001the meeting of the Alaway County School Board is hereby called to order today is Wednesday November 8th 2023 this meeting is being held at Westside Elementary School 800 West Main Street Smithfield Virginia Alaway County Schools is preparing students for college career and life the clerk will take the roll call Mrs tines Mr Cunningham present Mr wster present Mr Marsh here and Mr colck presid and next we have the approval of the agenda or amendments for the closed session Mr chair I move to approve approve the agenda for closed session as presented second we have a motion as second is there any discussion no discussion the clerk will take the vote and all y next we have the motion to go into close session Mr chair I move to go into Clos session to review the
002Personnel report posted on board docs under Personnel tab number 18.1 as authorized by Virginia code 2.2 A1 for purposes of discussion and consideration of prospective candidates of ala white public schools for employment contract changes transfers salary adjustments supplemental contracts deletions supplemental pay resignations of Alaway County Public Schools Employees second we have motion and second is there any discussion clerk will take the vote and everyone has voted in the affirmative uh Mrs Whitlow has anyone registered to speak in close session no sir okay the board will enter close session at this time [Music] for Miss Pam Panini is an instructional assistant at Westside Elementary School she where you okay U excuse me before we begin if anybody has inadvertently picked up the sign up sheet for speaking if you could please put it back in the
003back on the podium the meeting of the Ala White County school board is hereby reconvened in Open Session we'll have the certification of the resolution of compliance Mr chair I move the closed meeting was conducted in Conformity with the provisions of the Virginia Freedom of Information Act as required by section 2.2 3712 D of the code of Virginia and certify that only public business matters lawfully Exempted from open meeting requirements were discussed and only such public business matters as were identified in the motion by which the close meeting was convened were heard discussed or considered second we have a motion and second is there any discussion there is no discussion so clerk will take the vote and everyone agrees so next we will have a moment of silence followed by the Pledge of Allegiance excuse
004me I take that back we have the approval of the agenda or amendments for Open Session thank you Mr chair I move to approve the agenda for Open Session as presented second okay we have a motion and second is there any discussion heing none the clerk will take the vote and that passes unanimously now we will have a moment of silence followed by the Pledge of Allegiance everybody please rise and attention to the pledge I aliance to the flag of the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands one nation under God invisible with liberty and justice for all please take a seat thank you good evening everyone I want to welcome everybody to this evening's meeting but first I would like to congratulate uh those candidates who won their elections
005yesterday I know everyone involved worked very hard and now the citizens have spoken I'm sure that each of us will work hard to reflect the wishes of our districts as we work together on this board I look forward to working with each of you during the remaining years of my term and perhaps Beyond I would also like to thank my fellow veterans in attendance this evening for the service to this nation and to our community thank you and finally I'd like to wish my fellow Marines a happy 248th birthday if any Marine would like to celebrate with a few others please join us this Friday at 700 p.m. excuse me at 5:00 p.m. at Smithfield Station and some of you will notice that uh we had covers on the state of pledge of allegiance I'm
006wearing my ribbons tonight and this is all honor of Veterans Day so please remember the veterans and say thank you to them uh as you see them over the next couple days and of course the Marine Corps Birthday uh if you see a Marines please say happy birthday uh on Friday and now to start the meeting off Mrs Briggs will present the alawite achievers good evening the vision for Olive White County Schools is to create a learning environment that will enable every child to discover his or her unique gifts and talents the olive white achiever section of our board meeting gives us an opportunity to recognize and celebrate our students and staff for their unique talents and Gifts first from Windsor High School um we're going to be recognizing a special group and just let
007me introduce them by by giving this announcement Justin's the leading producer of yearbooks and student created content recently recognized Windsor High's yearbook with the jost's 2023 National yearbook program of Excellence award at the Gold level the national yearbook program of Excellence recognizes engaging yearbooks that reflect a broad representation of the student body while helping students develop 21st century skills such as communication collaboration and information and communication Technologies literacy The Windsor High School award-winning yearbook program is under the direction of Cassandra presson Windsor High School yearbook adviser Mr Preston has been the adviser since 2008 since then Windsor has won multiple vhsl Awards including three Trophy Class rankings which is the equivalent of the uh state championship and I'm also excited to say that they won one of those Trophy Class rankings this year as well
008for the yearbook last year um so at this time we'd like to recognize the current Dukes who were part of the yearbook Staff last year and those that are here would you please come forward when I call your name uh we're going to have you stand in front of the board down here on the floor facing the board Dr Coleman has a certificate and a pin for you when you come up we have Jasmine Lasser Jordan Baldwin Shelby Burton Aiden Cobb Daniela grabba wikii Cardis Robert gurin at the top Robert G open it up oh Robert G sorry about that Robert Emma Moore Natalie Moore Ree Mumford Giana Rich Joseph gray Savannah McMillan jadelyn Miller Destiny Robinson Destiny's here Fallon Sullivan and Miss Cassandra presson the sponsor see if that's Miss Preston's I think that
009might there we go and I think they have a special presentation for the board they're going to present this to miss Whitlow board clerk this is a copy of their award-winning yearbook that we will proudly display in the Schoolboard office directly behind Westside Elementary so we want to congratulate them thank you for coming tonight thanks for all your hard work and we're looking forward to a wonderful production publication this year uh we are going to have you guys come over here to the backdrop Mr ellot is going to take a photo and at this point yep any family members that would like to come up and take a photo as well this is the perfect opportunity to do that and while they're uh wrapping up the photos we'll move on to our next honores I
010have not thend any of those out so they're all in order okay the Packers golf team finished fifth in the bay Rivers District championship match and runner up in the Regional Championship match the second place Regional finish qualified the Packers golf team to play in the state championship this is the first time A Smith oh high golf team participated in the state championship match members of the 2023 Packer golf team are and if you would please come forward when I call your name sophomore James James Johnson James here yep here we oops Here Comes James Junior Jeremy Walker you come right down there just come there you go perfect and face them perfect Junior Corbin Ferrell senior Liam Wilson senior Don Cunningham senior Mason frell and Mason placed six in the Regional Championship and made
