide just shows the taking informed action piece and the summative

118performance task and then we'll move on to the one after this the stacker if you can go to the next one these are some examples of compelling uh questions our students are exploring in social studies this year from k-12 um and i wanted to point out the fourth grade inquiry on history versus memory how should we decide what's worth remembering which was an inquiry written by christine esposito uh our one of our gifted resource teachers here in charlottesville city schools and one of our teachers in jacksonville brian crist who's a member of our changing the narrative cohort this year his students were recently engaging in this inquiry and they were featured on the news recently for the taking informed action piece of the inquiry his students met with vice mayor cena mcgill to talk about

119what they believe we should memorialize in charlottesville based upon what they learned in the inquiry so that news story is linked on the last slide if you want to check it out for yourself so in order to set up these kinds of discussions with students it's really imperative that we do identity work with students at the beginning of the year and throughout the year students must understand their own intersecting identities in order to grapple with topics that involve race ethnicity gender and other identities our goal in ccs is not to be color blind but to be color brave to be anti-racist or anti-bias requires us to recognize and affirm race and every other intersecting identity so i'm going to turn it over to rachel to describe her experiences planning and implementing some identity work with

120students teachers have always spent the first few weeks of school building community and establishing trust with students but this year part of that work included proactive discussions of identity and laying groundwork for how to talk respectfully and inclusively about identity some example lessons that occurred in many of the grade levels involve discussing the power of names and how they connect you to your culture your family and your community we also did an identity mapping exercise where we discussed race nationality religion gender language hobbies interests teachers modeled what it's like to respectfully and inclusively talk about these topics which might be uncomfortable at first for students who've never had conversations like this before especially at school and teachers were there to guide and facilitate the conversations in a safe way and we also discussed norms for

121having these brave conversations and this was really laying the foundation for the conversations we'd be having later in the year in these inquiries and normalize speaking about identity in school thank you rachel so much and for all your work on um the social studies content squad and doing a lot of that planning um so in order to track our progress we are collecting student data using vdoe developed rubrics that measure whether students are making claims and backing them up with evidence during each inquiry tracking student performance helps us to reflect on our own practices and ensure that the work we're doing as educators is translating to our students in the way that we intend and at this point um the next slide is really just a link that you can check out to the news

122story that i was talking about um with brian chris class at jacksonville and then we just wanted to open it up to any questions you might have madam chair can i go okay i'm just going to go all right thank you i just want to say that i think that the work you all doing is amazing and i want to thank you um i know students personally in the lgbtq community who are who feel like they have a place um when these lessons are discussed and they see themselves represented and i also want to say that when i do virtual learning next to where i'm working and my daughter is doing her virtual learning i've been enjoying the lessons and i wish like i hope that you know it spreads and kids everywhere can have

123access to it because the the discussions are so engaging they were talking about the washington monument and how one monument can mean you know freedom and liberty to one person and how it can mean oppression and slavery to someone else and they talked about it and my daughter said you know that our teacher was so nice and she let us ask all the questions and it really was so i want to commend you because i enjoyed it and i wasn't even supposed to be in the class so thank you all for what you're doing thank you i i definitely want to reiterate what miss bryson morrisberger said it is delightful and then to have the conversations after school with the kids after hearing the the conversations that they had and then talking with them about

124it more it is really so deep and relevant to their lives in ways um that i hope just last generations i just feel like the work you're doing is is vital so thank you so much and it's it's the teachers the teachers are doing a phenomenal job with this and i couldn't be more proud of everybody who's putting in so much effort to make this happen anybody else thank you i agree with everybody yeah i want to thank you too and i think this is so profoundly important um you know for our kids but also just for our entire community i think it's really changing you know it is changing the narrative in ways that are so desperately needed and i think the effects will extend you know beyond the kids to the rest of

125our community and i wish that i could sit in on some of these lessons myself i really would like to so if there's an opportunity to i would love to be invited to do that but i really appreciate everything that you're doing very deeply thank you thanks neely for um expanding the conversation and inclusiveness for all of our students i think it's important and um thank you for inviting me to be a part of that panel i thoroughly enjoyed it i hope the kids did it that it did as well so thanks for all you all are doing thanks april thanks mr bryant we really do appreciate you being there at the panel so thank you for sharing your experiences anybody else adam chi yes ma'am yes thank you so much a lot of work

126went into um all of the work the summer work um the after school work and and sometimes these conversations are very difficult uh for varying reasons they are difficult but i just want to thank all of you um the big issues that we're discussing in their important issues so thank you for all of your work we appreciate you so much thanks um ms brown miss caldwell we appreciate you so much miss smitten thanks so much thank you dr atkinson thank you for your support for all of this work we couldn't do this without you so thank you thanks naomi thank you is there another part to that presentation or no we are finished i think that next up is dr douglas and dr dickerson yes dr douglas and dr dickerson will uh present some of

127the work that has been going on at the uh jefferson uh heritage center dr douglas i knew i had seen them and i was like wait a minute speak too all right thank you good evening everyone um i'm getting a little echo are you all hearing me well okay um i'd like to thank you all for madam chair and uh the members of the board and dr atkins for inviting us to speak with you all tonight um the last time we talked really i think about or came before the board was about yet another project so i always re appreciate an opportunity to come and and tell you about the work that we have been doing i think most of you know that bringing the local history into our curriculum has been my compassion we've

128been trying to get this to this place since 2011 since the heritage center first opened um you know this particular program embracing our narratives started with a conversation between myself and annie evans almost two two and a half years ago in relationship to a kellogg grant and at the time the idea was to create a series of resources for teachers and after sort of thinking this through a little bit i realized you can always give a teacher a resource but if you don't give also some background on how to use that resource or why that resources um is better than another resource um it's difficult without having that kind of information to make real decisions in the classroom and so embracing our narratives came out of that it also came out of the notion or

129the understanding that charlottesville's african-american story is equivalent to america's story and going in we really went in with the idea could you teach american history from the local space could you also teach her american history by not centering a white narrative but by centering a black narrative and so those were the sort of underlying considerations going in i was lucky enough to have my colleague kimmely dickerson dr dickerson available to work with me on this project and i owe all of our success to her um if it were not for her um i don't think we'd be sitting here tonight to be honest can i get to the next slide please so yeah so as i said this was our our reason for doing this um the other part of it um i i want

130to talk thank neely and her team as well because um changing the narrative and embracing the narrative we have a lot of narratives going on there's rediscovering the narrative so many narratives um are really two programs that work hand in glove um changing the narrative prepares uh your teachers for the conversations that we have in embracing our narratives and we really wanted that to to be a foreground because what we're trying to condense in just a matter of days the amount of history that we are condensing in just a matter of days leaves very little time for the discussion of the sort of culturally responsive pieces of how to deal with that and so we are very appreciative of being able to know that when by the time teachers walk into our program they've already

