October 1, 2020 Charlottesville City School Board Meeting

001okay this webinar is now live and attendees are beginning to join in thank you so much joe for your help i feel like we should have asked you years ago so i thank you for coming in well that's okay because we just started this uh signal processing through our streaming host just a few months ago so it took so it took a while to kind of perfect and get everything running and with all the boards and commissions that were now it's all filtered through the communications office so we had to come up with some way to get it out to our tv audience and we're just we just got pretty fortunate that our our servers uh can accommodate can accommodate the signal flow so we're excited joe we're at 4 59 in 30 seconds okay

002so hopefully we are moving live to channel 14 in just a minute or so i'm just checking the facebook page all right it did start so we'll give it one minute okay it is currently activating so i'll let you know when it does start great so we're just waiting on signal processing yep excellent then we will begin our meeting it does say we are live currently so pat if you will you could check the facebook site yep and i would uh relaunch that and that might take a second to sure go live too i think in the test we had a live a little live banner next to the video feed so let's see what happens if we pull that up real quick and i do see us i see us on boxcast so we're

003good there okay i'm just refreshing the charlottesville city schools page hi alex good to see you before we start our meeting officially thank you for coming um we're working with the city to make sure that we have all of the streams available to um anybody who can watch on facebook and i guess channel 14 and all things so just taking a minute to do that before we start pat i am seeing us on channel on our facebook education channel 14. so that went through okay i'm still looking for the charlottesville city schools um video i will share it if i need to but i will i'm i'm pretty confident this will yeah go through this give me one more click and see where we are yeah i'm not seeing the live button like we got

004yesterday so i know we're at least a minute into this oh i see a live button now great okay so off the charlottesville city schools facebook page there is a red box with live inside and it is showing we are good that we are live yes sorry it took a couple minutes longer but uh we're there great thanks pat and uh have a good meeting great thank you thanks joe okay um welcome hi i'm jennifer mckeever the chair of the charlottesville city school board this is the october 1st school board meeting uh we're offering via zoom and many leaving um live stream platform so welcome i am i'm going to now call the meeting to order the meeting is now in order uh do we we're going to do a moment of silence to uh

005to start off the meeting at this point just for a moment okay can i get the clerk to do a roll call of the school board members please it's phantom chair um mr brian mr brian welcome miss bryson morrisberger president dr craft griffin ms mckeever here ms puryear president mrs torres yes and mr waite yes thank you welcome all um the first item that we're we need some action on is the approval of the proposed agenda move for approval second okay it's been moved and properly seconded um i don't think it was me but sorry um and uh so yeah let's go ahead and um get a vote on the proposed agenda madam clerk it's venom chair mr brian yes miss bryson morrisberger yes dr craft yes miss mckeever yes miss per year yes miss

006torres yes and mr wade yes thank you okay we have now comments from members of the community um i any um am i going to look to mr cuomo for yes um we can start by anybody who would like to um just remind me if they've registered to sign up for a public comment or to raise their hand and and we can go in that order and then i'll go down our list make sure we're not missing anybody from the registration page i have um angela i'm sorry i have the registration page as well so sure um on me i've given angel firo the opportunity to speak you should like to if angel would like to unmute this time yes i'm here can you hear me yes ma'am welcome thank you dear madam chair and

007board thank you again for taking the time to listen to the community as well as my thoughts and thank you teachers for all the hard work you've been putting into educating our children a huge thank you as well to city of promise international neighbors boys and girls club and the ymca for all the support they are providing students with virtual learning through abundant life ministries i have had the privilege of running a socially distant in-person support program for elementary students over the past four weeks many of our volunteers are older individuals who fall in higher risk categories but feel the urgency of serving our children in person i've seen many of our students working harder than they ever have to attend to lessons through screens and sit in front of those screens for multiple hours

008each day our kindergarten through second grade students have struggled greatly because of the nature of virtual learning needing several breaks and incentives just to make it through the morning for many across all grade levels who struggled to access an in-person curriculum the virtual one is even less accessible i've received multiple emails from school social workers and other individuals in the community community wanting to help students sadly we do not have the capacity to serve them all and this is true for other community partners as well so what is happening to these other children who is supporting them when phone calls emails and zoom check-ins don't work families are struggling to balance work and support virtual learning especially those without the privilege of working from home those who do not speak english as a first language

009and those with single parents in only offering virtual instruction we have significantly increased the stress families are experiencing during this pandemic and the racial unrest in our nation daycare providers private schools community partners and volunteers have been working in person with students for several weeks now successfully and yet our city schools cannot even serve the most vulnerable populations in person we are failing our children in the margins once again when large inequities already exist and so i asked okay for city schools to request community partners serve our children in person if it is too unsafe for city school employees to serve children in pert it seems the responsibility has been shifted to organizations that often have fewer resources than our city schools this is not okay i'm deeply discouraged and angered by the lack of

010acknowledgement of those who are daily taking risks so that others can have the privilege of working remotely when discussing the reopening of schools there may never be a time when we can make everyone feel completely safe but we cannot allow systemic structures that have disproportionately negative impacts on black and brown communities to continue i ask you to deeply consider a four day per week november reopening for our pre-k through elementary learners to also consider children of all ages whose learning needs or whose family situations make an all virtual curriculum inaccessible and to acknowledge that all virtual instruction still requires in-person support to be accessible to all we can find a way and we must for the sake of our children thank you who's next mr cuomo um next we have chris meyer chris i've pushed

011that button to allow you just to unmute yourself hey chris before you start i just want to um add i'm sorry in the middle of miss fiera's fiero's presentation i realized i had not done the timing and i just want to indicate that i need everybody to introduce themselves tell me your address and you have three minutes um to um make to have your public comments so i apologize chris but i i needed to remember that this time so thank you go ahead all right thanks everybody and i'm not you know presume that's directed just unclear at me though not at all dear school board members uh on behalf of the charlottesville city schools joint pto reopening fund i would like to provide you and the community with a short update on its progress today

012the joint pto reopening fund was created to support effective teaching in a virtual environment and allows equal opportunity for each student and teacher to properly utilize the district's mandatory nine-week virtual learning plan the reopening fund partnered with the charlottesville area community foundation to administer the funding raise the funds raised and appreciates the supports provided by charlottesville city school staff including kim powell and denise uh particularly the reopening fund again is focused on equity and meeting the needs of the students and families during this challenging time of virtual learning because of this it is designed to allocate funds received to each school based on the school's population of students receiving free and reduced school lunches since it started a little more than 30 days ago the reopening fund has either received or has commitment commitments for

013a total of 131 262. from 169 donors eighty thousand dollars from the fund has already been distributed to the ccs schools which have created dedicated committees to select expenditures we are updating our website frequently to keep the public updated on the progress we want to thank all the parents community members businesses and foundations who have supported this initiative we as ptos do plan on reviewing this initiative after spending and reporting on funds raised in order to consider whether this type of joint fundraising could be used again in the future we wish you a constructive meeting thank you thank you mr meyer and who's next pat next on the list with a hand up is uh richard fira and he can you have three minutes thank you madam chair and board um i feel like our

014nation has been exposed um for not giving teachers enough respect and support and appreciation and money for the hard and important services they provide to our communities i apologize for the role that i played with that i also say let's start by raising property taxes so teachers can get paid substantially more hire more teachers so we can have smaller classrooms i'm ready to give a little more to make this for reality i'm sure others are ready to do the same um with that being said i'll be honest i was excited to hear an in-person option was being explored for october it sounds like that's off the table now it also sounds like the dates for when some may go back in person keep getting pushed back too um listen if we aren't going back in

015person anytime soon then let's make some necessary changes to the virtual education to make it more accessible for all of our students i got six essential changes that i've heard from students and parents in our community and the first one is to add synchronous night classes and weekend options for families number two don't do not overlap any of the school synchronous schedules so that the older students can help their parents support their younger siblings with accessing the virtual education three is require less synchronous instruction and more off-screen asynchronous work especially for grades k through two four if you're going to ask parents to support students with their virtual education then provide instructions in the first language of the parents of all your students five like albemarle is doing provide in in-person school for some of

016the i for some of our iep and special needs students that need it the most cuc isn't or cecs isn't willing to make virtual education accessible for all of its students or it can't let's put everything on hold until we can have an in-person option for these folks you know just like we put everything on hold when we have a snow deal last thing i want to say is i've asked this last couple times and and and i'm still curious of why is charlottesville city schools asking community partners to work in person with students if they have declared it's unsafe to work in person with students it feels like if this question can't be answered then it's obvious we can have an in-person option and i think there are teachers willing and ready to do

017this and i would phil and i think most community partners will feel encouraged to hear from them um so thank you for your time great thank you uh who's next pat i have uh jordan jordan johnson okay hello everyone you have three minutes please state your name and your address thank you perfect my name is jordan johnson i work with cultivate charlottesville um as a ccs partner i wanted to share for a few minutes uh i give a couple updates of our programming uh one is the programming that we're pursuing this fall and two is to talk about a collaboration between the ccs nutrition department and cultivate that's happening next week so with the schools going virtual this fall we have scaled back our engagement with students and have decided to focus our engagement efforts

018with students living in hearthwood apartments taking the nature walk to the greenbrier garden twice a week for a short socially distant gathering engaging students in friendship court and sixth street apartments in the uac programming space on sixth street collaborating with city of promise to host lunch in the garden with students living in westhaven and partnering with abundant life to spend time in the beaufort garden after their tutoring sessions we're also continuing to work with the eight ccs high school student food justice interns in our paid internship program providing two weekly shifts building job skills and leadership opportunities including recent virtual meeting with delegate sally hudson challenging her to think of school foods as a place to build equity and to prioritize the voices of students eligible for free and reduced meals on that note we

019are collaborating with ccs nutrition team next week in a very different but still exciting farm to school week um we are hosting farm to school programming in person in those small cohorts that i mentioned earlier uh but we have challenged ourselves to find ways to transfer these experiences to the home so next week we're releasing videos of tours of the garden and where they stand right now teachers have asked for some content with guided questions after so we're happy to share that as well we've worked to source hundreds of bunches of collards to distribute with thursday's lunch for our harvest of the month program with a backpack flyer recipe and guided guide to find videos with step-by-step instructions we also have a video of mr juan diego wade reading the harvest of the month book

020coming out next week week which is exciting as well the last thing i want to mention is that carlton jones the nutrition director and the nutrition team have planned have worked really hard and planned a from scratch lunch option on friday october 9th highlighting fresh fresh baked chicken potatoes and local zucchini and summer squash hopefully you all will get a chance to see some of the fruits of the fall harvest next week thank you again for the insanely difficult decisions that you all are making i hope you have a great night thank you mr johnson um thank you cultivate charlottesville is who's next mr cuomo i'm nancy d and she is unmuted hi thank you this is nancy deutsch i live on merryweather street um i also want to start by echoing the thanks to

021all of you for your hard work during this time i know you're making incredibly difficult decisions um particularly with pretty um changing information and lack of definitive evidence so i appreciate that i also appreciate your decision to walk back the the reopening plan um as hard as as i know that was um but i also have a concern um i am concerned about the map testing for elementary students that's planned so from what i can tell the map tests are not state mandated um so it's our district's choice about whether or not to administer the tests i do understand that they're meant not as accountability metrics but as more individualized assessment tools to help teachers gauge students levels of learning but i have serious doubts about their utility in this context and concerns about the

022effects of testing right now on students and teachers so parents and teachers have been really struggling and and community partners as we heard um to keep students engaged in and enjoying school i'm taking a 60 to 90 minute online assessment i suspect will do a lot of damage to that foundation that we've been working so hard to create um that's especially coming on top of the pals testing that some grades already had due to the state mandate for the the pals testing i believe so i'm concerned about creating additional stress for both elementary students and teachers who are already working um incredibly hard and feeling very stressed and anxious from what i can tell beyond that i also have some serious doubts about what the tests will actually tell teachers so i know that many

023parents are struggling to keep their kids sitting at the screens for classes and independent work and i know the community partner who spoke earlier noted that as well i imagine that will be amplified for a 60 to minutes 90 minute um test in front of the computer so what you're likely to be assessing is really how well kids can keep their attention focused online not the the content that they have in their kids i'm sorry in their heads for students who already have attentional challenges this may be made even worse by the fact that for some kids with attentional difficulties they may miss easy questions because they're not being challenged and are not engaged it's easier for them to miss those easy questions and because map adjusts questions based on students answers if you're disengaged

024online and missing easy questions you'll never even get to the more difficult questions um so you there's more difficult questions might have kept you more engaged but in the end the screen time is likely to exacerbate this so you may not even know what what kids actually know teachers are professionals they've been working incredibly hard to build connections with students virtually and i suspect that if we gave the teachers some autonomy to find ways to assess their students learning base in ways that they felt best mapped on to their students ways of learning and needs and what they need right now that they may be able to come up with really creative ways to assess student knowledge while also continuing to build their connections to in relationships with students thank you for your time thank

025you nick um mr cuomo who's next uh we have beth ike who can unmute herself good evening folks my name is beth ike and i live at 802 saint claire avenue i'm just hoping that we can hear some explanations tonight specifically i'd love an explanation for why the coveted committee was instructed to put forth a premature return to school plan that caused great confusion and stress for families and teachers alike i don't understand why the district would ever consider going against the agreed upon plan where we were planning to move forward one nine at a time i'm also hopeful will be offered an explanation for why certain lgbtq related content has been targeted for removal from our elementary level programming as a jmrl librarian said to me read a crayon story is a gem of

026a book and it's one of their favorite recommendations why would we be pulling this from our kindergarten lessons what is the thinking behind this censorship lastly i just asked the board to take both of these issues seriously and respectfully demand accountability from our leadership dr atkins perhaps these two issues did not originate with you but as our superintendent the buck stops with you i'm hoping we can hear from you this evening on these fronts thank you all thank you miss ike who's next mr promo uh we have kate tilik who's able to unmute it this time thank you kate tillak 1526 oxford road three minutes is a short amount of time in which to defend one's existence in the world but i will do my best i identify as queer my pronouns are she her

027my child is eight years old at venable elementary and she or they identify as non-binary my comments are regarding the gender identity lesson that was struck down i'm asking dr atkins and dr odi to provide a statement that they know and understand the virginia values act and will immediately begin work implementing provisions that protect and support lgbtq students and staff the virginia values act is a law it's not a bill it's a law that was signed by governor northrup that protects many different people from discrimination including women and veterans it also protects gender identity and sexual orientation as well as other lgbtq characteristics gender identity and sexual orientation are separate things i ask that charlottesville city schools opt for lgbtq educator training from side by side side by side is an lgbtq organization out of

028richmond the trainings are short possibly two hours long they provide current information and best practices for schools what this would do is put everyone on the same page with current information so everyone can have a similar starting point for productive conversation let me tell you about my non-binary child and how much i love them and how proud i am of them every day my child is amazing she is smart she is talented she is funny she is a good friend she works hard as a student she loves her school and she loves everyone in her school please love her back please show her that she exists in the world she gets to have that she gets to see herself represented as she is in her full beautiful life thank you miss tilik who's the next

029mr fumbo i have amy marshall who's able to unmute it this time miss marshall you're next in three minutes hello my name is amy sarah marshall i use the pronoun she and hers and i live at 260 chestnut street here in the city i'm the lesbian parent of an lgbtq child in the city system she's at chs and i've also been with seagull pride for gosh nine years or so um and so that's led me to work with lgbtq community a lot including youth in this area so i'm also responding to the issue of the lgbtq curriculum um but i'm going to reiterate some things that i brought up to you back in 2014 um and just point out that since that year lgbtq visibility has increased um both nationally in terms of marriage equality