011the All Region team he is also captain of the team Junior Max nef Max was an individual medalist in the Regional Championship and we en encouraged him to wear his medal I think he has it yes there we go okay um so he uh he finished first among all golfers in the Regional Championship with a 71 and was the only athlete under par we also want to recognize their coach Larry mcke coach mcke if you'll come on up and before we take a group photo of them at the backdrop um my understanding is we may have some family members that want to take a group photo uh with them in front of the board so we're going to ask all of our golf team members if you will just turn completely around slide together I'm
012going to move out of the way and you guys would go to the backdrop and I think it's only appropriate if we invite uh one of our board members to come down for the photo Mr [Applause] Cunningham it's always special when parents are here to celebrate with their children I think it's uh an extra special event when one of those parents is sitting on the board that's recognizing these children so um so Mr please join in in the photo it's that would be appropriate Mr mcke please just do what I say it all works out well there we go nice medal we got the trophy very good that is a fine looking group here comes all the family this is pretty special so this is a first we we love to celebrate first I'll we
013get everybody all right congratulations on an outstanding season [Applause] okay we have another honory from smithall high school we have some royalty with us tonight Miss Sunshine Huggins appropriately named and she's just a ray of light so Miss Sunshine Huggins a senior at Smith ohigh and you can come on up Miss Huggins was recently crowned Miss juneth USA she is also the inaugural Miss juneth Virginia Queen and was crowned in Williamsburg on June June 19th 2023 in addition she also brought back trophies for Miss Congeniality Miss Black Wall Street and talent her platform her platform was music therapy um a self-taught harpist uh Sunshine captured the crowd with her tribute rendition of Alicia Keys If I Ain't Got You on her way to winning the talent portion of the event her goals are to study
014at norick State University and launch her own small business Sunshine's greatest ambition is to make her family and ancestors proud and I think we can safely say she's accomplished that already so we congratulate you sunshine thank you so much for being here tonight um I think we want to get a picture of her with the board behind her and then we'll get one over here and I'm gonna move out the way now we're going to move on to our seniors of the month the senior of the month program recognizes seniors who have made a significant contribution or outstanding achievement in either their school or Community the seniors of the month are recognized by the board and in addition the seniors will participate in an end-of-year banquet where they will honor an educator who has impacted
015their life seniors will also be awarded a $500 scholarship to the postsecondary school or program they will attend to further their Education First from Windsor High School the of the month from November is Kiera key [Applause] towns I want you to hear this Kiera could be considered the unofficial mayor of the castle that is so appropriate so appropriate she has the most Pleasant demeanor and can be found chatting with her peers and teachers alike while traversing the hallways when new students arrive at Windsor she's often the person asked to show them around and make them feel welcome she is an active member of the community participating in both athletic and academic extracurricular activities all while maintaining her high grade point average her leadership skills have been developed while serving as class president from freshman through
016junior year currently Student Government president and is co- captain of the girls varsity basketball team she is diplomatic when addressing her peers and convincing them to accomplish tasks set before the group Kier recently taught herself to crochet by watching YouTube videos throughout last year and thus far this year she can be found filling her time making hats purses scarves Etc that she willingly and happily donates to students Charities and fundraiser events and she was working on one back there before the meeting started just so she volunteers her time after school as a mentor for new boys basketball players teaching them skills tips and assets and practicing with them to help build their Court confidence and make them better players quote Kier demonstrates energy and determination with everything she does she works hard in all her
017classes whether they are honor dual enrollment or building a well-rounded mind you can catch her keeping notes creating School designs and extracurricular events organized on her tablet she helps others in times of need as well as Mentor students to participate in sgaa sports are just helping out others in the Windsor way whether she is volunteering her time with the football team jumping hurdles running the court creating artistic yarn projects are keeping us informed each morning she is a true Duke and we are proud of her and that comes from Mrs Davis math teacher K Kira plans on pursuing a degree in mechanical engineering at either North Carolina &t or Virginia Tech congratulations so much Cara We love you how you go over there I have to also say it wasn't in there but K was
018uh was and is a member of the superintendent student Advisory board so we got to know Kier quite well last year and she is the mayor of the castle I have to say that okay our senior of the month from Smithville High School is Seth Thomas I know he's here Seth is a member of the Boy Scouts and an active member in his church as a student in the governor School of Science and Technology he's enrolled in rigorous courses and mentors other students in the jlab program Seth is an extremely kind and patient young man he has a positive attitude and uhoh oh sorry he has a positive attitude um and an outstanding work ethic my apologies Seth has been named a semi-finalist in the 2024 National Merit Scholarship program the National Merit Scholarship corporation
019which conducts the program announced the names of more than 16,000 semi-finalist in the 69th annual National Merit Scholarship program these academically talented High School senior seniors have an opportunity to continue in the completion competition pardon me for some 7,140 National Merit Scholarships worth nearly $28 million that will be offered next spring over 1.3 million juniors in about 21,000 high schools entered the 2024 National Merit Scholarship program by taking the 2022 PSAT which serves as an initial screen of program entrance the Nationwide pool of semi-finalists representing less than 1% of us High School seniors incl includes the highest scoring entrance in each state quote Seth is a hard-working determined student he is highly intelligent with a calm attitude I am continually impressed by Seth Seth's enthusiastic attitude towards learning and that comes from school counselor Mrs