131had some opportunity to engage with the kinds of conversations that this material elicits um so i really want to recognize that um and then before i turn it over the last thing i want to say is that in developing the curriculum we began by creating a an advisory board um of educators of uva people from the curry school people from our local community historians to really help us think through how we shape these ideas we also created a curriculum design team which included members of my staff again local scholars um and we basically just hashed it through what is it that we believe are the most important things um in our local history um that would move the conversation forward that would provide teachers with the kind of information that they needed in order to

132talk to students um who themselves are are fairly politicized these days you know it's an interesting space that people find themselves in so that is the armature around which we created um this five-day program um which was intended originally to be an in-house program and mid-stream we had to make some shifts in in the way we presented it and that's why i have all kudos to dr dickerson because i would not have been able to manage it all myself so i'm gonna turn it over to her so that she can talk a little bit about how the program went and then we'll come back together um afterwards and answer any kind of questions that you might have dr dickerson thank you andrea you are too kind um so first i will start by talking about

133the summer institute last year was our inaugural summer institute um and as dr douglas dr douglas alluded to we initially were planning to hold this in person we like everyone else had to kind of quickly switch this to a virtual setting so you see here a photo from from last summer we had about 22 educators who participated about half were from charlottesville city schools including many who had gone through the changing the narratives cohort from last year and we also had a good number from almar county and a few from private schools in other surrounding counties they were taught by university faculty who were experts in local history and then we also brought in community voices community experts so these are folks who might be descendants of free or enslaved people in this area people

134who personally had stories that they could share about for example integrating both charlottesville and elmira county schools so we invited folks like that to tell their own stories and additionally in addition to having an academic perspective in terms of topics we covered african-american history from the 18th to the 20th century so that included free and enslaved people we talked about the civil war to reconstruction we talked about the development of the black middle class and we ended talking about the long civil rights era the participants also in addition to the lectures we had small groups discussions um we had time for individual reflection and activities where they could explore different resources that existed um in the community and that we encouraged them to also integrate into their classrooms next slide please so in addition we

135collected some data about the program for evaluation purposes to assess how it went its effectiveness and also thinking about ways that we could improve the program in the future this is one piece of data that i wanted to share because it really struck me and us in terms of um evidence of the value of this program so all of the participants from last year who took the survey at the end said that this professional development this week-long series last june was more useful than other professional developments they had taken in the last year so for us that really highlighted the value that this program adds in terms of focusing on local history and time to think about how to integrate that into the classroom next slide please we also wanted to know how educators were

136impacted by participating so i've shared two quotes here that were from those final surveys that we collected last last june on the left hand side this teacher is talking a little bit about um gaining local history knowledge and then also planning to implement that into the classroom so embracing our narratives has opened my eyes to a new world of african american history in my own backyard i will without a doubt use local narratives stories and examples as often as possible to educate my students about true history available to them so close to home so really circling back to this idea of placed based history and the importance of connecting history to what exists in our own communities and then on the right this is a quote that really highlights the role of this program and

137helping teachers understand their students and begin to build relationships with them differently this workshop will help me better connect to my black students by knowing local history i as their teacher can develop more knowledge about their families and about their collective struggle this knowledge will lead to more empathy in a natural way that isn't forced or faked fake so these were two goals of um of embracing our narratives from the beginning and this data really helped to show us that this was something that that educators were actually walking away with so that we were really kind of meeting the goals that we set out to meet next slide please so in addition to the summer institute we will be running a professional learning series at chs this spring we've partnered with dr irizari to bring

138this series into the building essentially not we will be virtual but we will be during the school day on fridays during set-aside professional learning time so this will be a six-week hybrid program we'll have three live sessions that will be facilitated by local history experts and then we'll have three asynchronous video sessions using video video sessions from last year's summer program so so far we have 25 educators who have signed up all at chs we've got teachers we have men administrators also counselors from a variety of um content areas so we have social studies we have english special education math science so we've really got a diverse group and we're excited to kick this program off starting february 19th and next slide please in terms of the next steps for embracing our narratives we will

139hold the second summer institute this year june 20th 21st to the 25th the structure will be fairly similar to last year we're anticipating having a virtual session again this year virtual workshop so far we have over 20 educators registered again the majority of them are from albemarle county public schools and from charlottesville city schools we will also be building a web-based resource bank so this was the initial idea behind embracing our narratives and so we're circling back around to really complete this resource bank as a space for teachers to be able to pull from as they integrate these lessons and learnings into their classrooms and into the curriculum we want to further integrate local african-american history into the division-wide curriculum and lastly want to expand the community of educators who participate and participated in embracing

140our narratives so really excited this year to not only have the summer institute upcoming but also to be doing this partnership with chs um kind of within the space of the school day so the goal here is really to expand the number of educators who are familiar with and are learning about local african american history and embedding it into their classrooms so just want to um in there um thank you for inviting us again and we will open it up for questions wow and i just want to just before we actually do that i just want to add one point because i want you to to sort of understand that by the time we finish this summer we will have trained 75 student teachers which puts us way further ahead than we had anticipated um

141and you know the the resource bank that we're working on the pandemic closed the libraries and a historian without a library is like a man without a leg you just sort of walk around in circles you know so um that's our our goal for the summer as well so um it just struck me just now that the that we have really sort of tripled our goal almost in a year seeing what um kim just described for you yeah let me read that last question yeah dr douglas dr dickerson wow thank you so much i mean it's so exciting i sit here and i'm like i want to be a teacher i want i want to be in those classes so it's just incredible and and i'm just so eternally grateful to you both and to

142everybody for you know who's worked behind the scenes to make this happen um because i know it's you know you you all have been working on it and talking about it and dr douglas i believe hearing some of your initial conversations about this years ago and to just see it now come to fruition and and thank you for all of the work that you're doing both of you um board members anybody else have questions or comments for either of them i just wanted to say thank you for the work you all are doing um i i love the work and i'm so happy you all are here in this community doing this work here it's appreciated and if there's anything else we can do to support your efforts please let us know absolutely yeah um

143actually i just wanted to um um andrea this is something you've been talking about it seemed like further than 2011 it's been something you've been wanting to do for a long time so and to have 75 um teachers training that's phenomenal so what in my mind what that would do is that they're teaching other students and then they will be able to learn and have the appreciate and love the history of here as they're walking around you know um 10th and page or fight field or wherever they are in the community so that's that's one of those things you just can't measure that's teaching love for themselves in their community where they came from and so this is just phenomenal i'm glad that you know we could participate in that in this and anything that

144we can do to assist us just let us know the other thing that i wanted to also add to our efforts because you know you've got to work these things on both sides so for the last few years we've been running our trailblazers program and we were just awarded uh we were included in a five million dollar grant that um from the mellon foundation that the university of virginia has gotten and so what we're hoping to do through trailblazers is to train your students to learn this history and to continue to act as tour guides the the money that we got from mellon will allow us to pay them so that they see this as a job so um i think that you know approaching um our approach from both directions really will um uh