030and employment protections also with the virginia values act already mentioned and here in charlottesville we have had alternative proms youth picnics youth groups a pride festival that attracted 10 000 attendees and the most recent statistics show that 26 of millennials identify as lgbtq and for gen z that number is growing and it's even higher so even as these numbers have grown i have not seen the supports for kids in our schools grow at all um as a parent i have watched my kids hear anti-gay words jokes bullying slurs um in the classroom on the playground in elementary school and in middle school and never once have they had a teacher a bus driver a staff member step in and provide some kind of guidance or intervention what i haven't seen is any robust comprehensive system-wide

031plan to address issues and needs so it's not just the curriculum but that is my number one request provide an inclusive curriculum at all grade levels sexual orientation and gender identity are not controversial anymore and they're not sexual kids in kindergarten can have two dads two moms a transgender parent children in kindergarten can know that they are trans we have to validate the lived experiences of children and set the stage for all children to understand and respect the differences of people that they will be encountering as they grow this is not something to put off in elementary school that's where these words and these behaviors are learned that's where bullies are born we need to proactively foster student gsa's gender and sexuality alliances we need to proactively and deliberately encourage these groups and provide leadership

032around them we need to put policy into practice yes you have an anti-discrimination policy fantastic but a policy that nobody is held accountable to and nobody knows how to implement it into practice is not worth its weight in anything be explicit we can't just say all right miss marshall your time is up okay i am going to be sending um a letter to you uh with all of my proposals thank you thank you ms marshallty appreciate it who's the next mr cuomo we have katrina cooper and katrina can unmute herself at this time hello my name is katrina cooper and i'm a riverside resident and i was just um coming on here to bring a little attention to you guys because um i had an issue um with um i guess my cousin have a

033child with the iep and um i just feel when school started back up that his iep person was i mean not in contact with him like she should have been he's a special niche child and all the extra curriculums that the teachers will work with him with like nobody was reaching out to her so um that was one of my main concerns was about they have to do something better about the kids that has ieps and another one of my concerns was that um i had called to the school and as we all know the kids are virtual and they have to have um the technology and the tools to go with the chromebook such as the charger and um they had told me that they had a shortage a shortage in the charges and

034that they were on backhoe and that brings a little concern to my attention too because the kids need these things and i don't understand why like they don't have them like yeah but that's they're my two main issues and i thank you guys thank you miss cooper i appreciate your comments um who's next so they're no other hand raised but i do see lisa green had signed up to provide public comment and i'm just muting lisa at this time lisa you have three minutes thank you very much um i appreciate your the time to speak and i appreciate all you do i appreciate all the teachers that are working so hard uh through this uh time uh i come to you to say nothing more than some other speakers have eloquently put except to say

035that i support the uh the requests to put the lgbtq uh gender non-binary gender um uh non-discrimination into the curriculum and and i will keep this brief charlottesville is in the national spotlight unfortunately we have been since august 12th it's not just about race it's anti-semitic uh tone the lgbtq uh and we're in the national spotlight and then we were again in the national spotlight with the new york times let's not be in the national spotlight again because we are not following the virginia values act and giving every child the opportunity to be who they are in school and feel supported you don't know what it's like to have your kid come home and say hey we made some at school today for mother's day i could only make one because they only had enough

036for everybody to have one so the child has to then make a choice about what they do for mother's day for their two mothers he'll put the kids in that situation and also give them enough support and start teaching the children so that they don't become bullies i just ask for leadership the world is watching us charlottesville the world's watching to see what we do and see how we lead not correct dr dr adkins the world's watching you as well we've got this already in the paper and let's not make this another national headline thank you for your time thank you miss green anyone else yes we have julia feldmeier who's unmuted at this time okay misspelled by are you in four minutes hey um i just i i want to second the comment uh

037that lisa green just made that's a great point um but i joined this call because i wanted to talk a little bit about virtual learning and a hopeful return to in-person learning um our daughter is in the pre-k4 class um and we ended up finding a spot in a private preschool for her um which i'm really grateful for and it's been terrific to see how well the school has operationalized getting kids in the classroom safely um or as safely as can be uh you know the kids are are happy running around the playground wearing their masks um and i think there's plenty of proof proof around charlottesville that this can be done when we are deliberate and thoughtful about how to do it and so i my hope is there's been a lot of discussion

038about the hard decisions we make um and i think a lot of talk of doubling down on um well we've already put effort into building a virtual curriculum let's stick with it but if it's not working i don't know why we're doubling down and putting continuing to put more effort into that as opposed to saying hey how are we really going to operationalize in-person learning to make it happen and make it happen safely when there's plenty of evidence if we look hard and do our research to see how other places are doing and doing it well thank you miss feldmeyer who's next mr perma we have dede smith next who is unmuted at this time thank you thank you um i was inspired by the last couple speakers and just wanted to reiterate something i've

039spoken about before uh per the ibram kennedy metric i i think you need to ask yourself do your decisions create racial inequity or does it alleviate racial inequity simply put are they racist or anti-racist everything i've heard tonight increases the gap for educational access and assessment between families of less wealth mostly minority students and those with resources mostly white students who are your decisions helping how are your decisions shaping the imbalance that was recognized in the national media as racist are your decisions now racist or anti-racist thank you for listening thank you miss smith who's next mr cuomo um next we have finn green marshall who is unmuted at this time hi welcome hi i'm a student at chs and i myself identify as non-binary and i i think that elementary students should be able

040to learn about all sorts of gender identities because they need to have uh because some kids it's just like they know that something is different about them but they don't know what it is and sometimes they just need the words to know what it is and they can't always access those words if they don't have the correct access so you need to give them the access to know who they are um thank you thank you who's next mr pr mr fumble so there are no other hands raised i do have about six people who were on the public comment list um and i don't know if i should read those names out loud or just have them try to raise their hand in the zoom participant attendees list so i can call on them from

041the gallery i think that's probably preferable so if you uh want to have a if you want to comment at this time please raise your hand and mr cuomo will unmute you and you'll have three minutes to tell us your comments okay we have another opportunity at the end of the meeting as well um so if you want to make a comment at that time that's appropriate as well tell them to click a button so at the bottom of the panelist list there should be a series of buttons and one of them is a raise your hand button thank you mr promo anybody raise their hand at this time i do not see anybody else who has raised their hand in the in the gallery okay thank you um you will have an opportunity at

042the end of the meeting to comment as well um so at this time i'm going to close public comment so that we can move on to the rest of the items on the agenda uh as always charlottesville city school board appreciates all the public comment and we would uh encourage everybody who wants to speak to come continue to listen to the meeting and participate at the end um so with that uh we have uh we're going to move on to the special recognition dr atkins or miss powell who's miss palace says i have that item yes hi welcome so very briefly um just want to draw attention to the hard work that renee hoover who leads our finance department and chrissy vick and our communications team they've been working very hard you may have noticed

043that the last two budget books that you were issued looked very different than the ones you had received in the past and what we are doing under rene's leadership is working towards becoming a meritor having a meritorious budget and receiving that national award this year was the our second time with the new format our second time out of the gate we submitted for what's called the pathway which is it's a it's an accomplishment but with that we get feedback and we expected some feedback our first time out of the gate so we know what areas we want to work on next so we can continue our efforts to receive the meritorious budget award and under rene's leadership i'm sure we will get there and again i would like to thank chrissy vick beth chuck also

044helped us but chrissy really had the lead in putting together that look of the new budget book with all the graphic supports that you see there so thank you to the team and thanks for taking a moment to recognize the the hard work of our finance team uh well let me just at this time recognize our finance team and chrissy vick for their accomplishment and pathway to the meritorious budget award which is uh conveniently called mba so renee thank you i just um your leadership um is quiet but mighty and um we really appreciate your professionalism and expertise in um because it's critical work and um we just couldn't do without you and yet uh so under the radar so thank you and i'm happy to have the opportunity to recognize you so congratulations and

045chrissy and beth too thank you thanks kim um next we're going to go to the consent agenda were there any questions or comments about the consent agenda excellent um any motions of any sort madam chair i moved the acceptance of the consent agenda second okay great um any conversation or discussion on the items on the consent agenda okay and um with that we're going to go ahead and call the vote miss green thank you madam chair mr bryant yes is bryson morrisburger yes dr craft yeah ms mckeever yes ms per year yes miss torres yes and mr waite yes thank you miss green um the next item on our agenda is the um naming of facilities and grounds policy that dr baptist is gonna bring up as um i think this is a change that

046uh well dr baptist can explain it and thank you very much for joining us dr baptist madam chair members of the board and dr adkins thank you for having me and i did bring the naming of facilities and grounds policy to the board last month and was asked to go back and look at some of the the policies and resolutions that we have regarding equity so i have added language in there from um those places and the language that's added is in bold and um there was one bold statement in there last time which is still there but i would ask if there are any questions about the changes that have been added and would uh ask for the approval of the policy and once we have the policy approved we will start getting ready

047to have our first meeting i know we have two board members who will be working with us mr bryant and dr kraft and we have had several members of the community and school division who have volunteered for this committee but i didn't want to really organize the committee until we had this policy approved great thank you dr baptist um did were there any questions on the changes dr beth has made or i'm going to try to say her name as much as i can during this time please yeah miss mckeever please let me know if you want me to project the screen i can do that as well just take my cue from you okay oh okay thank you you want me to project i guess so just for the moment were there any questions

048or comments so the bold items were the part that dr baptist changed made changes right the fourth paragraph that is also bolded was in what i brought to you last time the first two paragraphs that are bolded or what i took language from the equity information that you asked me to do okay any comments okay hearing none we can say doctor i mean mr wade it's hard to hear like you're it's hard to hear i'm good okay we knew he was good but we're glad to hear it yeah we're gonna vote on that one we agree i would just like to say that i i really appreciate the changes i think i really like the language that you put in and i think it really clarifies um the work that we need to do and

049the reasons why we do it so i appreciate the work that you've done on this glad to do it thank you and i would just like to echo that same sentiment i appreciate the language being specific toward our goals so i think it's it's a good update and a great starting document thank you i would like to thank you lashandra for bringing that up and and prompting this these editions so thank you for that um and i'm super excited about what the future holds in terms of our uh facilities and naming um so i think this is a great step forward and i look forward to hearing what the committee says in the coming months um so i am certainly happy to entertain any emotions at this time madam chair i move the adoption of

050the naming of the facilities and grounds policy as presented by dr baptist i second it okay and i will no any questions or comments now that it's been okay and um asked ms green to call the roll for the vote it's madam chair mr bryant yes is bryson morseberger yes dr craft yes ms mckeever yes it's for a year yes ms torres yes and mr wade yes thank you thank you ms green thank you dr baptist thank you i feel like i'll be able to say your name again later so i'm going to get my numbers up um okay now the next item are the items for discussion and the first one is exciting private foundation donation for licensed social workers dr atkins thank you madam chair to school board members um this is an

051exciting presentation that we have tonight back in early june um ms lisa torres made us aware that there was a philanthropic group in the community who was interested in talking to us about how they might support our students and especially in light of covet 19 and some of the um concerns that our students might have or families might have around the area of trauma during covet and what they were experiencing so ms stephanie randolph was the representative for the group and we had the distinct pleasure of meeting with her several times to talk to her about what our needs are uh or we anticipated would be in our school division and so tonight what we bring to you is not only the incredibly generous um donation a donation of 500 000 or half million dollars

052from the philanthropic group through stephanie's work and her coordination and collaboration with us to actually put clinical social workers or social workers in our schools uh walker buffett and the high school in order to be able to create a comprehensive program that threads through all three of those schools to respond to the needs of our students whatever they may be as they either engage with learning online or in our building now we recognize that it's a tremendous lift to provide all the supports that our students need and through this gift we're going to be able to provide some of those very important aspects of social emotional development so we have with you us tonight uh all three of the principals dr hastings um from walker we also have dr turner and dr arizari who will

053talk to you about the program that will be in place i'm not sure which one will start good evening uh dr atkins thank you uh school board school board chair um we are i think uh dr hastings is here as well yep so we just want to say uh thank you we are excited about this program as well and i think uh to touch on what dr atkins just said it's uh that vertical piece between walker all the way up to the high school is going to be an incredible valuable uh incredibly valuable uh addition to our to all of our teams so if we can go to the first we definitely want to say thank you as dr atkins said um this opportunity has given us five additional clinical social workers in our schools

054so those will be two positions at charlottesville high school two at beaufort and then one position at walker elementary school so the continuum of roles between walker and the high school um we wanted to make sure that these roles were consistent from walker up to buffer to the high school so these positions would do a few things first they'll provide school-based clinical mental health intervention and trauma-informed care which will lead to the stabilization in educational outcome growth for our students these positions will be integrated fully into the school's daily life to build relationships with our students families and our staff will participate in the participate in uh or complete threat assessments uh that's threat to self-threat to others they'll support our staff with professional learning for mental health initiatives processes and interventions and what's really

055important is the staffing will be year round as well with staggered summer dates which will ensure that we have support for our families our students and our staff even through the summers as well they'll engage in 512 alignment and they'll coordinate to ensure a continuum of services between the three schools and also uh oh sorry i was like thank you they'll also be critical to our ctss process as well and they'll help to identify students with acute or emergent clinical care and they'll help with assessment and related ongoing interventions as needed for our students as well so this will be this is will provide all three schools with vital clinical support for our students uh staff and our families as well as we head into the school year and dr i and dr hastings if

056i could just add um we the three of us have worked and continued to work very hard and i want i like the public to know this um we are really engaged in having a strong vertical alignment and because we are trying to we are trying to pour into our children we we we are incredibly uh engaged in uh addressing the issues of the whole child um and and these these positions will allow us to address some of the concerns and trauma that many of our young people experience that our school counselors just cannot uh get to as wonderful as our school councils are we we need more help so um and we also know that our children take some of their issues and they're still dealing with some of the issues after they leave

057walker after they leave beaufort and go to the high school so if we can continue to work on this strong vertical alignment and link then we're hoping to wrap services around these children um definitely from the time they start at walker until they walk across the stage with dr eye and we are currently in the interview process so hopefully very soon we will be able to uh get these folks into the schools and uh get going with this initiative so again i want to say thank you to everyone that made this possible so i have a question because that's what i do i what tell me more about first of all i appreciate that this is these are very distinct um the school counselor is very distinct from like a social worker and will our

058social workers um follow our students up vertically like that would be a you know possibility or yeah so that's my first question my my my goal would be that their the social workers would basically be a plc and and they would know the children the the the as they leave the different schools so when they get to the next school the social workers are not starting over with the relationship piece or working with families um because they've been working with the social workers at the other schools for the entire year um i definitely think that's one of the advantages of many of our programs is following kids up the um you know you know especially in elementary school like you have the special specialists who work with the students for like all four years that

059they're in the elementary school and i think that really that knowing those kids helps um and gives them the additional support that they need so it's um so i guess they'll just if will they have like a docket like i want to call doc if i can't remember like okay similar to a docket but not not at all um yeah so anyway so they'll have a case load that they just kind of have for the whole year do they then like do the have people come on so it's kind of more long-term that would be our hope and with the uh social workers being up being a plc being a group problem solving together we're hoping that the model is very consistent from walker up to the high school as well so they're using the

060same strategies they're problem solving together and you know they're even though they're individual at different schools they're one unit that can flex back and forth and support each other okay thank you guys um i would like to let the board have an opportunity i'm sorry to hijack that sir mr wade do you have any comments no dr craft there uh yeah well i'm of course very excited about this as a mental health person myself um i think it fills a huge need that we have and um one question uh will these the social workers have the flexibility to intervene uh with students families if if that is deemed appropriate yes we we would like for uh the social workers to build strong relationships with the students and the families um and uh we do not