020Lana Booth Seth plans to attend Virginia Tech and major in chemical engineering congratulations Seth I'm very proud of you we'll have you we'll have you go over there and Mr Elliott will get a photo and if any family members want to take a photo as well or jump in the photo you're welcome to do that this Peach I don't know if I see um our next honory is from Westside Elementary and I I'm see if she's here is Miss Peach andini here no don't see Miss that's okay all right um Miss Panini is our nominee for the rise award the rise award stands for recognizing inspirational School Employees it was created in Congress in 2019 to honor classified School Employees such as clerical School nutrition Health pupil uh transportation and custodial staff who provide exemplary
021service to students and their communities Virginia invites School divisions to submit a nominee from which two state level winners will be selected to continue to the National level this year Al White County school selected Pam Panini as our rise Award nominee Miss Panini is an instructional assistant at Westside Elementary for the application I White County school submitted a video highlighting her outstanding service to the students and staff of Westside and we'd like to share that with you now here we go Miss Pam Panini is an instructional assistant at Westside Elementary School she currently works with grades four five and six she will do anything and everything to help teachers teach and to help students learn we know her as Queen Peach which is very fitting for her because she not only has an incredible sense
022of style and energy but she just carries herself with a demeanor that is in fact royalty she is phenomenal at what she does she loves the kids she is willing to always give her 100% she always goes the extra mile and does anything you ask her um and she's just our Peach she's a hoot to work with she's always laughing and we always have a good time together she just makes coming to Westside even more fun if I had a crazy idea rather than shutting it off and saying no it's a lot of work involved her immediate answer was well do you think it's going to help the kids her whole passion in life is to see these kids not only succeed but to do it in a memorable way that is positive Peach's students
023um always know that she's always there for them she's gets on the kids' level and always is willing to help them out with anything they need and it's always just that extra support for them if you need help she puts in effort and time to help you even if she can't get you right away she'll also plan to meet you later so just because she says I can't help you now she still puts in the effort to help you later she always wave at you and say hi hey Aiden how you doing doing whatever she say she probably the nicest teacher in the school she's like like like my grandma she treats me like she's so sweet and I trust her with everything she helps me with all my stuff and if I need work
024she'll help me that's why like she's my favorite teacher thank you for making our days here at Westside Elementary School even more fun even more enjoyable not only for what you did with the kids but also for inspiring the teachers to be better teachers you've taught us how to dream again and then you gave us the assistance that we needed to make sure that our crazy ideas reached the highest Heights so that they could be beneficial for the kids she's like very important to me and I'm so grateful that she's a teacher in Westside here and I'm so thankful she's kind caring and she always like she always has a smile on her face no matter what situation and that's why I love Miss [Laughter] Peach and we love Miss Peach too and we were
025very excited to uh have her as our nominee for the rise award um so congratulations Miss Peach from Westside yes ma'am I yes um so that's going to conclude our Achievers for tonight I do have two introductions I would like to make while I'm still up here um we have two administrators that we have not introduced you to yet our first if she's here is Miss Jamie barkdale is Miss barkdale behind me yay Miss barkdale thank [Applause] you um Miss barkdale was named assistant principal here at Westside Elementary in August however she was so busy hitting the ground running that we missed the opportunity to introduce her at a the subsequent board meeting Miss barkdale is a graduate of Regent University she has served as a a teacher interventionist and testing facilitator in both suffk
026and norfol public schools before joining Isa White County Schools so miss Barksdale little belated welcome but we are glad you're here with us thank [Applause] you also joining us is Miss Nelissa Vargas Perez Miss Vargas Perez was approved at October Schoolboard meeting as the Child Nutrition liaison there she is yep right behind me Miss Vargas perezz has extensive experience in this role which she previously held with Franklin City Schools I love White County Schools is lucky to have her knowledge and expertise in both Child Nutrition and finance of supporting our employees and students access to food and nutrition welcome to Al White County Schools very [Applause] good and that's going to conclude our introductions I'm going to stay here because I have the next one yes you do we have the special presentations we do
027um I love doing this one uh we have a celebration of veterans a short video These are veterans that are current employees in is of White County Schools many of whom are in this room tonight so uh we hope you will enjoy this short video and um enjoy looking back at their time when they were serving our country as we say before serving the students of is of White County [Music] Schools [Music] beautiful Heroes Pro in liberating [Music] stri who more than country l and mercy more than [Music] life [Music] America [Music] America make God th gold refine kill all success nobless and ever again Divine and you know when I was in school we used to singing something like this listen here [Music] oh spacious [Music] SK amber waves of GRA [Music] Purple [Music]
028Mountain [Music] majest theed PL but now wait a minute I'm talking about America sweet America you know God done shed his grace on the he Crown like yes he did [Music] Brotherhood from sea to shine sea you know I wish I had somebody to help me say this [Music] America I love you America you see my God he sh his on you to love him for he Crown good he told me he every brother SE to shine shine and SE oh Lord oh I thank you [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] Lord and if I could I know those are members of um alaw County Schools but for all the veterans here in attend tonight would you please stand so we can give you a proper Round of Applause whether you're an employee or not please
029stand if you're a veteran there we go thank y'all so [Applause] much thank you so much for your service and we wish you the happiest of veterans days and that's going to conclude my presentation thank you thank you Mrs Briggs next uh we will have ion instruction with Windsor High School good evening good evening thank you chair colleagu Dr Kramer and school board members we are engineering three class at Windsor high school we have been working on a project modifying a drone aircraft I'm Aiden MCH I'm Lauren ble I'm Gabe hman I'm Brandon Wiggins and that is our engineer instructor and project manager Mr Bush the the company has called things that in Cosmos was founded in 2001 for some background information they created land robots and also Aira robots such as drones they are
030always modifying new drones this company is constantly trying to modify and upgrade their products Mr Bush gave us a task of improving things in Cosmos 5 in1 robotic smart machines the Drone must bur drone must be improved without a decline in current capabilities to build our project we had to frame our out our criteria and constraints as a part of our criteria criteria we needed to improve at least one drone performance capability and it should maintain continuity with the stock drone parts that are added must fit with the current parts and it should not decline in any other performance capabilities for our constraints it must not decline in performance over 20% and it must be completed within 30 days and it should not cost more than $50 altogether for the additional parts in order to