145create some sort of synergy that then uh allows us to to to think through very clearly um dr atkins knows about what the changes in curriculum will look like and charlottesville is already ahead of the game for so many reasons um certainly based on the um presentation we heard earlier so um i just wanted to add that to it too that's also our summer work so we'll be pretty busy this summer as well so i'd like to say thank you also dr douglas and dr dickenson for all of the work that you've been doing and dr douglas this has been a dream of yours for many years uh and you've worked at it diligently for so many summers and so many falls trying to get teachers and and trying to get the curriculum written um

146knowing the local history is a vital part of understanding who you are uh in that community and i love you coming at it from both ends with the adults and with the the young people in our community and it's just going to spread to start and teach our african-american students and all of our students to have our african-american students to hear about the contributions that their relatives made and their community members made to make our community what it is and the struggles that they have gone through in order to be where we are today uh and the struggles that they've gone through um and the lack of progress that has been made that's all that's the realities of our community and where we are so just thank you for being so transparent with them thank

147you for teaching them thank you for teaching all of us vitally important that we all be a part of this we appreciate you so much well like i say you know without neely's help um i think again we're working together in a in a really proactive way and i think at the end of the day three years four years from now we'll have enough data between the two um initiatives to really see how um you know how well we're doing in that regard so that's also really important to us as well to really track it and and create the data that's necessary to to do more and um think more broadly about it i think one of the measures of success will be when we move from having african-american history in a month to it

148being threaded throughout every conversation about history and who we are in that history uh that's certainly a mark of success thank you and and last thing is your teachers should be applauded as well yes they have they were very enthusiastic about the program we didn't include how it's been used in the classrooms but even under difficult circumstances we know we've heard from people that the teachers have been using the material and continue to use the material so i think you all should be pleased with the work that your teachers have done as well thank you thank you for having us thank you very much thank you thank you [Music] all right are we moving on now um i believe the next item is school calendar 2021 2022. thank you mr torres we have dr odi

149who is going to give you an update on our um draft school calendar and tonight we heard at least one comment and we've received several other comments on the school calendar so dr odie madam chair members of the board dr adkins good evening tonight i do present to you a 2021 2022 draft school calendar thank you so much for showing that for us leslie this calendar was developed through collaboration with albemarle county public schools we met with their team on several occasions to work to align our school divisions calendars after our conversations with them we work to create this draft before you tonight you may notice that this calendar is very similar to the 2019-2020 calendar regarding start and end dates student holidays and breaks and professional learning days this calendar was posted for comment

150from the community as you heard earlier and as dr atkins just referenced we we haven't received an abundance of feedback but we have received some and most of what we did receive was favorable this calendar is informational for you and we will continue discussion with albemarle county as needed and continue to listen to the community at this time i'll take questions dr odie can you can you explain why january 3rd is included in in a day off please yes um january 1st of new year's is falling on a weekend it falls on saturday january 1st and it being a federal holiday we need to give the next day off january uh third because we're already off for the winter break before that so we do need to add up gotcha thank you but we don't

151have offer other federal holidays so i'm not sure i understand if it falls i think if if the day or the holiday actually falls on a weekend yes yes then you have to be credited that day off somewhere uh to the same as we're all for thanksgiving um we're all for new year's so uh right as ms torres said it does fall on this saturday so we want to get that next work day as a holiday for staff and students does it happen does it have to be on the third could you give them an extra day like the friday before the 17th and add a day on that end or not or does it need to be consecutive um or near the actual holiday date and i i don't think that would matter one

152of the things that we try to do is align with as we're planning with albemarle to have our calendars as closely aligned as possible and that was just a part of the discussion and where they landed and you'll notice if you do look at their calendar they will have the third as a holiday as well i don't know about you guys but i just um so having three mondays off in january does really not make any sense um and then not having a day off until the first friday in march makes no sense is there any way to better split up that slog there between um well and in fact it's not even a day off for teachers on the 24th um so it's like basically the teachers don't have like a day off or

153three day weekend until well there's just very few days there between january and in april and we did have the discussion about the three mondays it's not ideal um but you'll notice at the end of the first nine weeks excuse me the end of that nine weeks is there on january 21st and so the monday is the teacher work day so the teachers can work on their grades and report cards i we we absolutely acknowledge that it's not ideal but because we knew that we needed to give that holiday for new year's and of course we want to we will be off for martin luther king jr day um that work day just fell right behind the end of the nine weeks and there are there are teachers on this committee when you guys are

154yes yes we have teachers uh when we met uh teachers from charlottesville as well as teachers from albemarle county and principals as well and parents too yes oh i'm a former school calendar parent it gets a little heated there yeah and we've yeah we've come together us several times and and and had some of these same discussions um so um madam chair um and staff was there any discussion from the county in the city you know on this that to make you know to add additional time either during the day um start school earlier let them you know extend the year and things like that what was that discussion like are you talking you're speaking of um adding time because of code adding time to the end of the year well i mean yeah i

155mean um i think that you know for the next couple of years you know it's gonna be some catching up to do i would imagine we discussed the reason that we're presenting to you now rather than december when it typically is presented is because we wanted to wait and discuss what we were going to do we know that we're going to be looking at school summer school opportunities but we did discuss the possibility of extending the year but determined that we were going to have summer school instead and possibly having a longer summer school if if the governor were to make some recommendation or mandate i mean is that then you would bring it back with those changes or how does that work yeah it would depend on what those recommendations are um and if

156it would [Music] it just depends on what those recommendations are miss torres whether we would be extending this school year's calendar or making significant changes to the fy 22 calendar gotcha thank you i feel like we have to answer a lot of questions before we can approve a calendar for next year um and while like if this were business as usual my only concern would be like the third of january honestly but because i don't think we can return to business as usual next academic year i think we need to be a lot more creative and i feel like this um discussion around the calendar while i understand it it's just normal business that's what we do um i feel like we got gotta really think outside the box here and and uh stop talking

157about the calendar for next year until we have some answers to the questions of what we're gonna do and this is information only tonight correct that is correct madam chair any other questions from board members at this point okay thank you dr odie thank you um next we have a presentation of the 2021-2022 budget dr atkins thank you mrs torres what we'd like to do now is present to you our recommended funding request for the fy 2122 budget we'll start off with miss powell and then i will go over the specific items that we are recommending to include in the budget thank you dr atkins madam chair members of the board um wait for leslie to get it loaded you can go ahead to the next thank you so this is just a reminder that

158the work we do on on budget is all under the code of virginia as referenced here the superintendent is it's incumbent on the superintendent each year to prepare an estimate of the funds needed uh to support the operations of the school division for the coming year and so it's a it's a needs-based budget and it needs to be balanced next slide please you've seen this slide before but this is something our finance director renee hoover has started to do which is look at our budget and apportion it out showing how it aligns with the strategic plan and the major categories of growing relationships supported and supportive staff and diverse inclusive and rigorous learning experiences next slide now that was a slide you've seen before i did we did put in a few new slides for