061want to limit uh their ability to be able to make those connections because again it all spirals back to learning so if we could address some of the uh social issues that our students have then our our hope is that we will uh either increase their achievement or at least keep children at a level where they are achieving and and school is a is the place where they can grow and learn thank you you guys are talking but i wonder if it's like um structurally is this under like some special services or where is this going to be located in terms of our organization chart it will be in the same places our social workers are currently so it will come under the uh student services department okay i'm sorry again hijacked so anybody else

062have any questions so um this is um great news um being a former counselor this will really add additional support to our students so i'm really happy about about the social workers um being added um in the schools in the buildings yeah yes they will be in the buildings okay and working in sync with the school counselors yes they'll be working tightly with our student support team uh that's already in place okay that's great news and mr b one of the things that we have talked about uh it was sort of our first blink but but i think we're going to try to burst this out is that we want to try to create a very strong mental health core in our buildings so we want to be able to add them to uh our

063our region 10 workers our our school counselors um if we're able to have some tdt workers we we want to make a core okay um and and and have them be a part of of of the everyday life in our schools to be to become a part of the culture the ethos of our building so um that's what we're excited about them being with us they're not going to be coming in from across town and all that they're going to be with us every day so is this going to be um just for one year or are we looking at this on a continuous basis the funding that we've received right now is for one year okay um and we could go back and talk with the donors as we learn more about the success

064and we have more evidence of the success we're hoping that the donor may be amenable to continued conversation that we can continue to expand the program and of course we will have an opportunity during our budget development process to talk about how do we continue this program how do we continue the services of the program okay thank you the other board members like to speak miss taurus yes thank you i'm very excited about all of this so thank you everybody who's who's working hard to implement this i had just a couple of quick questions i know that supporting our students [Music] is so critical and so crucial um and as you know stated there's so many so much going on in the environment right now and so many different levels of types of trauma um

065to not just the students but for all of us in in this current covid atmosphere um so supporting kids and students is is great and that rolls out and that supports the rest of the team and i know at one point we had talked a little bit about and i seeing looking at the presentation as far as building relationships with with families and staff and and dr kraft asked a little bit about families but will these social workers be available i don't know if you've looked at the model yet as far as walk-in support to staff or teachers as well has anybody looked at that and then maybe on top of that i think dr hastings had used a type of model um last year and and whether or not i don't know the specifics

066of that but if he could speak to that as well so we're actually finding it as we speak with our school counselors now that with students not in the building um although they're having a lot of interaction with students they're finding that they're they're having more interaction with adults and we're finding that our counseling services are being utilized not just by our students but by our entire school community and that that has been an interesting change and and one that we think has been has proven pretty fruitful um for these positions have we've as we've discussed the the job description and the primary roles of these positions we really are focused on students that said all of our student services teams all of our mental health professionals in the building support the community i think

067as we think about the students that are going to be served by this program when we think about equity these are students with critical needs these are students with massive deep needs that need to be served and so we are looking we're not actually going to be serving in a very large number of children whereas you might think a school counselor has a caseload of half of a school at walker these are going to be folks who are working in a social working capacity with our neediest population of students and so if there's if there's time and there's ability in the day to work with adults that would be terrific but the reality is the need in our community for social work services is profound and i think they're going to have plenty of work

068with our children before they get to the adults the stories and if we know anything about social workers and counselors each time they encounter one of our staff members who need support they carve out that time in their calendar be it during the school day after hours before hours they're always there to call about that time so although their attention is to the student they know in order for the student to be healthy the family has to be healthy but also our staff they have to be healthy also and feel like they are part of the entire process and and the process of healthy social emotional learning absolutely well thank you for this i'm excited and i'm excited to hear i mean i don't know at what point we can get a follow-up report just

069to hear um how well this is going so thank you everybody any other board members have any comments um honestly mr dr turner that was a really persuasive on on your part your passion for it is clear and uh not that i uh i definitely heard passion dr hastings and dr irizarry but uh i've heard passion from them before so it was lovely to uh you know hear how supportive the three of you have been and i'm really looking forward to what happens from here and how we can serve our children best um so thank you all for that um i also want to say thank you to um said philanthropic organization um i'm really looking forward to seeing what we can do especially it seems like what dr hasting said about it this is

070being a profound time um for the needs of our community um we this will just continue to kind of grow and so it just seems like a really good opportunity and good timing so thank you to them for their support of our division um any i'm going to move on to the next item so thank you to the principals for coming and um dr king i think you're up with the special education update good evening madam chair school board members and dr atkins i would like to introduce katrina lee supervisor of special education and rachel rasnick special education coordinator as the presenters of the update on face-to-face instruction for special education thank you all for coming today um we look forward to hearing what you have to say today madam chair members of the board

071dr adkins we appreciate the opportunity to share this afternoon with you all some of the things um and opportunities that we are taking with our students and families to provide some face-to-face um instruction and services to some of our students so i appreciate that so if we can go to our first slide we know that families educators and so many would love for kobe to be gone or not even be here um but i would say that our school our teams our teachers our administrators our principals our families even in our community have had great discussions with and with us to collaborate on how we can just serve our students best we have since march and continue to have discussions on how we can respond to and meet the needs of our learners with almost

072with the most significant challenges and needs um for whom we knew um the virtual learning uh would present significantly and disproportionate impact for some of our students due to the nature and intensity of their disabilities um so if we could go to slide two our decision making process and this is part of our decision making process and is not exhausted but we certainly knew that we needed a place to start to start to work with some of our learners so working with many stakeholders charlottesville city schools developed some specific eligibility that eligibility in terms of what you think of special education eligibility but just some criteria for face-to-face services and learning um with iep teams on individual bank funding individualized basis for some of our students we begin to collect data that suggested to us

073that virtual learning is disproportionately impacting the progress of some of our students and a program specifically early childhood special education program our lead program our star program and our best program um so and so and also for our programs for students who require one-to-one services and assistance or daily um intervention one-to-one in the in-person setting so looking at that uh we started to then look at um does a student you know meet the criteria for those uh in those areas and how could we together look at the iep and determine what areas were having the most difficulty for the students to access in the virtual setting we also looked at access with looking at strategies and accommodations and still looking at students who weren't able to access even with adding those additional supports that we

074knew would have to add in the virtual learning um so the iep teams then looked at what adjustments excuse me we could start to make to facilitate the learning for some of our students okay i've been looking at that next we start to look at safety measures of course the health and safety well-being of our students and our staff and our families remain important to us as we go through this time together so we worked with many stakeholders again with our schools local health departments looking at cdc guidelines our local trends not only our local trends but the surrounding locality trends to determine how we could provide educational and service opportunities for students with disabilities within our schools so we looked at all of those measures and individual student needs and develop some specific guidelines

075for covet with input again from all those stakeholders and healthcare professionals as well and we develop written plans for each student specifically taking all factors into consideration including that limited to building access individual people access to the building all ppe equipment that will be needed prior to any student a family coming into the school we looked at the exit of the entries if students needed to access the elevators in any other parts of the school we looked at science we worked with ken powell to work on signage and what that will look like temperature scans all the safety measures that we have information and data on to date we tried to make sure that we implemented those things then after those safety measures were in place we looked at how we can best and suppose

076in the most safe way have students come in for orientation and what that would look like before we tried to provide any services to any students to have a true orientation our friends have been at home since march and it's a total different setting for them so we wanted to make sure that there was orientation even though it may be their home school we wanted to make sure that when they came in the the routines that they were used to weren't going to be in place there were so many other mitigating factors we want to make sure that our students had an opportunity to have an orientation back into their school with the current normal of what they would need to do to be safe and so right now we are in the second week

077of just starting services for some of our learners and i am very pleased to say that it is going well we will continue to make those individualized very careful careful decisions with our teams with our families for students as we continue in this virtual virtual learning rachel is going to ray jurassic one of our special education coordinators is going to share more specifically about the students um and the data and the logistics of the day-to-day for some of our our students um so i think we need to acknowledge the staff um who has had um a willingness to embrace these ideas of coming into the building and have collaborated with us to help us know what will help them to feel safe while we're working on the pieces that will keep them safe logistically what

078happens when an iep team makes this decision is that staff are notified and they are provided the ppe that they require for some students that's your basic gloves masks hand sanitizer for other students we're also looking at items like gowns to protect us in the event of bodily fluids we work closely with our school principals all of them have been very eager and open to the idea and discussed what it means in each of their individual buildings our school nurses are notified and they've all provided support with health care plans and making sure our school staff is prepared and our transportation department has been securing uh the routes and for some of our students we're looking at you know two 30-minute sessions a week and so transportation has been able to facilitate that um and

079we appreciate that um for the specific students um i i do want to say our chart is stale already and we made it this morning we are having our teachers reach out so there are three special education coordinators and we are all working closely with our teachers in this process and i know uh multiple kids have been moved into the planning stage today um so right now so effective monday um we will have uh 11 students coming into our buildings we will have two students in that orientation phase where they are learning the new procedures of school practicing wearing their face covering um and then we have 13 this morning students who are planning for so our teachers are reaching out to us to help them make these decisions but these are iep team decisions

080based on our criteria and you know we're we're eager to serve our students in the most appropriate way is that the end of your presentation is the end of our praising the end okay great um any questions um who has a question dr kraft um just a couple of things um i'm wondering you know with these numbers what what percentage is this of the total population that you uh would like to be serving in in the schools or uh who need to be uh face to face as opposed to virtual um i think what we've realized is that a number of families who we would like to serve in person um are not um necessarily gonna take advantage of the opportunity um due to the health risks for their children and so we didn't set

081a goal percent of students um we've really left it up to the iep teams okay um and and um how is this like how is this working in terms of how many school buildings are involved that kind of [Music] so currently it is a few of our school buildings but the option is available um as iep teams decide um we will consider uh the students homeschool but also um centralized locations if that makes the most sense and so is this like like one student at a time is it basically individual in-person instruction in the school building so they're not like a small group of students there together correct okay um yeah i think those are my questions thank you any other board members with questions i have a question ryan you can go ahead um

082my question is how are the students identified does the iep team call the parents of those students who needed additional service or do you all get calls from parents and then the team comes together how does that work i would say both yes sir so we're definitely listening to all um hair input because parents are at home with their students right now they're seeing the difficulties and the successes of their students but our case managers and our teachers are also in the virtual spaces with our students and so many of our teachers are coming to us and coming to the table and saying that we need to schedule a meeting because we're observing that our students and our caseloads are not accessing and not making progress with even the strategies that are in place and

083i just want to share also that that's not always the first go-to we're looking at coming to the team to say hey what are strategies that we can look at but certainly if teams iep teams are making decisions and discussions um we're having everyone at the table so that's either i guess to answer the question it's both the parent or our teachers so if you are out and about in the community and you run into a parent who comes up to you and say you know my kid is struggling and what do i do what should our response be especially that you know they have an iep and i'm sure that you know as educators if a parent sees us they're going to grab us i would if i were a parent i would say

084to let that parent know thank you for reaching out to you or reaching out to us whoever it may be and just to please contact their um their students school club special education case manager and work with the school and they're happy to set up a meeting with them and discuss their okay thank you yes sir that to the extent that anybody could help miss cooper and her family with that idp i don't know anything about that but um direct that um miss bryce and morrisberger uh yeah just to follow up um their two 30-minute sessions per student per week um have families indicated that they would like to increase that amount of time or they need additional days um of face-to-face learning um the feedback you're getting good questions right some more spreaders so

085that i think that was an example um that mrasnic shared that we have students who are coming in for for 19 minutes if that's the tolerance ticket orientation so that was just an example it's totally individualized so we don't have um it's not like a set criteria for example if you're in one of the programs you're coming in for two 30-minute face-to-face it is totally individualized per student and i don't think any of our students have the same amount of time per minute so it's totally individualized so if you need more time you can you can request it yes man okay thank you any other comments from the board um i think i had a comment um what about uh ptot speech services can you um tell us a little bit more about how those

086services are being delivered so we have um for students who are staying virtual um they're able to access all those services virtually through the same methods that they would access their class we're also using a lot of code co-treating and then students are coming in in person it is a blend of um in person pt ot and speech or hybrid um on for some students the ot is on the computer and the teacher is in person and um we're making it work that way um so we don't have too many people and we you know respect everyone's need to tell the work or not um obviously i just want to well thank you i feel like i have a couple things to say one is um this is a critical need um it's you know

087evident in every single covid transition committee meeting um and every parent and teacher i speak to about children with ieps and special needs so i'm very grateful for the um flexibility that our special education department has shown um and of course like everybody i think wants to meet meet the needs of their students um as safely as possible so it's obvious that that's what your team is doing and i appreciate that so much i feel like i know that's not i know there's more than y'all doing this um it's a dramatic amount of work i can't imagine the logistics and organization involved especially if you're also working with transportation so to that extent that we are um we can recreate that in an in additional environments i just i don't want everybody to who follows

088this i'm sorry you know this particular cohort clearly needs these services right now but there are other students who are coming um probably back sooner rather than later and i don't want to have to recreate the wheel every time so i really hope that maybe we could have um somebody from the special education department come and work with our um i don't know mitigation or facilities team or the prime you know elementary school in the in the covid committee um i i just like if you guys are actually doing this work then we then i don't want any of everybody recreating the wheel and it really sounds like you guys have are able to connect students with the with with um their needs so i appreciate that and um i'm hopeful that um even if

089it's not like the larger you know i don't want you have to go to more meetings than you already do but but i definitely think your expertise um is significant and something that we could really use on um at least from my perspective humbly um so thank you so much and keep up the good work and thank you for all that you do for our families thank you all for the opportunity to share um okay so that is a lot right there so next is our equity update with um beth chuck and denise johnson good evening madam chair school board and dr atkins i'm having some video audio issues so hopefully you can hear me and we and i can make it through it just let me know if we have difficulties we can hear

090you okay thank you great first i want to take a moment to thank you for your ongoing support and affirmation of our anti-racist and anti-bias work i also want to thank the staff and community for the feedback that we've received while doing this work we know what we're doing is important and critical and as a community we're going to work to get it right through it all your commitment really means so much we're here to give you a few updates on the current work that's happening even in the pandemic we are trying to maintain an equity lens during virtual learning this includes support such as meals food communication and our new remind app chromebooks devices internet access and regular connections with our students and families we want to acknowledge dr atkins as she co-chaired the

091governor's commission on african-american history education these recommendations have the potential to make real change throughout virginia including some of the ideas and practices that began here such as teaching african-american history as a stand-alone subject however there's still more work to be done one area of this commission's recommendations aligns with our own efforts to teach a more honest and inclusive history we want to commend our social science teachers and coordinator for their ongoing partnership with various school divisions historic sites and other educational organizations their work is centered around our equity goal of having diverse inclusive and rigorous learning experiences you've previously heard about this changing the narrative work and i believe that you'll hear more later this fall or winter we know these changes are important and that change can be hard as a division we

092may stumble in this new work as we move forward having better processes support and communication will be important and helpful and we are working on those areas we know social science is one small part of our larger anti-racism and anti-bias work and in our previous presentations denise and i have mostly come before you at these meetings to talk about racial equity that equity equity touches on many types of difference earlier this year virginia's house bill in 145 145 and senate bill 161 were passed requiring the state to give school divisions guidance about how to support transgender and non-binary students this guidance will come from the vdoe by the end of the year and it may impact areas from policy to pronouns to curriculum while we have previously found isolated ways to support our gender non-conforming