031frame our project we needed to also determine our objectives and what we needed to deliver to our consumers for our objectiv we needed to improve the drum performance in at least one way and as possible reduce the production price as we add the desirable features for our deliverables we needed to deliver our design our prototype our data a presentation and the demonstration of our solution so we began our project with research and the first thing we did was get the Drone and build it from scratch which which is shown by Gabe and the picture on the left side after the Drone was built we collected data on the drone's performances after this we conducted a Time study to find velocity and acceleration in the vertical and horizontal directions which are shown on the pictures on
032the right this video is an example of us testing and we created graphs like the one shown with a drone of 50% and 100% capacity is it not going to work you good aside from the data we collected we also reverse engineer the Drone to see what other features could be improved We examined the app for flying and the camera we reviewed the charger and we reverse engineer the transmitter microprocessor and the battery and also examin the propeller once we got all our ideas we had to put it into a feasibility Matrix to find out which ones were possible among about half of them were not for example the battery life we wanted it to make the battery life longer is it only lasted for about 8 minutes but it's not really possible since it
033only takes one kind of battery and it would take too much time to find a different one that would have little effect on the Drone itself as for charge time we definitely want it to make it charge faster as it the charge time to the flight time was not a good number and the problem was we don't have the knowledge or the time to acquire said knowledge to figure out how to improve it and as for range our idea was to um increase the um antenna strength or receiver strength oh this is an earlier one oops anyway um but the problem was the receiver was in the camera and we'd have to take it apart and repairing the camera would have been like just trying to put it back together would have been a problem
034and another big part would be the Wi-Fi connection between the controller and the Drone and we cannot alter that in any way after we got our feas uh feasible options we had to put it into a decision Matrix to find the best op to find the best option without any major bias so first we had to put weight to each set of criteria which we found most important rated each um idea on a scale of 1 to 10 for each criteria and then multiplied the um the scale to the weight to find the number and based on this the best idea was the propeller and after we got that idea we had to put it into another decision Matrix to find out which propeller design would have been the um would have been the best
035one which would be the second one the first design is just a standard two bladed propeller each blade was about um 1 mm thick 5 mm wide from The Edge uh and 30 mm long and next one after taking after taking into account the our analysis of the first propeller and the research that we conducted to improve it we came up with our first design it was a four bladed propeller that was slightly longer and thicker than the original however we found a possible point of improvement when we found out that propellers that have four blades or more can um can create instability within the air this led us to our next design a three-bladed propeller again thicker and longer than the original and this is the design that we ended up choosing in the
036initial printing in the initial printing as seen in the top left corner I made a mistake in dimensioning and it was later fixed in the second printing as you can see in the rest of the pictures however the second printing didn't fit onto the motor due to the hole being slightly too small so we had to increase it and I fixed this within the third Printing and this is the third printing that we put on the Drone the next steps that we have to take is we have to repeat the initial test that we um originally did with the new propellers that we put on after we collect that data we need to compile it into a graph as we did with the previous data and determine if all the criteria is met we also
037need to update this presentation as needed when we collect the data any questions go for it I do have a question and I will Ex expose my ignorance when I ask I was browsing through your engineering notebook is that a standard book that Engineers use when they're doing this kind of stuff um yes sir so an engineering notebook is actually a legal document that requires you to sign it and another person to coign it and it actually acts as um copyright to your ideas so if you wanted to pursue a patent later on that would be your your Source yes sir that's pretty cool so is this your first group project um in this course engineering three this is our first project but in the other two engineering courses we've had a plethora what's your
038thoughts on the group project me um I really like the group projects because I think it sets up a great example for how Engineers really are in the um job space you're often times given people that you don't know you may not like and you have to work with them because it's your job you're preaching to the choir young man great job thank you anyone else well thank [Applause] you yeah so that was Windsor right Smithfield okay now we have I on instructor I on instruction from Smithfield High School it's all yours good evening chairman College school board members and Dr Kramer as members of the Smithfield High School B program we would like to share with you our journey of teaching music through mentoring my name is Cade Franklin and I'm a senior hello
039my name is Jasmine Johnson and I'm a senior hi I'm Haley Brazil and I'm a junior hi I'm Andrew rert and I'm a sophomore hi I'm Maya Tyler and I'm a junior unfortunately NAA cannot be here with us tonight our driving question for this project is how can a mentor grow a fine arcs program our program The Band program would like to improve and grow within the next decade we would like to compete at the 3A to 4A level within the next year we have come to you today to show you why this is a factor to Growing our Band program we began with identifying the mentees and we looked at the middle school students and the new band students some new students selected instruments and we went along with improving and refining their technique
040and the students that had not chosen an instrument we helped them choose what instrument would be best for them once I'm I minty has been identified we have to now meet Al minty and one common goal that was sprayed throughout all the band members was that we wanted Al mines the new high schoolers as well as the middle schoolers to feel welcome and open to our opportunity of working together and so the first meeting which just about excitement and getting to know a minty and asking them what their goals are for their own personal growth in music and when we first at our first meeting um I I was at that meeting and one thing that I said was the key to being a good Mentor is not to command but to guide only then