159you this evening in response to some of the discussions we've had at our previous meetings we wanted to give additional information in areas that where people had shown interest and so this slide shows how our positions are allocated across three categories when you think about our positions you can think of school-based positions division instructional positions and then division administration positions and so what you see is the current allocation of the positions across these three categories 91 of our positions are school-based um four percent or 31.6 our division instructional positions which are positions that focus on curriculum and staff development and it includes all of our any instructional or mental wellness positions that serve multiple schools so we can't assign them to one specific school and then the division administration positions which are five percent of

160the positions are 43.5 those positions cover finance operations human resources technology and then our senior leadership team next slide leslie another topic that has come up in discussion at our actually with our joint session with council was our charlottesville's per pupil expenditure so we wanted to provide some additional information on that topic basically when you look at per pupil expenditure at the very bottom of the slide you can see where this information comes from as far as comparative information the contributing factors are number one economies of scale so smaller and mid-sized divisions have simply have lower economies of scale in other words there's smaller number of students to spread the cost of the core functions that all school divisions have to um cover and charlottesville is what would be considered a midsize school division when

161you look at the membership of all the different school divisions across the commonwealth i believe the average is over 9 000 and the median or midpoint is around 3 000 something and we're slightly above that so i'm wearing that i would you know we would be considered midsize also cities for whatever reasons the local per pupil expenditure averages three percent higher than counties and averages four percent higher overall um regional factors uh cost of living and cost to compete factors are certainly a a big factor album all like us is in the top for local expenditure per pupil and so there's a cost to compete factor both in central virginia as well as northern virginia and then last but definitely not least our community values what what does the community want to see from the

162school division and some of the drivers here to consider our smaller neighborhood schools and our unique upper elementary school that middle years configuration we have that's fairly unique the depth and breadth of our programs again in relation to the number of students we're serving economies of scale comes into play here as well as as well as the core functions small class sizes is a big factor and then the smaller neighborhood schools got listed twice sorry but um anyway that's um just what drives per pupil expense and so at the bottom there you'll see that for fiscal year 2019 which is the most recent year where the comparative report is published there's always a good year or so lag in getting this table 15 updated on the superintendent's annual report which is published by the vdoe

163but we were eighth in virginia for um overall per pupil expenditure and sixth for local and those numbers are there at the bottom of the slide and the pictures you see here are representative of our breadth of programming our orchestra our gifted program our stem avid and these are just the ones that i had enough room to put pictures on the slide for so all programs that um the community values and we are very um you know pleased to be able to offer next slide please leslie so something that we talk about frequently during the budget process is state funding and the significant dependency or rather the burden that's placed on localities throughout virginia to support education state funding is based on a formula that is ironically and erroneously called the standards of quality or

164otherwise known as the soq and what you see here are those the core positions funded through the soq um principals assistant principals librarians and so forth so the so just to take principles as an ex well let's look at um let's look at assistant principles for assistant principles the state soq based on our enrollment would allow us a total of the f it provides funding towards 1.55 we have 15 assistant principals we so we're above the soq by 13.45 the what the state gives us towards those salaries after our local composite index of ability to uh pay is applied is a little over thirty six thousand dollars and it costs us over 1.1 million to fund our assistant principal positions so we are significantly above the what the state funding is that is provided for

165these positions and you see that in all of these categories teachers of course is the big one where um you know over 19 million above what the soq provides and these are the just those which you might consider core positions there's also support positions to consider and the soq um put in this support cap was put into the soq in 2010 during the great recession and you know like these soq components above the funding for support staff it wasn't in line with reality before the support cap the soq was not in line with reality before the support cap was put into the formula the cat the gap only made the the cap only made the gap much worse and so for example for the positions listed to the right technology psychologists social workers finance custodians

166nurses human resources our current cost is 4.5 million currently the soq provides a little over a million dollars to support the what they call the efficient and cost-effective operation and maintenance of the school division and if you'd like to learn more about the soq and this whole situation with the support cap there are links at the bottom of the of the page there you could if you google those are the exact titles also of the articles or some really good articles that explain what's happened with state funding for education in virginia next slide leslie so in order to receive state soq funds and incentive and lottery funds all of the state funding every locality has to meet or exceed what's called required local effort for the soq portion of the funding formula and then something

167called required local match to receive the lottery and incentive funds and so of course they all have acronyms this is rle and rlm and most years all localities exceed rle and rlm and the key point on this slide is how far above and beyond localities have to go on average to provide the type of educational program that the community you know wants to have so for required local effort on average for fiscal year 20 localities exceeded the minimum required local effort by over 82 percent and required local match was exceeded on average by almost 71 percent and so charlottesville is among the 30 school divisions in virginia that exceed the state rle and rlm requirements by 100 over 100 so we're in that kind of pale blue piece of the pie there next slide leslie

168so that's just a lot of background information but those are topics that have been touched on in previous work sessions so we wanted to take just a moment to dig a little deeper and provide more detail in each of those areas our bringing things back to the here and now our priorities for develop developing the fy 22 budget are to recruit and retain highly qualified teachers and staff maintain the continuity of high quality instructional programs and apply a lens of equity in all of the funding considerations as we work through this budget process so the next portion of the presentation gets into the line item changes that are recommended leslie you can advance i think two more slides yep and so at this point i'll turn it back over to dr atkins to talk about

169the different components of the proposed budget changes sorry kim it took me a minute our power went out so dr atkins um computer's restarting i saw the blip would she like if you're able to um cast would you like for me to start the lineup and i hope all those acronyms and charts didn't bore people but it seemed there seemed to be some interest from our prior session so i like to use renee and i like to geek out on those things from time to time so he's almost there okay great kim quickly i just you know i know we've talked about um the soqs and and and how you know we exceed um the soqs but seeing that seeing those numbers is just astounding yes so i really appreciate seeing that chart i mean

170i feel like we should share that chart out with um our state folks part of my part of my agenda is always to help anyone who wants to um advocate for better funding for k-12 because it affects it affects all of our communities across the state yeah i mean that's just incredible that really 1.55 assistant principals you know you'll find those links at the bottom of that soq page interesting if you have time to look at them those are supplemental they're they're uh i forgot i wish i could remember who wrote those stories but they're um they're very good they're from a third party that has done a lot of analysis yeah thank you for including that i apologize mr as my power went off everything went down for a while but i'm on the

171laptop so we can continue please do thank you um so i'd like to go over now the recommended changes the additional supports and programs that we'd like to add and and the uh salary actions we'd like to recommend a two percent salary increase for our teachers our support staff administrative staff and administrative staff um and and for clarification purposes when we speak of administrative staff that includes everyone in the school division except the superintendent we'd also like to recommend a nurse pay scale alignment with the regional market we've taken a look at the regional market and we'd like to make adjustments to our nurse scale to become more competitive in the market and the region and be able to attract um the great staff that we know that we're accustomed to having in our division