093students we see this legislation as an opportunity to revisit our schools in our processes more broadly and systematically to better include and see and love and support our students and families we know that part of this work will be helping our staff grow and understand our own commitments this area is new for some people and together we will learn what it means to practice equity one concrete action we're taking to support our staff and encourage growth is hosting a series of lunch and learns for the division that centers around equity inclusion and anti-bias topics such as appreciating cultural differences foundational conversations about sexual orientation and gender identity family engagement and asset based thinking these sessions will begin next friday our ex our equity councils will also be working to continue conversations and trainings on a

094school-based level as beth mentioned having processes supports and effective communication in place will be important and helpful in keeping us all working towards the same goal this year we will be formalizing those methods including utilizing our equity committee to build out our division-wide equity framework and data dashboard one thing that remains clear is that we want a community that is welcoming accepting supporting loving and affirming and we are all willing to do whatever it takes to achieve that goal thank you again for your time this evening and if you have any questions we'd be happy to answer um thank you so much miss chuck and miss johnson for your um for your presentation is there um i'd like to go to the board what questions do you have um uh this is juan wait i

095don't really have a question i have a um just some some comments to make um you know over the last several months i've been asked to speak several times on equity and schools and community and i've called on beth and denise to provide information on what the schools have been doing and and you know i thought i had a good idea what we've been doing but once it's compiled together and we're sharing it with various parts of the community it's really amazing and and um denise may not remember this but when she was hired one of the things that she said that really stuck with me and she said that that trust is built in action and and you know and i think that that's so profound because we can say all these wonderful things

096but if we're not doing anything it really doesn't mean anything and i think that we have been been doing we can and we are doing can do more and these information sessions and getting input from the public is vital to doing that because sometimes we don't get it right and we that this input from the public you know helps guide us into what we're doing because we are the community so um i'm just i appreciate the work that's being done and on our efforts on equity dr kraft did you have something to say um yeah i also want to express my appreciation for all the work that you guys are doing on this um it seems like um you've alluded to this that maybe um some additional work needs to be done specifically around the

097areas of gender gender identification and i know some of the speakers and some of the people who have written to us have mentioned training by the organization side by side um it seems like you know i'm wondering if that's being looked at uh it seems like there's you know maybe look for all of our staff and also for some of the families that you know we you know i'm sure there's discomforts various discomforts that people have um you know and i think it's part of our job to to um help with that and to make sure that that doesn't get in the way of the experience of all of our students in the system so as we've heard from some of the speakers so i'm wondering what are what are your thoughts around that kind

098of training oh sorry go ahead beth i would just say simply this side by side came up several times as we've been discussing denise and i have been talking a lot about these issues in the last couple of weeks and side by side has emerged a couple of times and also just the model of um ptos in the course of our racial equity work have hosted several nights to help families come alongside in this work and i suspect that our ptos would also like to continue to help families come alongside in this work view we've already been drifting today oh that's okay we've already locked in our speaker for our um staff series and that'll be siri russell and she's the equity director for albemarle and also i've reached out to side by side to

099learn more about their training so i'll be meeting with helen from side by side really soon to discuss what that looks like for us great miss bryson morrisberger uh yeah a few questions um about the i don't know if it's this is the time to ask it but when we're talking about equity how are we monitoring our students progress because i know a lot of speakers have indicated um that they see students who are you know most at risk of falling behind falling behind more there was a speaker that indicated that you know i know we haven't done map testing and it might not be the appropriate time to do it during you know virtual learning but what do we have in place what metrics can we look at like how are we keeping track

100of our most vulnerable students in helping them and supporting them i think that's um what i mean maybe um we can talk about that under the advisory committee update unless you know okay i just wasn't sure if this was one totally understand but that's a great question johnson and miss chuck are the ones to answer that but i'm happy for if anybody else miss mossberger i think we we can look at right now we have the charlottesville tiered systems of support that are in place along with uh all of our efforts around equity that allows our students to access a multitude of supports our teachers access those supports if you've noticed on your personnel agenda you've been getting a number of personnel recommendations to hire tutors that are working with our students before school after

101school and even during the zoom time they're engaging with our students so this many of the supports that were in place prior to covet continue to be in place now there are also a number of home visits that are being made to make sure that we're staying in close contact with our students and recognizing when they have needs our counselors are there our teachers are they are listening and responding to the voices of our students in australia thank you dr hawkins and you said jennifer that it'll we'll still be talking about it in the committee update as well i mean with respect i don't know that will um i think that's a good time to ask about um how virtual learning is going uh but and what how our students are meeting getting their needs

102met but i'm i'm you know i i also defer to you as like everybody i mean i don't think miss chuck and miss johnson are the ones who have that information is what i'm saying okay okay and then um the other question um and maybe this is for dr atkinson not um for um beth or denise but we're the equity work you know a lot of callers have talked about the lgbtq curriculum so i appreciate um i appreciate you reaching out um for the training and it would be nice to hear an update about that at the next meeting and then um is there any other like outreach plan to kind of let like just discussing where we are as a community with equity and that equity looks like what equity looks like for everyone

103in all groups and making sure that we're being inclusive and um adhering to our own standards and not you know pulling curriculum prematurely be glad to respond to that um with reference to pulling curriculum and pulling lessons you have a policy uh that says that when we introduce new curriculum and our changing the narrative is a new curriculum and there's a lot of work that has been done around that area our teachers have worked really hard this summer on developing lessons developing plans they started the work long before the summer and done a really nice job in developing that but one of your policies ask us to bring that forward so that our community will have an opportunity to review that curriculum and that the board would have an opportunity to look at that curriculum

104kovic came in and interrupted a process that has worked incredibly well previously and so when we started teaching our teachers pulled some lessons and started teaching we got questions from our community from members of our community to members of our community to ask about those lessons it wasn't the topic of the lesson that caused us to pull it it was your process it was the school board policy that says we would review those lessons and then take them through a process that would allow the board and the community to review those lessons so it's less about the topic and more about the process i think we're headed in a direction now that we will bring all of those lessons and that curriculum before the board the state department is currently working on that they will

105be presenting that the guidelines and policies and curriculum to all school divisions in the commonwealth by december 31st we're one of those school divisions we happen to be ahead of other school divisions in that area um so we're following those processes uh pulling those lessons or examining those lessons was not because of anything other than your policy says that we do that dr atkins real quickly um so i mean i'm just finishing my third year or starting i don't know where i'm in my term here as a school board member but i'm trying to recall i mean is this typical i don't remember ever being asked to review new curriculum you have when we bring before you textbooks uh when we bring before you social studies science uh any of our textbooks the curriculum itself

106is not new um at that point or if there are new standards it's incorporated in those resource materials that we're using and that comes before not only the board but it comes before the community also and the board asked us pretty direct questions about uh how long has it been before the community how long has the community had to review those textbooks those materials have our teachers looked at them what's the input from our teachers i'll bring to the boy's attention that we delayed the adoption of a reading series in recent years because the board wanted us to give more time to review of those materials so bringing that forth and before the board is a process that we have used in the past is not a new process for us i do recall you

107know that specifically of course i do and looking at books and reviewing textbooks as they come in i do not recall um being asked to review you know curriculum and lesson planning that teachers have worked on and that comes from the state our lessons and our curriculum comes from the state the standards come from the state when we expand on those standards you review um the process by which we're going to go about gifted education that comes before the school board and we submit a plan each year to the state on how we're going to do that and sometimes uh very recently we made sweeping changes to that entire curriculum how we deliver those lessons and what those lessons look like and we brought that before the board the plan to do that so changing

108the narrative is one of those processes it's one of the changes that we're making in our school division and that's a process that we go through it's a very um transparent process it's an open process it's a process in which we all engage in um i looked at the policies i looked at three different policies that you have and um and looking at how do we approach a process to recommend to the board and it's the same process that we would have recommended for anything else any of those other areas of study well i look forward to having a more robust discussion and maybe looking at all of those policies together i guess it concerns me um with all the respect that a couple of people questioning some some lesson plans can trigger those lessons

109plans being pulled before it is brought to us for discussion so that i just needed to say that so thank you now i'll say also that one of the things that we have done in our school division is that we want to communicate to everyone every student in our community every student in our school division every family that they are welcomed we want to value them we want the words that we say and the actions that we have to say unequivocally that you are accepted that you are loved that you are an important part of our school division and that is whether a student is is binary transgender lgbt whatever their religion is whatever their orientation is heterosexual homosexual whatever one of those check boxes whether they're black they're white they're in the in any

110of those categories at our school division is a school division in which students are accepted they are valued our teachers and our staff are accepted and they're valued i'll be the first to say these are difficult conversations they're very difficult conversations and maybe maybe to some they're difficult maybe to some they're very easy um but they are difficult and unfortunately when we're going about changing and i can tell you charlottesville is probably on the cutting edge of this work the department of education has not completed the work they're not scheduled to complete it until december 31st so charlottesville is on the cutting edge and anytime anyone is on the cutting edge of anything they're going to be some successes and they're going to be some blunders in processes as you set those up and we

111find ourselves that we need to work through those processes but the bottom line even when we're working through those processes is that we care about our students and we care about our staff and we have a welcoming community and we have a welcoming culture in our school division and that's what we want to promote well i would just like to add and with all due respect to pushback i we've talked about curriculum we've talked about all kinds of issues and when we dig too deep in curriculum we get pushback that the board is not a part of developing curriculum that we might set we do policy but we shouldn't be in the weeds of curriculum textbooks are different than this specific curriculum and what applies to textbooks we weren't delving into curriculum when we approved

112the textbooks we were delving into which series we thought met our needs and in this particular incident what you're the explanation you're giving is not making sense because if it's our policy and we do it this way and then you pull it and then you put it back at one point one of those actions was wrong and so we need to be clear on what it is and people challenge things in schools all the time people challenge reading materials if you're reading the crucible and someone challenges it you don't pull it for the whole class you have some type of process with that teacher and that family and so the way you're explaining it it's confusing and the plot the process does not seem transparent and it's frustrating and it seems as if we're going

113against our own policy if to pull it um like um they were saying earlier because one or two people commented on the use of a word and it wasn't even more than that was pulled so and the things that were pulled were specific to lgbtq curriculums so the process doesn't seem transparent the explanation for why i got pulled and then why i got put back in isn't transparent i don't even understand when you're talking about textbooks it's not the same thing and i i don't understand the policy or the reasoning behind it and if there's an issue that would come to the board why would you pull it without bringing it to us first miss bryson moorsberger i'm sorry that you don't understand however i can give you what my my explanation is and i

114know that i give you a very transparent explanation and you may not understand it and you may not accept it but i know i'm giving you a very transparent and very forthright explanation as to what happened now oftentimes when a person doesn't agree with another person now regardless of what you say it may not be received well i think that um there are uh community members who were really really hurt by this as identified in our public comment and i particularly appreciated the high school students um miss green marshbur marshall i hope i'm using the right pronoun um for you and i appreciated her comment about um the curriculum and about gender identity because i think um that you know she said something about how if they don't if kids don't have the language if

115grown-ups don't have the language and i'm so excited that we um are are on the cutting edge of this and i'm really grateful to have such forward-thinking staff and curriculum in our schools and i look forward to the presentation in a couple of months to to really present um just that whole scope i think identity is something that is critically important and i'm grateful for uh the opportunity to tell our community how we are providing an inclusive and loving place for everyone i do think that people in this instance were hurt and i am sorry for that and i am glad that the board took action as it did and that the lessons were restored and i do think that the content of these lessons are the difference between this uh instance and like the

116literacy uh series of um approval and the gifted and talent gifted program changes as well but i um do you think if just from the board's perspective i i know how um us you know just you know frustrated um and and sad we were for the community members who were hurt by this decision and i'm very grateful that we have restored those lessons and that we are going to showcase these lessons in the coming months when we have that opportunity or slightly more time on our agenda to talk about it and so i'm jennifer i just want to chime into i'm excited as well you know as we move on you know um you know as i said before is that we're in constant learning and improving mode um in this whole situation i'm not

117only comparing pertaining to this but to other things and so you know we can always focus on what we you know what happened in the past but i would like to spend energy on let's get get it right and and i think that that's what we're we'll be doing and when we look at this in the next couple of months or whenever it comes up dr kraft you're muted good thank you yeah um just one one piece i wanted to throw in um that confused me about this um was that uh the board i thought gave its very full-throated approval of the changing the narrative um curricular effort you know the overarching theme of the changing the narrative and because um you know this is this area that we're talking about that was you know

118became controversial is so clearly part of uh the narrative that needs to be changed um it it did it seemed to me that it fell under that umbrella very clearly so i then was kind of surprised and a little taken aback that uh that those lessons were pulled because it seemed so well aligned with the uh the general changing the narrative approach that we did approve of dr kraft i will tell you that we've been a part of a collaborative of seven school divisions in changing the narrative some of the work has been grant funded and we've been developing those lessons together and some of the lessons that we have developed specifically in charlottesville was ahead of that collaborative so the work that is going on as we brought it to the school board earlier

119much of that work was that collaborative work and now charlottesville has moved above that and beyond that collaborative work uh and and that now we will bring the rest of that back to the board so that the board will have an opportunity to review it in its entirety um are there any adam madame chair i'd like to make a comment if i may of course um one of the things that i heard mr wade say early on was something that he remembered miss johnson's saying that trust is important we've also heard dr atkins speak on not only trust being important but asking us to be patient because as dr atkins expressed to miss bryce and morrisberger some conversations are more difficult for others and sometimes it's also difficult for people to hear what other people

120are saying we are going to make missteps along the way it doesn't mean that we don't trust what people are saying it doesn't mean that we don't trust what is written but what we are attempting to do is be inclusive of everyone i don't know if any of you whether you are listening or whether you are viewing have looked at the composition of the charlottesville city school board our motto is every learner every day everyone our charlottesville city school board represents every learner everyone every day you can look at a lot of school boards in the commonwealth of virginia but we represent every learner everyone every day we respect each other we agree without becoming disagreeable and i must say that i have learned from each one of you this evening from miss bryson morrisberger

121dr kraft miss torres and dr atkins and i think what i have learned is going to help me be a better school board member and learn more i work with children from all of the various groups that we have discussed this evening and there may be something that i don't understand but it is my job to read to learn and ask questions and i continue to read and learn and ask questions which makes me a learner every day and so i trust that miss bryson morrisberger dr craft miss torres miss mckeever and mr wade and mr bryant will help me continue to learn but you all are a part of all of the various and sundry committees that dr atkins has asked us to be a part of and so i'm learning from you i

122am listening to you and i am being patient but i am trusting that the leadership will work with us but i'm also trusting that when we make a misstep or when we fall that we will pick ourselves up we will dust ourselves off and we will move forward and when we make a mistake we will admit that we've made a mistake and i hope that when mistakes are made and we make those mistakes because we are going to make mistakes that when we acknowledge that we've made a mistake and we are sincere in acknowledging that we've had a misstep that we can all find a way to move forward this pandemic has put stresses on us that we cannot possibly imagine and we are every learner every day everybody we will have additional discussions around

123many many topics between now and the end of this academic school year and i hope that we will continue to be every learner every day everyone okay so i think um we have said many words so if there's no other comments we should can move on to the next topic if that's okay um again thank you for all the comments and next up is miss powell on enrollment update yes good evening madam chair members of the board and dr atkins leslie if you'll bring up the slides please this is a brief update and the first slide simply shows where we are versus what's called projected enrollment and you you see the projections you see the actuals and you see the differences and um then there's a percentage variance provided in the far right column you'll