041can you help bring out your me me m treat potential and the reason I had said this was when we first walked into the middle school ban room I we realized that in order to effectively help the Min we had to put ourselves in the minty's shoes so we don't walk in just start commenting and say do this do that you're doing this wrong we don't do that you have to sit down with the minty we play along with them of what they're doing with their own band director and since we're in that position now we can adjust and see what our minty needs to work on and one personal situation that I was in was when we was playing one song and there was one I play trumpet and so one of the trumpet
042player they had played a note a certain way and the band had addressed it and they were a little confused and so I turned around and I EXP it to him and he was very grateful that I did when we prayed the song again he prayed it beautifully and so that's just one thing when it comes to meeting our M that we created that Bond so that they feel like they have a person that they can trust and to comfort them and to help encourage them to grow in our mentoring Journey we strive to create a strong bond with our mentees we recognize the importance of this connection not only for their musical development but for their personal growth and well-being as mentors one of our key roles is to assess our mentor's music knowledge
043this helps us understand where they are on their musical journey and allows us to tailor our help effectively and encourage them to reach their fullest potential of course with every program there's always going to be a few challenges when we first learned of the experience of the mentorship one thing we was expecting the Mente to have more musical skills but we soon realized that we had to deal with various school um skill sets for examp example there was some mentees that they could play their instrument well but they might not know how to read music and then some might know how to read music but not exactly how to play their instrument so our mentoring methods became diverse so we might have to group The mentees together and work on one specific thing or we
044have one on one individual work in the fourth ring as being high school we didn't have a limited amount of time to be able to work with our mty so one thing that we strive to do was to create that good bond that would go past the ban when you know past the stage and that someone that they can trust as well as still being able to work on their music so they can approve their musicality it is important to be a mentor because we want our mentees to continue with music in the short term we wanted them to play rhythms and notes but the long-term goal is just building a lifelong bond with music and having a mentor beside you teaching you growing with you helps you with that as a mentor I have
045learned how to give constructive feedback and how to best evaluate my mentee to help them improve into Excel on their instrument I have as a mentor I have learned how no pressure buddy relax relax just relax music through mentoring has the potential to create a Rippling effect of positivity and growth we can use this potential to grow our Band program to help us get to that 3A to 4A level we would like to do this within the next year to make our band well known over the state one of the things I learned as a mentor that it helped me develop my leadership into personal skills as a leader I had to learn to make my M feel comfortable in the band environment and provide a friendly face for them to confide to confide in
046furthermore as one of our goals is to become a 3A 4A status motivational skills are also important to retain our new members thank you for letting us speak about our adventures of learning music through mentoring we are now taking questions well thank you um I I think we learned a lot uh just from listening to you you know how how you're mentoring other students and it sounds like each other and some of these younger students are mentoring you in your leadership skills so very good do anybody have any any questions we're a bunch of old old old cers up here and given the nature of our professions I know that we've all had some different version of a mentor program we've either been mentees or been mentors uh personally I think that a mentor can
047probably learn as much as a mentee so my question to you you in no particular order is is there anything that was surprising to you that you learned about yourself when you were going through this process thought-provoking question well I have to say that I learned various things and just to put them all together um I think one important thing that I learned was having to be a mentor you have to exhibit confidence so your mentee doesn't feel nervous you have to be that stronghold for them and so being a mentor has helped me to build my own personal confidence and not only that it has helped me to become someone that's to help me to become someone that someone can depend on as well and I think another thing has also helped me with
048my social skills because when it comes to the mentees it's someone that I don't know and they don't know me and with me being the mentor I have to take that initiative and introducing myself and creating that you know friendly Icebreaker so they can get to know me and that I can help create that Bond and I'm helping myself to be able to create bonds with other people in the future because now my social skills are being developed more okay I have learned the virtue of [Laughter] patience I I have a a younger middle schooler that is under me that I have been mentoring to teach him how to play the trombone and he's a little bit of a slower learner he he doesn't he doesn't come from the best background I I've tried to
049develop a connection with him to grow my friendship in order to help him and to teach him so he he has helped me to learn patience very good I also think with patience comes trying to build a connection I mean it's not I'm the leader you're the follower it's yes I'm mentoring you in this aspect it's it's you can teach way better when you're a friend with that person when you're on the same level so I think connecting you know making a friendship you know having a good connection really helps with teaching and communicating and having fun because it should be fun okay so I know Kate and Jasmine I've known yall since you were small and now both both of you are taller than me but anyway uh how many I know the two
050of y'all are seniors but uh there three I don't know if y'all are what what what are y'all juniors seniors or what I'm a junior junior I'm a sophomore okay okay great great so sophomores and juniors you've got a big job because uh I know Mr Fain is building the band and the seniors I know you're going to help as much as possible but you've got about seven months something like that and you're going to graduate so the junior classman you've got a big job because Mr Fain is an incredible band teacher and he's expecting a lot out of each of you and I'm expecting a lot out of each of you I played in the band when I was in high school so I know it's difficult but it really builds you it helps
051you with leadership uh I mean it's just everything that the band made me what I what I became to go to college to go the military and things after that I I've always remember my time in the M marching band so I'm looking for big things out of all of you uh Jasmine and Cave what schools are y'all going to oh do you want to go to put it that way yes I do want to go to college right now I'm looking towards the minion and William Mary okay okay I'm planning kind of hoping to attend the University of South Carolina Honors College great great great uh any plans uh I mean you should start planning as a sophomore on what you're going to do after high school I I mean my parents told me