172we also would recommend that uh hit custodian pay be adjusted to also align with the regional market the teacher salary increase action would be uh 760 507 dollars and then you can see the other um line items and the cost bringing the total salary actions to one million three hundred thirty four thousand five hundred eighty one dollars there are a few non-discretionary action items um two will would be in the uh contract uh insurance contract uh area the general liability property um insurance contract and then the workers compensation contract we also would uh recommend increasing the people transportation uh city contract and bringing the total of the uh contract um the contracts let me add in the city contract for maintenance uh we would recommend increasing that also two hundred and twenty six thousand four

173hundred and four thousand and a note to that that the um city contract increase uh takes into consideration the um mitigation strategies that have been put in the um the ionized air purifiers and other mitigation that has been um added to our facilities bringing the total non-discretionary contract cost to 386 669 dollars next page now on the um the school based program uh supports an improvement we'll start with internet access i'm so pleased to um say to our community and to our board that during the time that we've had uh virtual learning that our technology department has done a remarkable job responding to the needs of our students and to our families and to our staff our teachers and we have about 99.9 saturation in internet access all of our students do have access and

174do have devices we would recommend that a continuation of internet access even when we return face-to-face in the fall and that is our plan that we would be face-to-face in the fall but our students continue to have access to internet services before school after school on the weekends in their homes and we've included a line item for that we'd like to continue to use zoom so remote learning uh instruction tool we'd like to continue with that we have a communication tool platform form called remind and we would like to continue with that also new seller is a literacy contact platform uh that has been used pretty extensively in grades seven through 12. uh we would like to continue that um social workers for grace p um pre-k through four and lma we're recommending that we

175add 6.5 positions in the social worker slash counselor slash psychology area intervention area in order to respond to some of the social emotional needs of our students and to our staff once we return face to face we do believe that there will be significant need and we want to have the staff in place that can respond to that need we also want to position ourselves that as we start to develop how we will respond to safety and security in our schools that we have the staff in place in order to provide the supports that will be necessary to put in a strong program in our school as we transition beyond having our sros in our buildings we would recommend uh starting to continue with adding instructional assistance to our second grade classroom so we would

176add one instructional assistant to each second grade classroom we also recommend an assistant an additional assistant principal at charlottesville high school they currently have three now this would give them one assistant principal per grade level a reading specialist at greenbrier they currently have one reading specialist and the need has increased at greenbriar so we would recommend adding an additional reading specialist we have a program called structured teaching autism resource program and that's our stars program we would recommend the program has been successful at walker we recommend adding a teacher at walker and a teacher at beaufort for the continuation of those services math specialists for charlottesville high school to respond not only to the students who may need support in order to complete algebra 1 but also for students who are on our non-traditional students

177who are going into our advanced classes our advanced placement math classes or any of our dual enrollment or any any type of honors program in mathematics we provide the support that they need to be successful we'd recommend adding a fine arts teacher at beaufort our arts programs continue to grow and expand and there's a demand for those programs so a teacher at buffett also we have entered into a wonderful relationship with virginia state university and they will be offering dual enrollment college level courses for students and it would be a program called students training to be teachers and reaching success at charlottesville high school next week we were will be having a signing where our parents and students will be signing an agreement to enter into the program with virginia state once completing the high

178school portion of the program students will then be offered a admission to virginia state and it will be covered by grant funding for their tuition we recommend 0.5 literacy specialist program for lugo mcginnis we also will recommend that um at several lead teacher stipends um for grades k through six there's much of this work that's already going on but we would add a stipend to acknowledge the work that our teachers are already doing also a lead teacher stipend for our uh pre-k teachers for our english language learners english as a second language uh teachers also lead teachers striping for special education teachers and then with our math specialists we would add additional contract days we would add 10 contract days for them to continue with the some of the professional learning work that they are

179doing on teaching providing services and supports to our classroom teachers we'd also recommend the same type of addition for contract edition for our reading specialists an additional 10 days content squads there are many content squads um that have been writing lesson plans uh developing curricular finding wonderful resources to support our classroom teachers so we would recommend to continue with the content squads into the school year currently we have about 40 staff members many of them are our teachers who are participating in the alignment of the standards with the taught material substitute teachers and teachers who cover classes when there's an absent we would recommend an honorarium be included in the budget for that work our k-12 book rooms we would recommend adding some additional resources to restock those book rooms um we would also recommend

180um to restock our k through 12 science materials and supplies we've been sending those home to our students during covet and re restocking those areas and making sure that we have enough for classroom uh lessons and also for in-home lessons musical instruments maintenance and repairs we saw a surge in the number of students in orchestra and band at walker and that continues to move into beaufort and with the inclusion of many more students and many brown and black students in orchestra and bands starting at walker there are more instruments that we have in our schools which therefore would require naturally more maintenance and repairs we are in a new contract with the athletic trainer that services charlottesville high school and that contract um there's an increase in the cost of that contract so bringing the

181school-based program supports an improvement uh total to 1 million fifty four thousand one hundred nineteen dollars for those programs thank you school operations mitigation supplies we have earmarked a hundred thousand dollars to continue um miss bryson morseberger talked about making sure that we have supplies um at the ready for our teachers and our staff in the building that it has always been our intent so we would certainly like to earmark some of the covet dollars to continue with those supplies reductions um our enrollment i think uh cam ms powell may have gone over some of this but our enrollment uh did decline this year we anticipate of regaining about 65 percent of that enrollment so we have factored that in so we would recommend a reduction on in professional staff for the professional staff and

182a reduction of one in um support staff and instructional assistant bringing the total reductions to three hundred seventy two thousand eight hundred seventy four and then looking at our revenues on the the grand total of the net expenses would be uh three million three hundred and two thousand four hundred ninety five dollars when we move to the revenue side of the house the state revenue that we anticipate receiving would be thirty two thousand seven hundred eighty one the um cares one dollar eight hundred forty two thousand four hundred sixty six and the care is two dollars a total of four million four hundred eighty one nine hundred ninety three thousand four hundred eighty one thousand nine hundred ninety three dollars um bringing a total uh revenue to five million three hundred twenty four thousand four

183hundred fifty nine dollars with the total changes from um fy twenty one to fy twenty two at five million three hundred fifty seven thousand two hundred and forty dollars and leslie if you wanna pause there if you it's not all apparent on this one screen but basically if you look at the previous screen of the of that five 5.3 million in cares money you see that we're going to use we're proposing to use 3.3 million 269 714 dollars in this fy 22 budget proposal which would leave uh two over little over two point million to still carry forward to help address the fy 23 budget so thank you thank you ms powell and and we'd also note that our request to the city would be level funding uh no cree increase in the funding but