124notice that you know most of our variants is in the lower grades at the elementary school level with the exception of jacksonville which has in you know i don't know what the specific comings and goings are of students but in the net they have held their enrollment very close to projection next slide leslie so this this is the report that we give annually that shows you where our class sizes are you see again jacksonville has more typical class sizes but they're still within their tolerance for class sizes but you'll notice the other elementary class sizes are smaller than what we normally see the good news is that this will support physical social distancing as we work to um have more face-to-face learning so we'll we'll look at the silver lining and what could otherwise be

125perceived as a dark cloud next slide leslie and so this is just a summary of what we saw heading into the school year week to week as we looked at our enrollment um so you can see um this is actually a comparison not so much to projection but where when we were at where we thought we would be and then how the numbers kind of peeled off week by week there is again i always like to look at the bright side the good news you'll see the difference between the 14th and the 2 and the 21st and what we're seeing for the week of the september 28th it's leveling off because there was a time period where we were like when is the curve going to start to you know level out and so we

126think we've seen that that point and i do want to point out there's an interesting article that's referenced here at the bottom that public schools across the commonwealth um this was as of september 18th the projected enrollment loss was around 35 000 students and that was quote so far that was based on a vast survey and 113 of 133 divisions across virginia responded and when i did the math on that 35 000 based on the last published um you know statewide enrollment for the commonwealth it's somewhere between a three and four percent enrollment loss and that's exactly the ballpark that we're looking at here locally so i don't have any other information for you um this evening but i'm happy to take your questions thank you kim i'm glad to see those numbers leveling off

127leveling off it's very nerve-wracking it was we understand that you know families are making choices for their um families and we understand that completely um it's uh i'm very grateful for our teachers for making virtual as good as possible for them and their students and i'm just really looking forward to keep moving on and talking about how we can get back face to face and um you know moving forward so thank you kim any questions miss prairie um miss powell i know that you are talking about the three percent um loss uh approximately a hundred ish students do you feel i know that has budget implications what does that mean from a budget implication standpoint and do you feel that once the face-to-face comes back regardless of how it comes back that we would have

128another uptick because one of the things you did say or either dr atkins said i can't remember um well it may not have even been dr atkins but that's not the issue with the decrease in numbers and our social distancing requirements at this point in time even though there's a budgetary loss how does that play out as it relates to social distancing with the big picture am i making any sense i think so i i believe i can answer your questions okay so first of all i believe our adm average daily membership which is a different number than enrollment that is something that is um the first snapshot of that that goes to the state is based off of a september 30th snapshot but there's work still being done with our um powerschool team to

129check that data in any way arrive at our official report which is that first adm that determines that sets the compass if you will for our monthly state payments until march and then there's another that's the the most important snapshot of adm is march because then what happens is they will adjust our payments either up or down from march until the end of the year so that that march adm is actually as if that's the the um the membership for the whole the whole school year so march is the is the big one um base i right now it's looking like the adm loss will be somewhere between i think 150 to upwards of 200 students again i don't we don't have that finalized i've run a number of different projections with that range between

130173 and 191 but our data our data team hasn't finalized those numbers quite yet um in dollars that's going to be somewhere in the ballpark of 480 to 500 000 but the cares money there are two you know that is something that we've been bracing for a number of things right we've been bracing for sales tax loss and um bracing for you know adm loss if we um being virtual so those are things that as we work our way through the year and we're looking at the different buckets of cares money that are made available to us we know that there's a piece of that work that has to you know be a for lack of a better term or revenue hedge if you if you will because the other alternative is you know really

131you all know very well from balancing our budgets in hard times the only place we can really recover the only place where there's significant dollars is in people because we're a people business and so we're not looking at making those kinds of changes because ironically with social distancing you need all hands on deck because your classrooms go from 20 or so kids down to you know 15 if you're lucky in a classroom or 12 right will accommodate so we need all hands on deck um so it's part of the balancing act but we're not sounding alarm bells this evening because there's a broad recognition of this you know there's another wave of cares money that's slated to come for schools we've already gone through you know the initial plus the i think it's called gears

132forgive me i i don't keep the acronyms straight with the awards but there's we're looking at num awards award set number three um coming you know coming forward at some point between now and the end of the year and so we keep all these things in mind when we're looking at those available funds and what what can be done what needs to be done we all know we'll have the general assembly we'll weigh in sorry cam the general assembly will be weighing in and there's some discussion about um adm loss and um a discussion as to how the general assembly may support school divisions uh during this time and whether or not there will be additional allocations out to the schools based on that loss of abm and um local composite index effects thank you

133thank you dr atkinson i apologize i was just asking miss prairie did that answer the question yes yes yes yes yes who else has a question mr wade you're on mute if you're talking to us sorry um i had a question or comment about do we know um why you may have mentioned this i've been fading in and out um or the computer has um on why the high school is up 40 students in and in jacksonville why didn't it experience some of the um decrease as to other elementary schools okay so with jacksonville i don't know how they have not experienced the same wave of choices that seem to have impacted the other lower grades i i don't know with the high school i don't even have i haven't even had the time to

134make a good guess or to dig in to try to figure out what the dynamic is there that has made jacksonville different um i don't know if there's something like a couple years back that um a large development on the corner of fifth street there you know that opened up and we saw a big spike i don't know if there's something with housing and an influx of families that's happened there i'm not aware of anything new i don't know if new sections of something i don't know and i should take time to find out but i honestly just haven't but i was pleased to see that they held their numbers um but the high school we always had we see um you know growth there um at times and i think the reason that they're

135still growing despite whatever choices people may be making is that the growth wave from the past remember that's rolling into buford and rolling into the high school now that big spike of growth that we had a few years back it leveled off the last couple years but prior to that remember our growth curve was relatively steep um and so there's the the residual of that is now reaching these upper schools and i do think in general you don't um and this is across the commonwealth a lot most of the enrollment laws where families have made different choices have been with their younger students because the older students perhaps do better with the virtual option not that saying that that's true for all students but perhaps in general i just really appreciate those families who have

136been um who maybe don't have as many choices other as other families in our community and acknowledge them and say thank you and also we are delivering a high quality product for you and we will continue to work hard to meet your students needs anybody else have any questions or thought comments okay so thank you mr powell for that update um the next item on our agenda is the proposed budget calendar miss hoover good evening um hey leslie can we get that on the thank you i just wanted to say thank you for for your kind words on the budget award i i really appreciate that um it's hard to believe that uh we are looking at budget development for fiscal year 2022 it just seems like we just wrapped up uh 2021 um just

137a month or two ago this calendar that you have in front of you follows the same format that we have used in prior years we have worked out most of the dates except for the joint meeting with city council that date is still in a to be determined state i i don't have anything else to add is there any questions or comments anybody have any comments or questions um i just want to add on we really don't know you know um what the environment will be like as far as social distancing um and um we just i think this is something that we all must shoulder that um we just have to take extra effort to get input from all aspects of the community um in addition to the the zoom and virtual um somehow

138if we have to make you know calls to different stakeholders and get that input just we just need to do as much as we can in in this environment to get around a wide range of input that's a good point mr wade um any other comments or questions okay um i don't think we need to approve that right now correct missoover no we'll bring that back next month for approval um i you know a lot of transitions happening right now in the city and um so we're just going to be working really closely with the city in on this transition and in this budget process so just a lot of variables and a lot of unknowns um okay so the next item is the long-awaited advisory committee update miss dr baptist yes thank you leslie

139will you pull that up please as we get started um i want to thank the entire committee i want to thank the entire team here at um school board office and in the schools for all of the help this really has been a group effort it's not just one person leading it and as you can see the committee members we have quite a few and i know there's some that have been left off because they've been added in the last few days but we have a wide variety of our community and our school division who are working with this and i want to thank everyone who has spent three wednesday afternoons with us to get to the point where we are and we do not have a recommendation yet but we are we're working together

140as a committee next slide please leslie so the the purpose of the committee and we shared this at our first meeting was really to to start getting the data from everywhere and it changes every week so we can't really say this is the data this is the way we need to go it does change we've been getting information from the cdc virginia department of health thomas jefferson health department all of these acronyms that we can have are all these initials to discuss possible options for an instructional model moving forward we know we started with predominantly virtual but to get the committee to help us with possible other options and then to make a recommendation to the superintendent regarding which model we think is uh the better model for our families and then to uh have

141the superintendent come to the school board with a model for approval and then continue with this process until our schools are able to open full time we know that a model will be presented and that is to get us going we don't know what is going to happen as this goes forward we may be able to start with one model and move to another or it may be that we have to go back to virtual depending on what happens with with covid so we will this committee will still be with us until we can be fully opened next slide so we've had the three meetings you can see the dates there the 16th 23rd and 30th uh giving the group a week off this week because they had some homework to do and we will

142come back together on october the 14th and then back on the 28th and we may have to have other meetings beyond that and no we will have other meetings beyond that but didn't want to uh have them too far out i heard several of the folks yesterday say they're just holding wednesday afternoons for covet so we will see where we go with that next slide please so review of data this is not just an update of the committees but we've been updating you with data at the last few meetings i wanted to make sure we did that this is a continuation of the information that ryan mckay has been sharing with us and this is the most recent that we have you can see that it is um from the last three weeks and you

143can see the cumulative cases that charlottesville has had you can see the rolling seven day cases you can see the percent positive and these are all just for charlottesville the color coding when dr bonds first shared this with us was red orange and yellow or maybe i've forgotten all the colors but anyway they've changed the color scheme now and you're going to see more about this in a minute but just so that you could see the continuing i wanted to share this slide with you next leslie and as i said things change so monday morning uh dr lane from state superintendent and members of the virginia department of health shared with us a new cdc metric system looking at the risk of transmission in our schools so one of the goals from the virginia department

144of health and and not really the goal of cdc but the virginia department of health is to pull this information together so we have one place to go for information and not trying to pull it from so many different places this does have five levels of risk highest higher moderate lower and lowest now this information and i'm going to show you our information in another format in a second but this information is updated daily and i can assure you i am updating it daily and i've got it recorded in a couple of different ways and places because different people taking information differently when we look at it though this information that is on here if you look at the very top of the slide you can see charlottesville city and you can see 9 28.

145this was the first date that this was offered in this format to us i'm going to show you data from yesterday in a second but the first day it shows number of new cases per hundred thousand within the last 14 days and i have to admit when i saw that number it it stunned me because i knew we had not had 623 cases in the last 14 days but we have to realize that that hundred thousand is a standardization across the state or the commonwealth and we don't have a hundred thousand in charlottesville so ours is pretty much doubled since we're about half so it was not 623 cases it was more like little over 300 cases which i'm not happy about 300 cases but it was not 623. on that particular date looking at

146our average of the positivity rate for 14 days we were at 5 we know we want to keep that lower than that the third core indicator is looking at five medication strategies that school divisions can put into place and they don't rate us on these we sort of rate ourselves and you're going to see more about this in a few minutes uh ken powell is going to share some more information about that so just know that that metric is one that localities will score themselves okay leslie and then the next indicators are really secondary indicators uh charlottesville city is considered the northwest region as far as uh localities go which sort of surprised me i've always thought of us as the central region but the way that the virginia department of health classifies us we're

147in the northwest region as is fairfax county and and all of that group so when i see regional data i realize we're being compared with lots of other people the first of the secondary um metric levels is the percent change in per in new cases for 100 000 in the last seven days so we went down 16 and that is just charlottesville from the week before now the others are regional data so when we see the 79 for hospital beds in the region that is not just charlottesville because every locality does not have a hospital so they do this on the region so this would be the northwest region all the hospitals here through fairfax county we've got 79 percent available beds then you look at um how many are occupied by covet patients out

148of the entire large region 22.4 percent are um in the hospitals with covid so again most of the indicators at the beginning are charlottesville specific but when we start getting into hospital beds then that is when it becomes a regional number okay so this is what we looked at yesterday um my fancy handwriting on there and we show it in the columns with the different metrics so yesterday we had our number was 646.3 in the 14 days so we were in the highest risk level for transmission yesterday we were down to 4.9 percent with um positivity so we were in the lower risk you're going to hear more about the mitigation measures in a few minutes although we believe we are in the lowest risk level we were at minus 17 from the previous seven

149days and then again the regional data hospital beds we had actually more hospital beds available yesterday than we did monday and the regional for coveted beds stayed a little over two percent so i'm gathering this data every day and looking and and looking at it every day really doesn't show that much change but hopefully we will see some numbers change and this census 646 number is based on our daily cases even though it's at uh uh based on a hundred thousand as we see days where we have big drops in cases we should see this number change so i will have that information if anybody asks okay so summary of the meetings how have our meetings gone next slide please first meeting was on september 16th we talked about what the purpose was we talked

150about the path to the present where we had been from the middle of march until september the 16th we shared data and metrics from the virginia department of health and administration offered a draft proposal to begin the conversation it was not intended to be this is what we are going to do this was just to get the conversation rolling because sometimes you have to have something to start the conversation it certainly doesn't have to be where you end up but we wanted to get started okay and after that meeting we received a lot of feedback from what people thought about what we had shared i know school board received feedback so what was some of the summary that we received we know that our teachers want to see our students and we're very glad about

151that we also know that people were confused about um in the proposal changing the timeline on it about a number of cases especially with uva being back um concerned about relationships we've talked about that everyone wanted to know how people will be assigned and how students will be assigned when we return they wanted to know about space configurations and wanting to know about daily health checks so we got lots of feedback on questions that people had but one of the pieces that really made us feel good was that overwhelmingly teachers said we want to see our students they didn't give us a day they wanted to see them but they wanted to get back into learning face-to-face when it was going to be safe for everyone okay next slide please so we took a step

152back all of that feedback told us we needed to listen some more so that meeting last week we listened more to the committee to our employees and the total community we updated the data we shared some possible cohorts and models that had been reviewed earlier in the in the summer and ask the committees to go into breakout groups to discuss these models again to give us some more information and some more feedback after that we felt like that we really were not getting to the point that we wanted to come up with a proposed model and so we wanted to look at doing something a little bit differently leslie so we met i guess that was yesterday um and we shared lots of information again with the group we updated the information and data that

153i've just shared with you we told the committee about some of the models that were being used in other divisions and how they were looking at making some changes we had three breakout groups that are going to continue meeting the elementary group the secondary group and the facilities group and gave the groups a worksheet of various topics that would need to be thought about and added some information in there of what we know meaning what we know here within the school system then so that people didn't have to ask well i wonder if we could do this or what is the answer to this we tried to put some guiding information not proposals of what we thought it needed to be but just some objective statements that might help in the decision making um and

154we we told the group that we gave the group another um information too some of the timing that we might need to think about once a model is recommended because if we make a decision on what every day it's not like we can fully open or open to that model the very next day we need to think about some things that need to happen in there so again we had the three groups and they were given the task of creating a proposed model giving us some timelines what metrics they would like to see us usually think we need to be using to help in making this decision and then the facilities group is focusing more on the mitigation strategies and we're not meeting next week but when the groups the entire committee comes back on

155october the 14th we want to talk about what are the proposals at that time so what are the the documents that we gave the group the what we know document that i mentioned the calendar for next year so that they can for this year so they can see that uh information about how to get to the department of ed department of health excuse me data that i've shared with you some interim guidance um the transmission risk that i just went over with you mitigation measures which kim is going to go through in just a second which is a part of that cdc information that we shared and one of the issues that many people have asked is how will we be notified when things happen or what sort of communication will we have well we'll