052I was going to college you don't have a choice so I like to see everybody I I know college is not for everyone but I like seeing people plan on you know have a plan and work the plan that's going to help you in life so I don't have any other questions do you have any questions of us all right thank you outstanding all right thank you thank [Applause] you yes you got it okay next next we have the requests to speak um before we begin in um with citizen comments we just wanted to make everyone aware of a new system we have to better help speakers and audience members um the device here and up on the wall um where they're getting their pictures taken um that is going to be for um to
053help the audience and the speakers to track their time for comments um they do have a timer um on them um the one at the podium and the one up here once it reached reaches your 3 minute Mark is going to turn yellow and once your 4 minutes is completely up it will turn red and there will be um a beeping sound that you will hear um that's just to indicate that your four minutes is up um I will also still be giving the um one minute left warning so in ordance to policy BD dh- presentation of information on any subject will be concluded at the discretion of the board no person will be recognized to speak more than once citizens schedule on the agenda to speak will be permitted four minutes maximum time for
054their presentation delegations will be requested to limit their speakers to two persons speaking are asked to be specific State the issues for the board's consideration and attach a copy of your prepared remarks if you have prepared remarks they should be given to the board clerk please do not approach the board members any matter relating to specific students will be heard by the school board only in a closed meeting first we have Mr herb de thanks Eric Mr chairman board members congratulations to Mark and to Jason for the re for the reelection and uh I guess Denise now was going to have time to get that golf lesson in from her coach Dr Thornton that she mentioned earlier this year one thing for sure we're looking forward to Brandy Perkins coming on the board and serving
055the interest of this mthi constituents because uh Denise had a little problem serving other than past superintendence by giving them $180,000 combined payouts in violation of policy wow number one the 2% compensation adjustment via email I sent to CFO Harris asked several questions about the raise but didn't get an answer question is this raise only for S soq funded positions does the Board of Supervisors have to come up with a logal match of 1% for these s soq funded positions does the board have to cover the entire 2% raise for the other staff that are not s soq funded positions and how much money will the Board of Supervisors have to come up with for this year I vote no rais for highly compensated already overpaid central office staff that you're looking at some over
056there and will Dr Kramer show up at the Board of Supervisors meeting when they have to vote on this secondly the monthly financial report showed a negative balance of $458,000 um and Miss Harris the public really needs an answer tonight why there's almost a half a million dollar shortfall or spending overage deficit for this month of December I know that Miss get and Dr Coleman they have to process things before it gets to the superintendent to head off any problems but hey um we don't need a repeat of the fiscal year 23 debacle thirdly the uh October 23rd board minutes documented a sing decline in enrollment since 2019 drop of 43 students since last year and the September report says we have 5438 in 2015 there was 5580 students 142 more than now gee back
057in 2000 we had 4,970 so we really haven't gone up that much over 23 years so we don't need any smoking mirrors when it comes to projections because the census figures show that the birth rate is down that affects ala White County like anybody else the central office administration building certainly is isn't needing to be moved because according to Dr mcferson the current one was good until 2034 30 years students are supposed to come first so why haven't the tracks been repaired that Mr marish noted at both the high schools and we know that the shs band room needs to be enlarged has been needed to be enlarged for 5 years in any case uh the nice chart that we got presented with tonight is color CED and it shows some interesting things uh there's
058going to be a communal central office restroom for men and women but there's going to be six Royal Throne restrooms for the executive team what's going on they've already flushed enough of the taxpayers money down the tube we don't need private bathrooms board don't give them private bathrooms they can use the commun one like everybody else because the executives and ordinary folks all flush the same way we really sorely need that $660,000 for a remediation teacher to help with all those people that are behind their grade level and competency lastly the Education Foundation raises money I saw a couple of board members there and Miss Briggs where were all the other highly paid people and you Mr Cunningham and Miss tits support this group it's called leadership the Marine Corps taught us all that right
059Michael thank you all very much and tomorrow 9:00 here for the veterans program thank you Stephanie Russell good evening Mr chairman and board member um I have a 5-year-old that attends Carolton elementary school and I'm here to talk to you about the transportation issues that we have had since the beginning of this school year I'm over it I'm over um we have only had the first two weeks of school is the only time the bus has arrived and dropped this my child off on time okay um the bus consistently does not arrive in the afternoon until 5:15 or 5:30 we have also had mornings where the bus has never shown up for the take the child to school at all the drivers are telling the students and the parents things like I have another job
060I get there when I can and um this is just the way it is we don't have enough buses okay no child especially a 5-year-old should be at school for over 10 hours a day I'm pretty sure you were all parents at one time I was I was a parent too this is my grandchild an angry grandma is worse than an angry mom I can tell you that right now after speaking um with Transportation about 2 weeks ago I was informed that 50% of the bless bus fleet is either down and in need of repairs or is unable to be repaired I was also told there is no funding to fix the buses we have mechanics but they don't have any parts to fix the buses the ones that can be fixed Transportation has to
061take all these angry calls from all of us and I was one of them and it's sad because their hands are tied because of the Mand handling of funds and resources why do we have mechanics if we don't have the parts to fix the buses I understand that um the school board members made a mistake last year with the 5% raises that they did not receive the state funding and now we are in this huge deficit that the gentleman before me talked about because of this um our students are suffering but in the end our students come first and at what point do the school board members M and quality control with the school board come out and take care of this we need to put a temporary fix in place immediately and then you