184i i miss power mentioned and i will mention also this budget is a needs-based budget however it is built on care's two dollars uh some cares one and and the bulk of these changes uh are being built on cares two dollars meaning that it's one-time funding so beyond fy 22 as we go into fy we would have to start working our way out of the reliance on the one-time dollars next slide leslie if you want to go to the summary section please yep next steps thank you thank you miss powell would you like me to wrap it up here dr atkins yes so the um this is just a snapshot of the summary of of what all those chain proposed changes would look like when you break it down to our general fund and our

185special revenues fund and so you see here that the fy20 budget recommendations that we're working with right now would increase the general fund by 3.3 million the special revenues fund would hold that 2 million thousand seven hundred and forty five dollars and cares money that we would be holding over we have to have a place to hold that over um you know for fy23 so that's where that money would sit in special revenue um and then the total change is the 5.3 million next slide leslie so uh dr atkins just touched on this but it's such a critical point it definitely merits its own slide you know this budget proposal is really it hinges on an acknowledgement that the city is in it and it's in a challenging revenue position right now and it's perhaps

186it's equally uncertain or even more uncertain that it is challenging i think the uncertainty of it all is is one of the biggest problems so in acknowledging all of that we did try to we're trying to use our cares money in a way that we address the most pressing needs of students while at the same time building or allowing for a ramp or a runway for the city revenue to recover and come alongside of us and so when you look at what we're you know what's being proposed to do with with what's what we call one-time money it's not money that's gonna co you know come in continuously from tax dollars or other revenue streams it's important to understand that historically the city has increased the appropriation to the schools between 1.5 and 3.8 million

187a year so an average annual increase of 2.3 million over the past five years or so in what we would call normal times between 2015 and and 2020 and the city's funding is the key you know back to the early part of the presentation talking about the soq and all the different programs that contribute to our per-pupil expense um the the local support is is really foundational and key so um the this budget proposal that the school board's been working with dr atkins and staff we've all been wrestling with this idea of there's an urgency to address a lot of needs it is certainly a desire to maintain all these valued programs but but also giving some some ramp or runway for the city's revenue picture to become more clear and and time to recover

188and i think the next slide is just the next steps so there's a budget work session on february the 9th that's the next work session and then the school board approval of the proposed budget is slated for february 18th meeting and then on march 1st that's when the school board presents the budget proposal that they adopt to the city council all right thank you um miss powell mrs torres we'll be glad to answer any questions that you might have thank you dr atkins and um ms powell any questions um from the school board i have a few questions yes um the first question is um the we got we've been asked twice about the raises and if they cover people making over 200 000 is that a is it does it or does it can

189we get some clarity on that because it's been asked i think twice i think dr atkins addressed that so no correct okay just check and then is there any way to i know that the uh cultivate charlottesville people have been contacting us about their requests is there any way to have some presentation or clarity or some discussion around that before we close out the budget with our final request miss bryson morrisberger yes um there are several meetings that have been planned right now um for clarification on what that request actually included okay thank you can i just follow up on that point uh will we have that information for our work session on tuesday in time for that meeting yes dr crown we will okay thank you i have a question yes ma'am um i

190i recall uh discussing additional raises uh additional because um what we're only doing is one step um and our my understanding is we didn't do a step last year and so i thought we had discussed on in january at a work session kind of bringing back numbers related to that will that happen at the work session it will yes okay thank you another thing i wanted to kind of clarify maybe for the work session purposes is that the um just kind of related to the calendar um is i i feel like again we're kind of continuing to do the same thing even though things are not the same and i uh respectfully with the contract the teachers sign and teacher hours um and our staff hours might be expanded next year to try to like

191whatever it is that we're going to try to do i i feel like we need to kind of think about that for the next fiscal year and maybe we talk about that more in our work session especially after we have a little bit more information from the state but i also feel like we're flying blind a little bit trying to do a budget for next year and then we still have a lot of questions to answer i agree there there um we're not quite sure just yet what the government governor plans to make an announcement tomorrow i don't know if he will be including uh information about his recommendations for um the impact on either this school year or next school year um but we'll know tomorrow i think that uh announcement is around 11

192o'clock tomorrow anybody else mr bryant mr wade miss purrier can't see everything uh no no i i don't have any questions at this time if i do i will um send them to you uh and you can address them to uh dr adkins or i can send them to both of you um to both of you simultaneously but at this point i don't all right dr kraft did you have anything else no i mean just a comment that i i um i do feel like we are building in um a lot of extra supports for um you know given given i think what we're going to be confronted when the students do come back and when we actually have a chance to see um the in the impact of the pandemic um you know on

193where the where our students are and so i do feel good about that um you know that both mental health social and emotional support but also extra you know sort of a ladder of um extra instructional support so um i i'm i'm pleased about that i feel good about that thank you and i'm sure we we will have um amp opportunity on tuesday to continue to ask questions if they do arise in the meantime um if not i think we can move on to our next item which is uh the 2021 school board member committee assignments thank you madam chair um dr king has taken a look at committee assignments made some adjustments to those assignments and we'd like to present those to you now and the adjustments is based on any feedback that we

194may have received from board members and i think i anything that that may have been adjusted i mean i had touched base with different board members [Music] i do have one question and i had posed this at the vsba conference this week that i attended to the lawyer the vsva lawyer and i think she did try to call me back and i missed that phone call but i wasn't sure and i had asked uh during her presentation whether or not the board chair needed to be one of the people assigned to the disciplinary committees um or if that was if there was leeway in that and i i did not like i said i missed her call and was was not able to get back to her before today so i'm not sure if anybody

195has any knowledge about mr that just as a matter of procedure it may um since the chair would be a part of the appeal committee along with the rest of the board um and you would be conducting the meeting there may be not anything legally against you serving but procedurally we might want to consider that since you will be guiding the meeting with the appeal and you will have all of the knowledge ahead of time on the committee right and so that was one change again i apologize that i didn't follow up um prior to that and how is that listed there can you put that back up leslie please so there were an alternate right so there are three listed there is that correct on that committee that's correct all right so would miss

196purrier dr kraft or miss mckeever would one of you mind switching with me i'm happy to be an alternate lisa if that will address your concerns and if you find out from a legal perspective that it needs to go in the direction that uh dr atkins mentioned then we'll make the switch so go right ahead okay thank you my understanding is that we are um i've literally never had to be on participate in a committee meeting and that all of us are on it because we they come up so quick and it's hard to schedule so it's it's alternate in name only it's basically who's available at the time okay all right i just was checking and i knew that was like i said i was a question i had posed during that conference but

197they didn't answer it at the time so just so just make the switch lisa and list me as an alternate if the if a disciplinary meeting is called whoever can be there will be there and we can just keep it moving okay great thank you miss prayer so if we can make that change is everybody okay with all of the other assignments are you asking for us to move this unless there's further discussion i'm sorry okay i'll make a motion to pass the school board committees as a changed or altered um by you becoming not an alternate on the student disciplinary committee and leah miss prayer becoming an alternate on the disciplinary committee second thank you further discussion all right madam clerk could you take a vote please mr brian yes it's bryson morrisberger yes