156develop ours specifically for charlottesville but we shared some examples of communication that other school divisions have done when they have encountered cases in their school division so before i go to the next thing if we can click on the mitigation measures related and let kim tell you about that and then we'll get back to the rest of this okay uh thank you dr baptist so if you're able to see i don't know how large this is appearing on your your screens but um in the first column what you see are five mitigation measures that are the what the cdc has put forth as the um the standard if you will to assess your readiness or your risk level in your school and these five mitigation measures are consistent and correct use of masks social distancing

157to the largest extent possible hand hygiene and respiratory etiquette cleaning and disinfection and contact tracing in collaboration with the local with local health department so in the green area to the right of those five measurements i mean the long story short we are and would remain in the green for all of these measures but i know there are other considerations as well so we're going to go through this whole list quickly for masks and face coverings there's a policy that was put forth months ago times kind of all run together for me but the link to the policies there we long and short we are requiring them we ask that students and staff would bring them from home but we will have them available should someone forget or need need one or um so that's

158not going to be an issue we also will have face shields as well as an additional measure on top of or in addition to the masks social distancing will use floor markers to reinforce where furniture needs to be placed and where it needs to stay to maintain six foot separation there are numerous floor stickers that say please wait here and six feet apart and directional arrows that we've um ordered the custom ones with the school logos and such and they are all slated for delivery no later than the end of next week so those will all be going down um plus signage for stairwells that indicate the direction to help ensure that people you know don't crowd we've already installed plexi dividers in reception areas and we provided movable plexi barriers for all the schools

159and for special ed in certain areas where they need to assess students so that if a teacher is working with a student in an assessment or something like that they can put the barrier between them uh seats will be bus seating is limited but and it will be assigned i think that covers most everything related to distancing for hand hygiene we rolled out large gallons of hand sanitizer for all the classrooms a while back the transportation team has equipped the buses with hand sanitizer so that when students board the bus they can get hand sanitizer there and we just we rolled out the first wave of the hand sanitizer stations the freestanding ones so they those would need to be deployed at all student entrances and i'm sure as the schools finalize their physical preparations

160we'll get a sec we'll need to place a second round of orders for the freestanding hand sanitizer stations but they would be at all of the entrances um for cleaning protocols we have a daily cleaning plan template that we rolled out to all the schools for the custodians to work with the administration to daily go through the checklist and document what they have done to keep everything routine we also have a room tag system red yellow and green that helps the staff and the custodial team know exactly the status of each room um and then we have we're we've rolled out um our epa list in uh product which is and span but it is rated to as appropriate product to address covid it's on the epa in list and we've purchased extra bottles with

161microfiber cloths for every classroom for teachers to help address high touch areas throughout the day and so they have that right at hand whenever they want to wipe something down in addition of course to the supplies and what the custodians will do we also have a lot of new custodial equipment that does fogging and electrostatic spraying and the buses will all have the handheld electrostatic sprayers as well um contact tracing uh we um already have been doing this with staff as as applicable since the onset of all of this in march and we will be prepared with all the proper protocols um to readily collaborate with the health department when there are cases in the schools and that's you know not an issue then there are other mitigation measures there's other signage beyond the floor

162stickers there's mirror clings and pop-up banners and a-frame signs that all reinforce the key practices and go into more detail in some cases about like self-screening and all of that so constant reminders and messaging with the signage with health screening we have the touchless temperature scanning equipment that's going to be mounted on the buses so that when students board the bus the protocol will be they temperature scan there in front of the bus driver and they get they put the hand sanitizer on when students arrive at school they'll be designated entrances what for like the bus the children coming from the bus will arrive through one entrance a car people who come by car will go in another and then those they'll need to be an entrance designated for people who for students who ride

163bikes walk scooters whatever so each building has to determine which which students will enter through which entrances but when they arrive if they come off the bus because they've just been scanned they could come in directly and maybe just hit the hand sanitizer one more time as they walk in but for students who are arriving by car or other means what we've seen work well in other school districts is either using the scanners we have the mounted ones or the um handheld you just check every child's temperature and if you have a lot of staff out like multiple staff because you have a car line you're scanning the students and you're giving them a like a laminated card with a big check mark on it and they walk in so that they know people know

164they were scanned right at the entrance they hand sanitize drop their card in the bucket because we'll spray all those down for use the next day and you proceed on from there and then of course anytime someone has a concern administration and the medical staff or teacher if they want to refer student to be screened we can do more in-depth screening based on whatever the currently recommended screening criteria are we will be prepared to do that we will have and we have already gotten in some additional ppe for staff who will need it in certain areas whether it's any staff who work with students in medical situations or for personal care and like in our sped team for example we'll have the gowns and of course gloves and the face shields to wear in addition

165to the masks we have plenty of face shields plenty of masks and then last but not least the air ventilation and filtration that is a big topic the filters um are already installed and in the process of being installed i had i do have confirmation they were received from all school for all schools and by filters i mean we're following the cities following the ashrae recommendations to install the highest merv rated filters that the equipment will support not all equipment has a frame or to support merv 13 or 14 but if it'll support seven or eight or whatever you put in the best filters you can is the bottom line and there's new technology that is supposed to be commercially available or new media that's supposed to be commercially available by the end of the

166year to make better filters available even you know for more a broader spectrum of equipment in addition to that the city is um sets the the dampers to be open to support maximum outdoor air exchange whenever buildings are you know operating at close to normal or higher occupancy levels but there's a second level there's another wave of mitigation measures that we're looking to um implement beyond those baseline recommendations and those are things that have to do with uvc lights bipolar ionization and air scrubbers and that really needs to be probably an entire separate presentation perhaps sometime or that will make a document available that people can read if they want to because there's a lot of details there but the city is working with us to put out an ifb next week to get the

167bids and we're going to um be working through that process as quickly as possible to get another layer of mitigation measures or improvements in place in this area of air handling so more to come with that as we move along but that's an area where what we're looking to do exceeds what a lot of other school divisions um have been doing or or have done so i'm very grateful for the support of the city and city council and city facilities maintenance team in working with us to pursue that next level of mitigation measures okay um if we can go back to the next slide please so as i said a minute ago we did give the committee or the smaller committees uh a slide to ask them to think about timelines uh we know that

168everything cannot happen overnight uh there's some steps that are gonna have to happen once a decision is made um it's got to come to the school board we've got to have our intent forms to find out you know what students are coming back and you know what depending on our process we'll take some time to go through those um for buses it's going to take some time to get the buses routed and then letting parents know about bus transportation we do know that we don't want buses to be a reason that we want wouldn't be able to start at a particular time we may have to phase in some of our bus riding to be able to get our schools open so these are just some of the potential uh timelines that we would be

169looking at but our first priority once we know that it's safe and once we have the model is to get our students in into school with the model that is selected okay next one so what's what's next we will have the breakout groups are meeting and i know some of them have meetings already scheduled um for follow-up from yesterday we will meet on the 14th to receive the models provide feedback about the models and at that time it may be that recommendations are provided to the superintendent are and maybe decided that we need more work done on the model so we'll just have to see what happens on the the 14th we have no preconceived notions of what that will be and so when the proposed model is ready superintendent will make the recommendation and

170to the school board for approval and then the committee as i said early into this will continue to meet as needed on a somewhat regular basis until we are able to get all of our schools back fully open the way we need and want them to be so that is where we are right now now i know a few minutes ago uh there was a question about virtual learning and what's going well and not going well i've asked miss thacker to have a couple of slides that we had prepared about what's going well and and some challenges and i know this print is small and even with contacts and reading glasses i can barely see it but wanting to make sure that you did know that we are looking at what's going well and what

171some of our challenges are and miss ivory worked with some folks to get some of this information for us you can see it came from elementary teacher content survey talking to administrators some of our coaches so we do have a full list of things that are going well in the virtual arena and virtual works very well for many students we've had great attendance uh in many of the classes has been great engagement and i'm not going down this whole list for you because you can certainly read it yourself but there have been some things that people have been very pleased about and i also realized that perception is reality and one aspect some people may think it's really going well and some people may see that as a challenge so we realize anytime we get

172information we have to look at it from from both sides so this shows what are some of the aspects that are going well based on the survey administrators and coaches and then if you can share the challenges slide and then there's some of the challenges i mean we're always going to have challenges with whatever model that we do um we've heard some of these more than some of the others um and they're going to be technology issues just because it's it's technology there are going to be parents that are concerned about um the screen time about instructions and routines taking longer they're i mean they're just various things that are going to be different in a virtual world rather than in the face-to-face so just know that we have looked at both sides of this

173i know i've shared a lot and if there are any questions i would be glad to try to answer them or any of my trusted senior staff members or dr adkins are also available to help thank you dr dr baptist and miss powell appreciate um your efforts there um also um miss torres and i have been there so if you guys have any questions for us we're happy to help too i should have said all the questions went to the two of you i'm sorry that's yeah uh we'll defer to um the staff obviously um but yeah so who would like to go first i have a question to start with to follow up from the last meeting with the percentages and the numbers um do we find out if the uva numbers are being

174credited here or in the students home states and do the percentages you showed us for charlottesville address i was reading recently about the rapid test available for some athletes maybe at uva and how the multiple testing for them coming back negative inflates the numbers for the community as a whole so i was wondering if the percentages included that or that's taken into account or you know the address thing for the students where their test is credited it's very confusing and i keep asking the the same questions the uva numbers do affect the charlottesville numbers generally the students who live off grounds most of them live within the city of charlottesville so they are counted in the charlottesville numbers another page that i look at every day is the uva tracker now i can't look at

175the tracker and do a one-to-one correspondence onto our numbers but if i see a day that their numbers are higher then i sort of expect the next day we may see higher charlottesville numbers so they are in there now i think and it's never been fully explained i i think that they are counted here in charlottesville because this is where they are currently residing but if they gave an address outside of this area it could be that it's counted there but most of them are being counted here the students living on grounds and dormitories are pretty much counted in the county because the dorms are located in the county now your question about the percent for positivity yes the tests that are being conducted for the uva athletes is going into making our uh setting

176that percentage and that could be i'm i can't say it's absolutely but i can say it is likely that that's one of the reasons that our positivity rate has gone down because we've had more testing which that would make the denominator and that that factor be higher which would make the number go down we have asked if the uva numbers can be separated out from the charlottesville and our albemarle numbers and they cannot partially because of confidentiality reasons and also they're living here so even if we take them out they're still living in in our community so we can't totally discount the fact that we have people in the city limits who have tested positive did i answer all of that miss bryce yes yes and then um a few more questions um i've seen

177emails from families asking for four full days two days back and do we have the compat do we even have the capacity for space and teachers and social distancing to even consider coming back four days a week it is something that we are really looking at and we would have to know before we can fully answer that question what percentage of families would choose to come back now if we went with a four day we may have some families that don't choose to come back and we would have enough capacity if all 100 wanted to come back we would have to come up with or have some challenges on what to do next both space wise and staffing-wise so until we have a model that that parents can respond to with their intentions some of

178that is hard to answer we've talked today almost every decision we make about this is a chicken and an egg sort of thing do if we have the model and then the parents tell us what they're going to do and staff or do we have them tell us what they're going to do and then hopefully match a model so we would have to look at what we have at the time that a model has done and what the intent forms say and see what we can then do staff wise and space-wise can we poll for both options i know the two day a week is popular and the four day a week is popular is it possible to pull for both well we've talked about that but we don't know what the model will be

179on october 14th the committee may come up within something entirely different than anything we've thought about so we don't want to try to have the community think that it's going to be this or that we would love to know what our model is going to be and it may be that it's a two day or it may be that it's a four day or we know we've got some very smart people on the committee they may come up with something that we have never thought about we've we've kind of toyed around with some some thoughts that it could be and there's some exciting out of the box thinking so it's we don't want to poll until we know what the recommendation is and then last question is is the committee considering a model like albemarle

180is doing right now where in person is offered to those with special needs or people with internet access problems or you know families where the parent can't telework um is that being addressed in the discussions like not bringing everyone back but bringing back those most in need to be back who uh you know who could opt into it uh when we identify like special groups of people um that need to that virtual isn't working for that is certainly in the mix as far as the discussions go um you heard tonight how students with disabilities will be offered some opportunities for coming back and we've been trying to work with families that have their internet issues i know it's not perfect but um i think as we move forward seeing what the committee is recommending we

181will try to get the students who have most needs in but there's no set plan for it uh but we do want the students who need us the most to get back to us as quickly as possible okay thanks for morrisberger we also have been looking at contingency plans and overflow space in case we do have um more families opting for the face-to-face at whatever time that might be how might we use some of the spaces in our community in order to house our students should we get to that point that we need the overflow space hey who has another question who would like to go next miss purrier miss purrier uh my question yes my questions i think are with doctor i mean no let me see i think with miss powell so i'm

182uh concerned about our mitigation and i'm glad that she was able to discuss that i know we have a lot of these supplies now i know that we have some instructors in the building you know teaching virtually what impact is that going to have miss powell because when you when we bring students back face to face that's going to include additional work it's one thing to have 5 10 or 15 people in the building it's another thing to have socially distant implies that there's going to be additional work for our custodial staff uh there's going to be additional work for the instructors that they don't have now because there's nobody in their room other than them so do we do a practice run how does that work um you you know i you know how

183does that go and then will there be additional training required for our custodial staff or for our instructors because maybe there's a particular way that you have to wipe down a desk and then what about our bathrooms because you've got children in the building that may be needing to go to the bathroom more than an adult so okay i'll try to um answer all of those um so the first thing that's important is that you're right we do have a lot of things that now that we're talking about going with face to face we have to put put it all out and get everything set up and get our classrooms set up and the good news is um in a lot of ways that's not as daunting as it may seem we have a plan

184and i started today at one of our schools i'm going to another one tomorrow and more next week and i'm working with them through it's actually called the covet operations building prep checklist that just goes step by step through all the different pieces that they have to um address for everything from you know setting the furniture in position and making sure the the markers are on the floor as to where the furniture goes getting the signage in place i'm assessing the quarantine area for each um spa school and where they're storing their coveted supplies we've set minimum supply levels we have a form where they can request their replenishments i've given them minimum thresholds for whoever's monitoring the stock so they know how to handle that so we'll work with them from our central supply

185i mean there are a lot of details and that truly is always where the devil lies but we just have to pay attention to those things um there's you ask me a lot of questions i want to make sure i can answer all of them so um i do think it's doable with regards to our custodians they had special training the week of um the 19th of september hold on i can tell you the day it was i think week before last yeah it was actually on september 15th all of our custodians we took them and we had them in two batches and they had we had guest lecturers who talked about everything from you know general covet awareness and knowledge to the proper donning and doffing of addition you know gowns and masks and

186additional training on the new equipment that they have um and i i was intending to actually participate in that training with them unfortunately i was called into other meetings but um from everything i've heard uh it went very well we've been working with anne sandridge and our special ed team on different videos and so forth for the special ed folks who are starting to meet with students face to face to make sure they watch these videos before you know they start meeting with students so there are things like that that we've been doing on a smaller scale and we'll just have to scale that up further we actually have a video that we developed for staff um months back but we kind of held off on releasing that that was a training video that we

187about our um our mitigate basic mitigation protocols what we see in a lot of other school divisions is they'll do a video at each school that with the with the folks at the school the principals that can kind of help inform students and families before they come back i think that's something we'll certainly want to have in our arsenal just some simple little videos that show what it's going to look like when you arrive at school and things like that so those are all things that you know we we now need to make sure we have them ready to go and there's there's a plan for all of that it's not a big unknown as to what we need to do we're going to be much more specific with our principles some of these things