062need to place a another plan in place to get these buses bought what happens to the children have who have no other transportation to get to school no other Transportation they're a one vehicle family so those kids don't get to go to school they don't get to go to school it's pure mismanagement tonight we've heard heard about all these student Achievers in Alla white schools Caron elementary students deserve the same chance to be Achievers but first we need to ensure they get to school and that's not happening at all tonight I challenge the school board to come up with an immediate Sol solution and develop a plan to obtain new buses for our children thank you all for your time and commitment to our children in the elected positions that you have been given thank
063you any questions for me Mr vby boyin well I'm very happy to be here tonight good evening board VY boyin Walter's Highway District 5 at recent meetings I've listened to Renee da tell you something to the effect of just waiting till the election and Mr wer and Mr Marsh wouldn't be on the board anymore I don't see Renee dial here tonight I wonder why I'd like to say I'm very glad she was totally wrong as she has been on most things and I congratulate you both sincerely on starting your new four-year terms in January after Sly defeating your opponents in the election yesterday but it's the parents and children of this County who won yesterday's election they made the decision on what type of education they wanted the children of this County to have they
064do not want Marxism and socialism CRT or Dei and other damaging subjects taught in schools they do not want boys and girls locker rooms and bathrooms of playing girl Sports they do not want teachers indoctrinating their children with their personal beliefs they do not want the children they do want the children educated in subjects that will help them in the future they do want the right to teach their social beliefs to their children uh miss school board elect Brandy Perkins couldn't be here tonight but congratulations to her on her soundly defeating Miss times in the election and I can't wait to see Miss Perkins on the board to miss times who's not present not surprising to me thank you for your service but I can confidently say that many are not sad to see you
065go at all it took about two and a half years and three elections along with lots of efforts by many many people but we can finally rest assured that the children of this County will receive the the education they deserve at least for the next four years under your leadership and Dr Kramer who I have a lot of respect for and think he does a good job and I thank you congratulations and it's a job uh well done on your elections all the work time money you put in to get those positions um they're volunteer you get a few dollars but nothing close to what I know you put into it thank you Mr Lewis Edmonds good evening um I leave for a couple months youall change the whole setup here so uh uh Lewis
066Edmonds uh Windsor fourth district I'm going to bounce around a little bit because uh I missed the opportunity on a couple things but um first I want to thank the uh central office staff for uh I feel like we finally are getting some honest work and explaining what the impact to uh additional developments throughout the county are so previously I've watched we'll just say oh you know the study that the developer funded said that it really is not going to have an impact and we agree it's going to have an impact so I'm glad to see that there's actually some work being done and some thoughtful answers are being given not only to the capital expenses but the operating expenses uh hopefully that will result in better decision making by the Board of Supervisors going
067forward on that uh Second uh the new central office uh I don't it seems like that maybe it fell off the agenda or maybe I'll change what you're going to talk about tonight I I do have a lot of questions about the $700,000 that seems to have been spent towards Hardy and and not central office but was part of the Grant I hope that that can all get worked out um also I think we're a little deep in this project to turnaround now um I'll give her some credit maybe we don't need six individual bathrooms I'll let youall figure that piece out but uh in general uh I think we should keep forward with that uh on the 2022 2023 budget uh I I'm going to ask for a moral Victory here so please please
068go back to the final approved budget and please change the version it still says proposed budget on it it's embarrassing I think that's a pretty easy one to fix uh I do have one question you know I've I've looked at this a lot frankly I'm still very confused on it there's one item that I can't really figure out and I don't know why uh in the superintendent's proposed budget on 21 February under uh Transportation uh it was 4, 382,000 700 or $374 when uh Mrs Harris gave her presentation in September she used very careful words and she said that 3,481 673 were put into the financial system for the the transportation fund that's about a $900,000 difference that $900,000 kind of keeps floating around uh I would like some better explanation than what we've got
069on why there's a Delta there so because at leasts up till February AR you know in the budget that was presented it said that that uh it was over 4 million put in there um and then quickly I want to address uh Dr Thorton's letter um to the times back in September and this idea of inviting him to come do some you know audit or whatever I would equate that to inviting the arsonist uh to come back and do the fire investigation I don't think it's a very good idea uh you know Dr Thorton is the primary root cause of this because Dr Thorton is the one that abandoned the county he's the one that Twisted the board's arm to make sure that there wasn't a 30-day public review of his contract change on the
070way out the door uh M or uh Mr Lombardo leaves Dr Thorton leaves kepus is pushed out and then uh Dr Coleman is thrown in the fire the you know two people above him were taken out his cfo's taken out and shockingly we had a mess it in suit afterwards so uh you know and his accusations and criminal investigations for Dr Kramer absolutely obnoxious uh you know I think he protested a little too much so that's kind of interesting and I think he thinks that we're going to forget that he got up here and also got in front of the Board of Supervisors had Mrs Briggs sending out letters when the Board of Supervisors wanted to withhold a couple of uh funds and lied to the public about what the impact would be in having
071to fire teachers so so thank you for your time that's it Sher colleag thank you okay next we'll have the reports from the student of the aison Samantha um so we've had a very exciting couple of weeks with sports um two of our teams are going to the state championships so volleyball they're going and our theater bhsl team is also going um last Friday we had a big win for the football team they beat tab so that was very exciting to see and then just a congratulations to the golf team who have done extremely well the entire time I've been in Smithfield High School right thank you Connor yes Windsor has also had a very successful month um our volleyball team was District Champions um our vhsl theater f Festival team is going to Charlottesville
072because we are going to States um we hosted the super regionals sat last Saturday at Windsor um won first place in that next up our beta um our leaders went to a leadership conference at greatwolf lodge in Williamsburg for two days where we got plaques for both of the categories that we competed in and now we are able to go to Nationals in SA Georgia um also our beta is having a dodgeball tournament for fundraiser anybody welcome to come it is November 16th we're GNA have fun um looking forward to see y'all there thank y'all all thank you both and you're both welcome to stay for the duration of the meeting or you can leave whenever you want but do want to say again thank you for what you do here for your schools and