198dr craft yes miss mckeever yes miss per year yes miss torres yes mr wayne yes thank you manager thank you all right i think we are now to our our second opportunity for comments from members of the community again if you raise your hand or in the chat or have um indicated that you would like to make comment please state your name your address and limit your comments to three minutes please madam chair i have um beth ike um to to make a comment miss ike thank you um two things thank you for the clarification i requested that is helpful and appreciated um and in general thank you to everyone for working so hard i will say this was a frustrating meeting to listen to because i i sense that patience is frayed and we're

199all frustrated with the hand fates have dealt us but to hear a school board member refused to explain his position especially one who's running for city council was disappointing when asked for clarification i think we should all try and exercise a little patience um and i would hope that greater patience and greater listening would be in order as we move forward thanks guys thank you anybody else mr como i do have another hand raised um and the user is listed as angel firo hey y'all it's me again richard fero 825 prospect avenue um thanks again for having me uh first it was great to hear from dr douglas and dr dickerson um what they're rolling out since really exciting really excited to hear what's cooking there the next comment i want to make was uh

200before the year began um american pediatrics warned us about the likely adverse effects of virtual learning that it not what that would have on the mental health of children especially elementary children uh knowing and then today we heard from three doctors attesting to how that possibility has become a reality in their practice um so i may have this wrong but i believe miss mussberger said something to the effects we don't know how long the children will suffer from mental health issues due to the virtual education to me those comments sounded like you want to see how far we could push the children i'm confident that's not what you meant but if you could clarify what you were saying in response to the comments the doctors made that would be helpful um and lastly be it'd

201also be helpful if someone could confirm if the vote that took place tonight is the official vote that is going to bring pre-k to second grade back to in-person learning march 8th um and um guys uh just echoing previous comments um it's tough this tough time you all are a tough spot no one signed up for this and really appreciate what you all are doing um and how y'all are uh serving the community so thank you very much thank you mr pharaoh um i do not see any chat messages to participate in public comment or do i do see any hands i'll again remind anybody who's on the phone they can press star 9 and that will raise their hand i will turn it to you madam chair for the amount of additional time you'd

202like to give for public comment here thank you give us a few few seconds here going close to 30 here anybody else right now we still have zero hands raised and we have zero chat requests for public comment all right thank you thank you very much i'm gonna close public comment then thank you for everybody who did take the time to to offer comments and emails um and now i'd like to move on to our superintendent's comments please dr atkins thank you miss taurus and thank you to all of the board members for our discussion tonight mr specker we have one slide that we want to put up wonderful we'd like to recommend one of our board members miss lee per year we'd like to congratulate you miss per year for yay of the 2021

203martin luther king jr community awards thank you for all of your work and your tireless efforts to engage the community and to respond to the needs of our community members regardless of age of those community members whether it's our youngest citizen or our most seasoned citizen your work is much appreciated and uh is evidenced by this award so congratulations miss purya thank you very much dr atkins and everyone who has called texted emailed and i think there's some people on this call who are going to remain nameless that knew about this but did not spill the beans so for those of you that know how to keep a secret i know who you are and i'm still here so remember that okay yes look at you just smiling some of you are giving yourselves away

204hmm but thank you it's been an honor and a privilege to serve the charlottesville city school division and it just means more to me than any of you around this table will ever know and thank you so much for allowing me to be a part of this tremendous organization thank you miss per year and then we'd like to recognize our vip winners for this week um dr odie thank you dr atkins uh we love celebrating our great teachers and staff and so the vip program is a perfect opportunity to do just that before you use ce4 of our staff members who have been nominated by their peers kristin edwards fifth grade uh english language arts and virginia studies teacher at walker sarah hathaway first grade teacher at greenbrier miss k elena k an esl teacher

205at walker and matt torriel sped teacher at chs all right thank you dr odie we have a few more dr atkins keep going kelly walters pe teacher at johnson erica trent sixth grade social studies teacher at walker and gracie hendry a fourth grade teacher at greenbrier i think a little bit more here we have no image but we have desiree connor third grade teacher at greenbrier angela corpus art teacher at greenbrier cindy nelson fifth grade english language arts um m virginia studies at walker jillian smith special education teacher at walker and i believe we have one oh was that it that was all okay i thought we had one more so we are hoping that uh we will continue to have additional nominations from our staff so that we can continue to recognize uh excellent

206teaching during this virtual environment thank you dr agust thank you dr oda it's so nice to see those those smiling faces up there and you know our teachers continue to smile and they meet every challenge that we put before them so thank you so much and congratulations to all of our award winners um miss torres we're looking forward to march 8th opening our schools with at a minimum with our pre-k through second grade students and then targeted students in grades 3 through 12 as we work with staff and and um look at our capacity and we will be um increasing those numbers uh as quickly as we possibly can and we will send out adequate notice to our families and to our staff uh prior to increasing beyond the the model a uh but we

207would be looking forward to continuing the progress of bringing our students back into the building so thank you thank you dr atkins um and next dr king do we have a work session wrap up was there anything on that list therefore they're not anything on the list um as board members were asking questions um dr atkins or staff answered however if there's a question that you feel like i should have written down and i didn't um please let me know can i add one a request or a follow-up um at the next board meeting um in march can we get an update on our community coveted numbers um just to see where we are and um where we are in the surge and where we are locally with our case numbers sterling kim um bryson

208moore's burger um we have that baptist on if you'd like an update i think she is she has those numbers before her if you'd like an update tonight we've already voted and so we can look it up i just wanted to add it for the next time just to you know so we can all know where we are in the community great thank you we appreciate it do you think we are going to have board member comments i'm sorry i didn't see that on the agenda that's right before superintendent comments i flip the page too soon sorry no worries um sure absolutely we can go through a series of comments from the board and i also do want to offer an opportunity although i had uh send her a message miss packer if she would

209like to offer anything she doesn't have to but i wanted to acknowledge her and thank her for being here again we value you and the time that you've um vested in and hanging in here through these these long meetings so thank you very much so let's start with you if you'd like to say something and if not please please know that we are all very grateful for you um i do believe that this is my last meeting as a student representative so i wanted to thank you guys for this opportunity it was a rigorous experience thank you thank you again all right mr wade i see you right now are you ready no comments okay miss mckeever hey thank you so much um i just wanted to kind of uh uh some of the things

210that i have discussed with you i just wanted to make sure that we talked uh that i wanted to follow up on in the future if dr king doesn't mind adding these to the list um one is just seeing the foundation um article in the newspaper i wanted to make sure that we as a board also discussed creating a foundation as a division creating a foundation i think it's critical especially in light of reconfiguration and cultivation also's request that we find ways to leverage private um and support um schools through our own foundation um i also wanted to mention we um used to in the past um have lunch with the city council every other month and i know zoom is painful but i think uh it would be very helpful to continue those um