188i've been communicating with principals since the summer but now we just have to make sure that we every school is at the same place and being ready for with these things um you asked other questions ms puryear oh custodial staff i should also mention we have a company lined up to provide supplemental custodial services as needed for both subs or if we need to do but i think it's more likely we would use them for subs if we have folks out but we could also uh use them to come in and do intensive area cleaning if we needed to we have a rate for that as well um so does the city um please tell me if i if there are other questions that were in there that i've missed you got them all and

189i have one other question and i don't know if it goes to dr baptist or dr atkins it's piggybacking on miss bryson morris berger's question when she was talking about um uh locations for our students we have done a lot of work with community partners so that the students uh whose parents uh cannot be at home they are at the y they're at walker the girls and boys club etc etc with us looking at at some point no dates given uh face to face how does that uh impact those organizations that are helping us now with our students so we've been talking with them about that since the beginning what does that look like and so um the boys and girls club for example they were only scaling to the to the capacity or the

190amount of what they could actually serve when they drop back to the club space because right now they're not using their club space um they're just using buford so the boys and girls club has that plan and then with the y it's similar um although i think the y has scaled more to meet the need i don't know if they could but at the same time the demand for the services should drop down as we move into meeting face to face to give you a definitive answer as to what that looks like and what the potential issues could be unfortunately i can't say until i know which model we use to go back to face to face i don't know what potential concerns there could be until we know what model we would use but

191for example this is not no no decisions have been made but if we used a four day then you have that fifth day we would need to figure out what kind of demand there is for that fifth day um but i don't know that we could make the buildings available for them for the day five because that's a day we that we have plans for with deep cleaning you know professional work the teachers many of our teachers are already working in the buildings so um i can't totally say i know with the boys and girls club that they um the last time i talked with james pierce about their numbers they could fall back to the club space and they could serve the same number of students with the y they've been i think they've

192been scaling more and so i'm not sure how that relates plus with the y over at brooks um there are some county um students there as well yeah thank you you've thank you you've given me enough information to process with the information that we had from the presentation so thank you very much yes um i um i think that all my concerns at this point have been covered my my main thrust and this has been said numerous time by dr atkins and and other presenters is that i would like to get all of our students back as soon as possible but it's safe as as both um and i'm glad that at the very least you know it sounds like you know maybe jumping ahead but no matter what comes up we're going to make

193an effort to get our most vulnerable students back in the classroom maybe before the the um as soon as possible and um so i'm just really looking forward i don't want to jump too much on um the committee work um i really respect the time and effort and understanding the the the difficulty of their decisions and and i think that everybody is seeing now the role that the public schools play in our everyday society so many people have lost their job so can't go back to work because of child care because of you know waiting for us to make a decision and we're we want to do it but we wanted it to be a safe environment for the students and the teachers to come back um in and so this is just really difficult

194and i just wish it would go away but it won't we have to deal with it a time will take care of this but in until then we just have to take these steps because we want to educate them the students but we want them to it to be safe and we want our teachers to feel like they're safe and that they can teach without worrying about um the virus and and and so i appreciate the work of the committee and i look forward to their work over the next two or three weeks thanks miss raid dr aircraft yes i'll be quick um first i i want to give a huge thank you to you guys um for all of this work um and to dr atkins too for just the huge amount of work

195and the amount of detail that goes into all of these decisions kim i just i always marvel at your ability to manage like thousands of details at once and you know it's incredible and it's very much appreciated um what i wanted to do my my question um really circles back to uh for dr baptist um these the question of the the new case is in the community and i imagine you know for myself and i imagine for the public when you see that big red you know the the number and and it's all in red and we're at the highest level um it's very alarming to people and it's hard to understand you've explained it a little bit um but i guess i'm wondering [Music] are there other kinds of do are there other outbreaks

196in the community that would be helpful for us to know about that are contributing to these uh numbers or is it pretty much are we thinking that it is by and large the uva students and then i guess i'll just say this that if it is my understanding is the uva students are all going to be gone after november 24th they will be there well there won't be any class or anything and i think there we community would like them to go back to their home communities until the second semester and so i'm wondering if how would how might that affect our our timelines and what things look like i've i've asked the question many times is uva the numbers from them the reason our numbers have gone up i keep numbers from every day

197i look at them at the last day of each month to see how many we had per month to see whether july was higher than august or or whatever else and yes the numbers started going up about the time that the students came back and but but the health department will say they are a factor they're not the only reason we're still getting community cases but the students being here add to the numbers of people in our community and and to the uh the number of cases the numbers that uh they're shared in the red i agree that is very confusing because it when i first saw it i thought it was saying 646 new cases well i can pretty much tell you every day how many we've got had for that day but when

198looking at this it is 14 days of cases based on a hundred thousand people in our community since we don't have a hundred thousand we only have a little less than 50 000 so you can look for us our cases over 14 days is about half of what this red number is like uh yesterday our red number was 646. where our number of cases over two weeks was 310 or something like that so the the number on the cdc chart is going to almost every time be about double because the 100 000 is about double for what charlottesville's population is now you ask what will happen after the 24th of november but it won't show up anything for a while if uva continues to have cases it's not going to show a drop of this

199red number until we get 14 days in because this is looking at 14 days of cases so it would take us if we continue at the same rate we've been going to 14 days after everybody leaves for the number to drop much it might drop some because some of our days would be lower but we're looking at a 14 days accounting of cases there's no averaging or anything in it it's just purely counting cases i just i wanted to go back to the issue of virtual school and how that go is going um with respect to uh attendance i um myself have been uh called several times about my child's attendance and i just wanted to know how attendance going if we have any numbers about percentages of students showing up and if we're keeping

200data on that and what we're doing in the event that students are not coming to school i can answer the part we are keeping data on it i don't know whether dr king will have a better answer on that or if someone else dr king do you have a better answer yes we're keeping data on it the school principals as well as our data team diana sacra um watches and has percentages from the principal's report um the high school walker and buford had really high 90 98 um scores when i looked at it i want to say the beginning of last week with with that report but the feedback from the principles and um is just the the level of participation um we do look at being on being present at school on time and

201all day we realize that there are going to be exceptions to that and we have um schools follow up with families case-by-case basis specific situations where if there's a time that a student isn't able to be present for a live session or or if there are some activities or assignments that aren't able to be completed for those days we follow up not only with phone calls and text messages and emails but we do home visits we had a um our high school principal um just this week went to a home to make sure that our student could get on zoom classes they shared hey we're having trouble getting on doing classes we're getting their assignments in but did the personal home visit so principals our social workers our teachers are making sure we're meeting the

202needs of students so they can be present for school all day just want to give a shout out to mr cook and miss thomas who both contacted me this week about my child so we're good um but i see that so i just wonder if that's going to continue to be um you know it's i think it's interesting um and and hard how is the elementary school doing they are doing well also um i just did not have those numbers with the with you for the high school and walker that stuck out um to me because usually those are the areas yeah i just remembered but very well also okay is that in our consent agenda report as it normally is the attendance numbers i am sorry i didn't catch that on the consent agenda

203let me take a view of that madam chair okay you don't have to do that while we're doing this i can look later i want to make sure that it is in there if as it normally is um okay so any other questions or comments about the covid transition committee can i ask one last question before we move on i'm sorry yes the um the cova committee have we looked have we talked about what our testing capacity is i remember at some point we were talking about it and we were saying that the thomas jefferson health district will cover the cost of testing for students or teachers and i was just wondering if that isn't included somewhere in the return to school planning about testing and our capacity and how how we refer people out

204or you know what happens if you come in and your temperature is 101 or something like that we don't have a set plan at this point regarding testing on thomas jefferson health district has been very collaborative with us but there has been nothing set up about testing i think that would be something that the facilities group may look at because of mitigation factors to see what we can get worked out and we can't tell them that's got to be done we would need to see what capacity they have as far as testing goes i know that the capacity has gotten better over the last few months and the amount of time it takes to get a test back has gotten better but uh we don't have anything firmly in place for that at this point

205thank you i want to say to you ms bryson morrisberger that has absolutely been one of the focuses of our mitigation committee we talked about it in detail yesterday we're working with um trying to connect with some resources at the university to see what uh how we can it really does depend on the timeline like they can't offer us anything immediately but certainly in the short term or medium term and long term there may be some collaboration aspect or elements that we could take advantage of um so we're still examining testing as a mitigation strategy um it's not uh you know the health district specifically does not recommend it for school districts but i think um our community would value that at least some access to it so that's where the commit you know the

206mitigation committee is working on that um i also wanted to tell you a couple of like one of the other things that we talked about in mitigation was communication um and our uh nurse from venable uh mentioned she's also in our on our facilities committee she mentioned that this is the time for families to get your flu shot um that school is going to look a lot different no matter when we return to school um and so it's you know we're going to be wearing masks we're going to be distant lunch is going to be different things are just going to be different so no matter when we pull the whenever we decide to go return back in person things are going to be different and that we need to start looking at um how

207to talk to our children about that um but also we're going to just have very high expectations about hand washing and social distancing and matte proper mask use and you know also getting your flu shot this year is really important um so those are just um so we'll continue to you know i think community education strategy is also a mitigation strategy too so that's i i i suspect we're going to be working more on that in the coming weeks any other questions or comments okay so um i um i think that's the end of our agenda with respect to the information and action thank you to all our staff for everything you do on that and the next item on our agenda is the um comments from members of the community and this time i'm

208going to try to remember to do my three main minutes starting at the beginning if you guys um mr cuomo is there anybody signed up yes um i have becca saxon um who can un mute when ready okay the saxon you have three minutes uh good evening everyone i hadn't actually been planning to talk tonight but i think the pieces of the letter i sent to you all earlier uh are important to share publicly since the conversation tonight on lgbtq identities diverted the focus of the conversation from anti-racism these anti-bias lessons were created to begin moving the school system for anti-racism as part of the changing the narrative work the goal is to affirm every student's multiple identities and center the voices and experiences of marginalized people as students explore systems of power and oppression

209multiple educators reached out to both me and the charlottesville education association for guidance after seeing those lessons get removed during those conversations we learned that a fourth grade team had requested a one grade one book reading of this book anti-racist by tiffany jewell and that this request was denied because the book mentioned of lgbtq identities as part of personal identity as a result of these conversations the open letter i sent earlier today was drafted and circulated among teachers and supportive community members because of our intentions to work internally to address these issues the letter was not posted to the public and the media was not informed it still received almost 200 signatures these decisions to censor lessons and materials are very concerning the charlottesville community has grown and changed significantly in the last three years

210we are finally acknowledging the generations long prize from our black neighbors and friends who have been calling for more honest conversations and learnings in our classrooms about race and our difficult history regarding race but any honest conversation about race must include the nuances that emerge when overlapping identities come into the light we cannot teach honestly about racism if we do not also acknowledge the ways in which all aspects of our identities work together to form our perspectives and experiences we must also acknowledge how systems of oppression and power affect all portions of ourselves and our community for this to happen educators must have the authority and autonomy to select materials that recognize affirm and celebrate every single member of their classroom communities i'm glad that the lessons themselves have been returned to the lesson bank

211and then we can now focus energy on how to move forward constructively at that end i trust that you all incorporate many of the suggestions i made in the letter i sent earlier this afternoon and i again offer my support in any way uh that may be welcome to the teachers to the central office staff and to the school board as you go through this process it's exciting work to see happening thank you thank you ms saxon i appreciate your comments um next is who mr cuomo um i have uh the only other hand i see raised right now is beth ike okay miss ike you have three minutes thank you um thank you all for your time and your commitment to our kids please know how much we appreciate it i'm sad to say

212the two topics i was hoping to better understand have not really been sufficiently explained i guess i understand choosing not to reflect on the proposal of an early re-opening which had already been walked back but the whole ordeal was so unnecessarily disruptive and stressful for all i was hoping that we would hear at least an apology on the removal of lgbt related content i wanted to follow up on some of miss bryson morseberger's comments i too find dr atkins explanations confusing and lacking transparency i was so grateful to hear a board member ask for greater clarity on these curricular changes miss peerier i heard you loud and clear but trust is an issue there has been no admitting of mistakes i was appalled to hear the way dr atkins chose to respond to miss bryson

213morrisberger to speak with such disrespect to anyone like that is hardly behavior becoming a superintendent but to tell a board member i'm sorry you don't understand and then basically refuse to be more clear was an egregiously poor response this board should not be okay with that lastly i just wanted to echo the comments made earlier about map testing if this is not something required by the state if we cannot trust the data generated because of the very real changes the virtual environment proposes or that we have to contend with because of the fact that we're in a virtual environment then why would we do this now i ask especially as a parent of a second grader i watched her second grade teacher take the class through an exercise where they wrote on their whiteboards and

214then pulled their screens down so they couldn't see their screens but what was on the whiteboard would be able to be reviewed this was supposedly in preparation for map testing it felt like a difficult exercise even as an exercise i'm not exactly sure how it fit in but it had me scratching my head earlier today and then i really appreciated hearing the comments from the other parent and hope you guys consider not following through thank you again for everything i appreciate it have a good night thank you miss ike um appreciate that um who is next mr cuomo yeah madam chair there are no other hands raised um someone did make a comment that if the hand raise button is not available they if they just put a simple note in the chat i can

215also use that as a way to acknowledge a time to speak so if you are unable to raise your hand please put a little note in the chat and um mr cuomo will call on you i'll probably give you know you an opportunity for like i don't know 45 seconds does that suit everybody just like making up rules as i go along so um yeah 45 seconds ish and um so i should play a song is that what no you should sing a song i'm not singing yeah that would yeah no um yeah so interlude music and then um yeah well we'll just have some silence for a few seconds anybody showing up mr cuomo i see no hands raised and no comments in the chat box perfect everybody get your comments ready for the

216next item okay board members i'm just gonna go alphabetical okay okay so um mr cuomo anybody in the chat ah there's nobody at this time okay i'm gonna go ahead and close public comment thank you all for your comments we do value them and um everybody i do hope it feels like everybody knows our email but feel free to email us at schoolboard charlottesvilleschools.org we um we see those and respond to those um and thank you for all of your emails as well um and so i think mr bryant is first in the alphabet it's kind of late so i don't really know but yeah i'm gonna go with mr brian right now okay good evening everyone um first of all um i heard a lot tonight um i think the thing that stood out

217to me most um were the parents of those students who perhaps may have felt disenfranchised in regards to those lessons being removed and it reminded me of a time when i was teaching and there was a complaint about teaching negro spirituals and administrator questioned me about that and i was accused of teaching religious songs and um once i clarified these were the songs that were in the civil project book that was approved by the school board we moved on with the lesson so in this case um i do appreciate those parents calling and expressing their concerns because we want we know that we have a school i know that we have a school system that's that's opening and warming and friendly to all students i've taught them all over the years um many students who

218were dealing with certain issues um but we were able to move forward and and ingratiate these kids and make them feel welcome so i am very i was very pleased that those lessons were restored um i was i have to admit i was taken aback and um but they were restored and uh as miss purier said we make mistakes and we move forward also um dr atkins um immediately after that shared a video with us um i sat and listened very intently and my response was that she has set the tone in us moving forward the equity committee is is work is going to be working hard and setting up training i think that's going to be very important moving forward for everyone in regards to this issue so that we can cover all of

219our bases and the community members um their children feel feel welcome in our school system i think that is very important also i want to thank dr axes for leading the charge um it's critical to have a strong superintendent that sets the tone for all of us um central office staff you are amazing uh you've worked hard um trying to cover all the bases so that we can safely open our schools for our children and staff members um the kovic committee is extremely important because as a board we're going to depend heavily on the information that they share with us it's critical so that we when we do open schools back up that everyone will come into a safe environment um so i do want to commend the culvert committee for their great work as

220well as central staff and dr atkins um we are moving forward in these uncertain times we have to understand that we're in the unknown and we have to move it forward i will also thank the equity committee for their fine work um i'm hoping that um we can can we can move beyond this um and continue to do the great work that the charlottesville city schools are teachers our amazing teachers um our staff members and our hard-working students god knows if i was one of those students working virtual i would have some issues because i like it up close and personal so i want to thank our amazing students everybody the bus drivers the folks who are delivering the meals in the community um everybody working on because as the old african proverbs it takes

221a whole village to raise a child and we are the village so my hat goes off to everybody and i'm hoping that we can move beyond this little snafu and do the work that we've been asked to do hey um so hopefully you're as lucky as i am to have a child deliver um dessert to you and um miss bryson morrisberger you're next okay um i'd just like to say uh for my comments uh that i hear the community and the concerns um over the last month and i think that um we should really be clear and acknowledge that releasing um a earlier return date than the one we acknowledged you know even if it's a conversation starter was just not the best communication strategy because it alarmed people it people were panicked and i

222just think like just acknowledging to the community that it wasn't handled or wasn't communicated and the way it should have been um and that uh i can understand their frustration um i'd also like to add i am still not clear about the lgbt curriculum and the whys and the hows and the policy that went into the decision and the reversal um but i think that both of those two incidents create issues of trust and that and transparency and that we can't gloss over the fact you know that we have to be honest in our community with our conversations and say that like in both cases it did take some pushback and some fighting to get clarification or to get the decision reversed and that is worth acknowledging and not just glossing over and lastly i

223just want to say to the students to the families and the community organizations that are urging us to come back face to face that i hear you um and i we want to come back face to face and we also want to keep you and your family and your students and everyone safe and um i just don't want to do it in a way that we regret later but that we're doing everything we can to get everyone back safely and i'm sorry that you know virtual has been a struggle and that we'll continue to work together to make it to get to where we need to be thank you you dr kraft are you next in the alphabet yes i am um well i want to first thank uh the public those of you who

224spoke up at our meeting and those of you who have spoken up um through emails to us and contacting us just um expressing your your concerns um you know expressing when you're unhappy about things expressing when you know when you are happy about things and we've heard um we've heard lots from both ends but particularly you know if there's something that you you really do find egregious that you you do feel like you can reach out to the board that that's we're here for that and i appreciate those of you who have done that for us and to for us um and once again just to say i just uh i can never express enough how much i appreciate the work of the staff i think we have such an extraordinary group of people working

225on uh all of these issues which are almost unbearably difficult and complicated and um you're you're wonderful and i do appreciate you all the time and i um also want to appreciate um our board chair ms mckeever for um eating her dessert no for really for being the face of the board um for many of these communications with the public i think it takes a lot of time and and a lot of thought it's not an easy task and i think you've done a wonderful job doing that on on our behalf and so thank you for that um appreciate that um and just a couple of things one is that um in terms of our the timing of when we're making these decisions about what to do i think that you know families are thinking

226about you know the nine week that you know the first nine weeks the second nine weeks and people are sort of thinking in those chunks of time so i hope that we can um come to some direction uh so that people will begin to have a sense of what the second nine weeks is going to look like you know even if not all the details are worked out i just hope that we can think about that that's how families are looking at this in terms of their timing and take that into account and even if the board does need to meet before our next scheduled meeting in november i hope we will do so if that would you know help to lay out a plan a little more clearly and [Music] well finally this is

227i have this weird um this i flashed on this weird image of as as we've all been talking back and forth and i think there have been tensions and you know all of this kind of stuff i was thinking about these i don't know if you know these two big um cement lions that are in new york city uh by the big main library in manhattan and they're named patience and fortitude uh they were given these names and i was thinking that's you know that's kind of what we're grappling with and i think we all uh really need to be reminded we we do need the fortitude to get through all of this stuff we also need the patients to understand how stressed we all are how afraid we all are and how uncertain we

228all are about um how this is all going to happen this is nothing that we've ever experienced before and so finally i would just add a third lion called grace and uh put grace up there as well and so i hope that that's that can guide how we um work with each other and how we talk to each other and and um deal with each other so that's it thank you dr kraft i'm gonna get this wrong i'm gonna go miss purrier now p before t um thank you to everyone for all that you've done um my first shout out goes to the covet committee because um i'm glad that uh dr atkins thought about all of these various in sundry committees because they're doing the heavy lifting they're doing the research they're pulling it

229all together and then we have to read it and we have to interpret it um i understand how people may feel um [Music] that trust has been broken i understand that i know how important trust is all of us like mr bryant and miss bryce and morris berger and mr wade have said are looking forward to the day that our students can return but there are a lot of things that go into making that happen so we have to listen to dr kraft and put patients first we have to acknowledge when we're right and when we're wrong but if we are a part of a family they're always going to be a little disgruntlement there's always going to be a little dissension but somehow we all come back together and we may not understand everything

230at the time and sometimes it will become clear and sometimes it won't but i don't know anyone that was here a hundred years ago my friend that was 103 died at 103 and we hadn't gone into pandemic then so i want us to use the guidance guiding principle of patience and i feel that if we can be patient trust will be restored it'll take a while i understand that and i think everybody around this table around if you're sitting around a table at a desk or zoom you understand that for some of us it may be a little difficult to accept an apology but maybe that will come but please understand that when you look across the commonwealth and when you look across the country of all that is happening in public education all the

231targets and daggers that are thrown even with our missteps even with our hiccups even with our frustrations and not understanding look at where we are look at what we're doing and look at some other school divisions and all of us know people in other divisions hey miss torres i think you're up okay thank you um quickly i just wanted to mention a couple of things that that i've done and participated in here recently and and one was last week had the opportunity to attend um the 2020 the sba legislative advocacy conference so this is a webinar um i apologize because i meant to send just an email update to board members as far as some of the topics that were were covered but it was very informative and quickly just they they did talk about

232um collective bargaining um as that pertains to house bill 582 so there was a lot of information on that that was very informative they talked they had the commissioner rosen worsel i believe her name is from the fcc which talked about our digital future talked about e-rate programs and just equitable digital learning so that was also very informative and then we had our 2021 general assembly preview of hot topic so i have some information and i'm happy to share that out um another thing that um i attended this attended via zoom this week was our first seac meeting and um just to announce that there will be the next meetings that are scheduled or november 18th february 24th and april 21st um and um there was a pretty good attendance i don't remember what the

233numbers were so it was it was noted that i think having the zoom option um really allowed more people to potentially attend and participate in that than potentially hand having that in person so i think that's something that we all noted and it was a it was a nice turnout just as a question um i mean we heard a couple of times some concerns and questions about map testing come up so i would just love to pose um to whoever in in central office if we could have an opportunity maybe to have some more discussions about what types of assessments are being scheduled when they're being scheduled especially in light of the current environment of virtual um and and what we're looking to gain from that so i'm just out of curiosity would love maybe

234some follow-up on that if that's appropriate um also i wanted to acknowledge just all of the comments from the community members and and as chairwoman mckeever so graciously stated you know just to acknowledge the hurt that people felt whether it be students staff family members and and as was said by miss marshall you know i just to validate the lived experiences of every person i mean that is so important i know to all of us so thank you for um stating that and i look forward to receiving your letter and with with ongoing recommendations and also thank you miss mckeever for your leadership and thank you to central office staff for all of the work um putting all of this together and that's it thank you mr wade thank you um i'm going to keep

235it brief um um because i know we have another meeting to go to i just really want to echo what sherry said in that she that um to acknowledge uh the the great staff and all the work that they've been doing i know they've been attending a lot of uh meetings um for you and your leadership and responding to the emails and just kind of guiding us through just a very difficult year i know that you weren't expecting all this when you took on chairmanship back in in january and i'm also the fact that you know we've been willing to to meet again um for um [Music] you know if we have to make a decision before the november meeting and i'm going to just kind of take a different tack on you know the

236issue with the um um the curriculum i i want to commend rosa and staff for really um you know listening to the board and the public and and and um making the change i didn't see any hesitation at all in staff um you know making the changes uh maybe i missed some emails but i just want to can commend um her and his staff this is what i've known that um that you know we're very inclusive um community so those are my comments and um um thank you mr wade i wanted to say uh thank you to um our staff who are helping so us with the covid committee that it is just a lot of work um and the data that they continue to bring to the committee is extraordinary uh i'm i feel

237really grateful for where um at least the facilities and mitigation um committee subcommittee is right now and i hope that the elementary and middle school high school committees also feel at least empowered to kind of present options and i um i think maybe we should just schedule a meeting already like the third week in october i i feel like there's enough consensus about that that maybe we just have a update on the committee work and virtual school at that time i just think that as a school board that's a huge priority and and even talking to you all individually over the past week and a half or so it became very clear that there's just a you know there like it's hard to get in information out to you all um in the in the

238kind of in-depth way that you want it so maybe a committee meeting i mean maybe a school board meeting um in the middle of october after the 14th would benefit this board to kind of just keep them up to date on um on where we are in virtual school and in the um committee um i want to tell the public a to get your flu shot and b to vote i um said uh you can vote early um in vote early in person absentee however um i think i said in july uh and you know this little and i i've said this in a couple of our emails sometimes i'm not that great at the email so i apologize but i i i remember i said recently in emails um that we as a local

239little school board are having to make these really complex decisions and plans um just because we have been failed at the national level in controlling this virus um and the mixed messages that we have received over and over and over again we literally just got guidance from the cdc this week as for school divisions it is like october um so this little school board in this little town with little school with our you know mighty but small staff trying to make these decisions is it's too much to ask but we are doing it and we will continue to do it but we have to make our decisions and we've had to make our decisions and we will continue to make our decisions we are not doubling down on any decision everything is on the table

240and i just really feel strongly that um the we haven't even begun to see the community spread that uva is bringing to our community um you can see that every day the cdd guidance it stays in the red for one of those but the other parameter it changes so we have to metrics that constantly change so i wish and everybody i know around this table wants to go back to school in person that's what our teachers do best that's where our students do best and um i'm i'm really sorry that we have not been able to do that um but i really feel like if if our schools are safe our community is safer and i just think it's so urgent that we continue to protect our community um so obviously that was a little

241soapbox and thank you for letting me um say something like that but it's really important and urgent that we vote to have sensible leadership in this country so we can just have some path forward that is cohesive so that little tiny school boards are not making these big decisions um so to move away from that i'm going to i think go to the next item on the agenda um i think dr atkins you have the superintendent's report comments i do have superintendent comments miss mckeever thank you so much um i want to say thank you to our staff again i will echo everyone saying that we have an amazing staff tiny but amazing so thank you so much for all of the work that you have done to get us through the summer get us

242open get us back to um engaging in the teaching and learning process so thank you so much thank you again to the copic committee um so i i have some choices right here that i could go into um this whole dialogue about how we got to where we are and and what policy i felt followed and how i followed that policy um in response to any of what we've heard tonight i'm going to say thank you for what we've heard thank you for every person who has made a comment and thank you for all the text messages email messages that have come i can tell you when we started the covic committee the covet 19 advisory committee it evolved out of the last board meeting and in my leadership the purpose of it was because

243we built trust we built trust in opening the schools we pitched it to the teachers and said tell us what you want how you want it how to shape it and let's get school open in a way that works for everyone and i felt that we had built the trust so the covet advisory committee was based on that trust and walking into that committee there was never an intent to scare people to frighten people to get them to anything other than continuing to build on that trust that we have and starting point of discussion so um i'm glad we are where we are with the co covet advisory committee they um they're committees that are working right now they have the ball in their hands they're shaping that ball they're reshaping that ball and they're

244going to come back with an amazing report the elementary committee the secondary committee and the facilities committee they're going to put all of that information and come back on october 14th with the report and i just want to say thank you for all of your innovation and what's going to happen we come to work every day wanting to make this the best school division possible following every guideline that we have and for our public and our teachers and our staff oftentimes what you see is the very end of a protracted long process in which we are making decisions or finalizing decisions sometimes when you see the end of that it looks good and sometimes it doesn't look good but do know that our mission in the school division is to embrace to celebrate and to

245value every one of our students and every one of our staff members and to embrace the conversations that we have ahead of us difficult conversations and difficult processes and so thank you to everyone for your input and there's a small piece that i say for me personally miss bryson morrisberger if i in any way spoke to you in any manner that was not professional for that i apologize my mom taught me a long time ago how to be professional and how to be polite and i think i try in every way that i can to do that so may not agree with you but i sure wouldn't disrespect you so thank you and thanks to all of the boys for everything that you've done hey okay so um now we're on the back of the

246page super excited about that um and i just wanna because it's before the wrap up i was wondering if anybody would mind if we have any consensus about whether to have a another meeting in the middle of october or if we should just do that as an on an oz needed basis if we could just get some discussion or cons consent um thought about that miss mckinnon i i don't have a problem in having another meeting but i'm not sure that the third thursday is when to do it because if we go back to what dr baptist said the covet committee has their assignment that is due on the 14th of october so i'm just wondering may i can't i can't speak for anybody we all have lives we we've got lots going on but

247i just feel that if we've asked our committee to report back on one day and then trying to compile all of that to meet the next day i don't know i mean logistically i just don't know how that works okay how about okay let's just take the date off the table any uh because we could easily do at the 22nd um it again if nobody wants to do this that's fine i'm just asking okay uh do you want to have a meeting yes or no could we well i have a question could we wait until the 14th to could we decide right after that committee meeting um about having another meeting maybe we could set up something tentatively but i think we won't know um whether it would be useful to have it until we

248until that committee um comes back on the 14th well we can literally do anything we want so a yes b um the i think that given the amount of data that you all want as a board not just from the committee but in general that communicating with you all that on a regular basis can be overwhelming right now normally i don't have a problem with that but as chair like commuting communicating to you guys all individually can be probably can be difficult and i just think like having this central okay well on the 22nd you guys will learn all of this and it'll be like everybody's on the same page um so that's also one suggestion for that i have is that um there's a lot of information happening right now things are changing every

249week and it's just hard to keep you guys up to date all the time about that um so yeah i i we could easily schedule something at a later time but i just wanted to at least take a little straw poll to see if there's any consensus around having a meeting lead after the committee meeting and after staff have had an opportunity to kind of dissect that so um all those unless there's any other comments about that i'm just going to do like a little straw poll hand showing okay so yes to a meeting middle of october okay so dr atkins and i will work together to make that happen and useful and um and not onerous on them um so thank you for that uh and so uh for that i think we're gonna

250go to work session wrap up i think dr king is in charge of that yes ma'am um madam chair um i've noted an update on the equity training as well as a follow-up which i took as maybe an email follow-up on assessment types that we'll use and those are the only two that i captured okay um is there any anybody else have any thoughts about the about the wrap-up okay upcoming meetings interesting um so i know we'll probably have one in the middle of the month so keep your eye on your emails and then i don't um november 5th thank you so much leslie and then november 5th is our next um official board meeting and don't forget to vote and yeah so that's all i have for the upcoming meetings and any other comments

251or questions or thoughts okay i really appreciate all you all we're gonna go into closed session in a minute but um for the moment we're gonna stand adjourned if i hear no objections okay great so uh leslie just sent us an email about how to get into closed session so we'll go do we have to do the um do a motion yeah i'll display all that when we get in the other meeting okay you'll have to we'll log out of here and log into that one okay thank you so much okay we're gonna go there now see you soon you