211conversations with council and i think they have a lot of questions and i think we get a lot of questions and um i think for example um we have no idea what the revenue outlook looks like might be helpful to when considering our budget to consider what the revenue is um coming in from the city so i just love to have additional more frequent conversations with city council um generally um i think well last time we had a meeting with with city council we talked about reconfiguration briefly but i definitely think we need to have an update on the contract um and where we are with that i'm not sure that anything's going to happen unless we keep asking the question um so i think we need to ask keep asking the question um i

212want to say thank you and congratulations to leah for all of her advocacy and for her award um well well deserved there um and we'd already discussed but i definitely um look forward to hearing the outcome of discussions between um our staff and cultivate charlottesville staff um about what it is that they are recommending and how we can pursue mutual mutually uh you know goals that we both agree on um and thank you very much that's all thank you ms mckeefer um miss bryson morrisberger thank you i had just one comment but i will add um an additional one just to clarify um to follow up to um the comments that were made um my comments about the effects in children was about the long-term effects of covet 19. so i just wanted to clarify

213so that there was no misunderstanding and just to say it's really easy to misinterpret or to i don't know not extend grace um so i just want to make sure everyone's taking the time to be patient and to hear what everyone is saying and not necessarily assuming that you know that what just assuming is instead of you know extending some grace so just to clarify my earlier comment was that we know um there's just now emerging research about the long-term effects of covet 19 on children and then my second comment was to say thank you to everyone who had any part in putting on the clinic at the at the performing arts center for the school staff and that it was a lot of work and everyone there was volunteering and everyone went above and

214beyond and i want to say thank you and i want to say a special thank you um to dr baptiste because she was up at 10 p.m the day on friday night still signing people up still filling up slots to get as many people in and out so i just wanted to say a big thank you to her because those vaccines are saving people's lives so we appreciate all the work that you do and thank you i agree um let's see dr kraft okay um just really quickly i wanted to mention um this is a time of year when normally some of us would go to washington to lobby our legislators there regarding federal funding for education and of course we didn't go this year but it was held virtually and i was able to

215attend um a meeting with senators kane and warner uh this past monday and um you know it was great i mean we're so lucky to have them and i think they're both real advocates for for education and um you know in terms of hopefully getting more federal funding senator warner is just totally committed to broadband infrastructure he really wants to do that and also requesting that some of our federal testing requirements get waived uh for this year so that they don't interfere with some of what we're trying to do with our with our students and helping helping them in the ways that they need help and forming our own assessments you know to find out where they are and how they're learning and then i want to second lachandra's thank yous about the vaccination clinic

216i mean it was so wonderful to have the school division um really take everybody in their arms and say we're gonna we're gonna make this happen for you we're gonna organize it and make it happen because it's been very a very chaotic uh system you know all over the country and um there's a lot of anxiety about getting vaccinated so i think your efforts um were you know we're a game changer and greatly appreciated so thank you all very much that's it thank you dr kraft miss purrier okay so it's february and it will be our first i tell you pandemic is giving us first isn't it nice to have a first so we are going to have our first virtual grace tinsley bash it is on friday february 19th dr atkins i will send

217the information to you or to leslie in order that it get to the appropriate place it's only 30 minutes from 7 to 7 30 you'll see a brief video of grace and a brief slide show of all of the recipients that have received this scholarship for those of you that don't know grace tinsley she was a force she was very motivated for education she is a retired school nurse uh with the city schools uh she hired uh ann sandridge so she used to sit in the chair where anne is and we've given out lots and lots and lots of scholarships our students are doing well our monies are growing when we initially started we gave money for the first and second year we are anticipating that moving forward we will be able to continue those

218scholarships at least through the third year the money has grown so that it is now housed at cacf that's right we had to invest i'm so excited and um it's just a really really uh fun activity it's only 30 minutes and we're asking you to watch the little video and there will be information on the screen about how you can donate and all of your monies go directly to the students our administrative costs are uh called volunteerism and so we do this uh gratefully gracefully gratefully all of the things you can possibly think of to someone that meant a lot to our community and meant a lot to the students in the community and so we want to make sure that we don't let this go by just because of pandemic so from 7 to

2197 30 on the 19th of february it's when the event will be held and as i said earlier i will make sure that i um zap it to you dr atkins and you can get it to the appropriate person i can think of a bajillion places it should go but i know you'll know exactly where to send it thank you so much miss purrier i have one question yes when you said slideshow i was wondering if we are going to get a preview of the electric slide no we're just going to slide we're going to just slide of the students it's going to be of the students yes you will not get to see uh uh mr wade do his famous thing and jennifer and i will just sit back and do like this as

220we watch mr wade okay just checking thank you all right um i did not mean to miss anybody but i feel like i did mr bryant did i catch you just gonna say a few few words remarks yes sir um thank you um um dr baptist for coordinating um all of the coordinating for all of us to get the vaccine i think dr atkins and i got the word uh on the same day thank you for all of your hard work for coordinating all of that um again this is a group effort mr bryant you and your you and your group i want to make sure i include everybody be inclusive also um a shout out to all the principals and my fellow school counselors congratulations and um have a happy week council administrative week

221and um also to my fellow um board members um it was a really robust um conversation tonight um we could agree to disagree and at the end of the day we're all working toward that one goal and that's getting these kids back in school parents hang in there better days are coming so having said that miss e congratulations on your mlk award it's so richly deserved and you've worked very hard congratulations that's all i have to say thank you sir um yes i will re reiterate um a lot of those or feel uh you all shared a lot of sentiments that i have i do again want to extend my congratulations to you ms purrier again um also i know miss dr baptist and team and a lot of people um dr atkins and a

222lot of people who are working behind the scenes and coordinating efforts with blue ridge health district um you know up until this point and going forward to take care of all of our staff and and i just want to express my um ongoing gratitude for all of that and and for um you know the time spent with that and and again dr baptist i know and and you are you and i were communicating very late and i know you were entering um registrants you know doing hand registrations for people last weekend so thank you again and you know have heard how you went above and beyond um as i think everybody does on our team um you know for people who weren't comfortable who or who may have been nervous to get that vaccine um

223and just you know again reaching out that hand to make sure that everybody was okay so thank you i so appreciate and i'm sure like so many of us this is not what you know we signed up for and you have just stepped right into this role of doing so many wonderful things and taking on this whole covid thing so thank you so much thank you and i offered to give shots to people but no one took me up on it oh darn well you didn't offer to me i wouldn't let you do mine no you wouldn't anyway thank you thank you so much yeah thank you so and um thank you everybody and again just to review um upcoming meetings we um which were listed but again this this tuesday just in a few

224days we will be meeting on february 9th and that is a charlottesville city school board budget work session via zoom and that starts at four o'clock and then february 18th is another board meeting where the budget will be presented to the school board from the superintendent and then march 1st is when we would make our request to city council so thank you for showing that and i think that i don't think i forgot anything so thank you miss mckeever for getting me back on track and with that i would like to adjourn this meeting please so thank you everybody night