073have a nice Veterans Day weekend and a great Thanksgiving okay can please Samantha Connor Connor as I told you I met your dad the other day at the food line um had a good talk about you um I've spoke with Dr Kramer in the past about you young folks sitting up here every month um as you can tell not everything is all hunky dory all the time so my ask and I don't need an answer today but just put some thought in it between now and next month is in addition to your reports which are generally positive if you can think of anything it's a head H herder something that needs to be addressed and I know that you Lea is with Dr crra are so probably appropriate to bounce that through him get some
074guidance on what you throw out here but um if there's anything that you'd like to bring to the board's attention you have the floor once a month so I would' like to hear not just the good but the bad so and I'll let that rest and I yield all right thank you and next we will go on to the presentations by the superintendent staff and uh next is the transportation presentation Mr fik and Mr Sullivan good evening board members Dr Kramer um I was told that this presentation could be no longer than five minutes so U I need to hurry up and get started before they cut my microphone off um got a lot of information to talk about um but before we dive in I I do want to mention one thing um this
075information is not going to be new to the board um the board has heard this before uh which is why I am going to go kind of fast um our troubles are well documented um as we've heard um so kudos to the board thank you guys for allowing us to come and give this presentation uh so this is ultimately something that we know we have your support so we're kind of reaching out to the public and reaching out to the policy makers within the county so our current challenges like I said I'm not going to necessarily get into them uh one by one but uh what it really comes down to is one word resources all right so you can see our current challenges uh those are ranked in order number one is our greatest
076Challenge number two is not far behind and then number three now most other school divisions you're going to look at something like this and the Staffing shortages is going to be number one straight up um so it's a little bit different here in iow White County you can see right there um our number one issue is vehicle shortages there are many times this year and even before where we have zero spare buses available zero spare buses um I know when I took this position you know I kind of had an image of the bus yard in my mind I'm going to show up to my office and there's going to be like 15 spare buses parked back there and if one breaks down yeah go here the keys go get another one or whatever that's
077not how it is uh we do have some that are broken down we'll talk about that in a little bit but um our Fleet is very old number two so um it's a it's a misconception among the public the schools parents um even a bus driver on the radio a couple weeks ago the bus broke down so the question over the radio was are we going to set us Fair bus uh my routing technician and I we kind of looked at each other in the office and we knew we had no buses to send uh ultimately they got it running but what would have happened is we would have had to taken a bus that had finished its load and then send it there to pick up the kids to to get the rest of
078those kids home in the afternoon um and definitely the one more point I'll make with this uh Staffing shortage is we are hiring folks I interviewed somebody uh on Monday um brought actually four members into our department this year we're working on our fourth one if we had the assets the buses to put them in we could be way more aggressive uh so ultimately like we have to kind of balance it you know you can't hire all these people and then not have anything for them to drive so so that's kind of where we are um Mr fake yes can you just head back to the last one real quick here I just wanted to um to reiterate and highlight something Mr Fike has brought up and that is the fact that Staffing shortages are
079at number three here on the list that is an outlier if you ask other areas in the in the state across the country number one is Staffing shortages still it's a testament to the work the board has done our human resources department has done the transportation department has done we're in a relatively good place when it comes to Staffing knock on wood so that's a huge Testament it's a huge win to us but part of retaining those drivers is going to tie back to numbers one and two we've got to have quality buses on the road working if we want to keep up the hard work that this board has supported us in doing and kind of to substantiate that um we have had days this year where we have Subs that are available they're
080willing to work for us we did not have a bus to put them in so so they they could not work that day that that's that's how hard up we were in some occasions um once again just uh I know some statistics up here so the age of our Fleet so the first bullet you can see 44% nearly half of our fet was manufactured in 2010 or before so in a moment we're going to see the uh the Virginia Department of education guidelines but we are riding buses way past their service life um almost like I said half of our Fleet is uh from 2010 or before we have a whole class of 2007 2008 buses 2009 buses these buses should have been auctioned off years ago or they should be emergency spares we rely
081on them every day um and then like I said the the the lack of buses there essentially uh is the big thing and and the big takeaway and uh we've heard about this like I said it's well documented kids getting home late from school due to double backs so if we don't have a bus or we don't have a driver or something like that the kids at Carolton and any other Elementary School have to sit there sometimes till 4:45 so it is true there are some days the kids are not getting off the bus till 5:30 or after um unfortunately we don't like that my my son attends school in this County as well and that's not good enough we have to do better because what it comes down to is you know what's best
082for our kids and certainly to the instruction time that miss the Havoc that this reeks um it's it's on a big time scale and Mr fik if I could just add one more thing here and then I know we're going to get into some of the the Gory details but I I want to just make sure to highlight to the board the Domino impact because us three up here we think about this from an operational standpoint we think about this in terms of the buses but the Ripple impact is significant kiddo staying late that's one getting to school late we heard from a Community member here tonight and she's not the only one there is a direct instructional impact these children are getting late to school they're losing quality instruction time that's an impact direct
083to instruction goes well beyond operations there's also an impact to staff Mr Fike knows from working in a school and so do why when those buses run late staff has to cover and monitor those students that's planning that a staff member should be doing that's something else that staff member should be doing they're not able to do that that's an impact directly on the morale of our staff so this goes well beyond just the buses and their capabilities it is a domino impact that touches every Department within this District so real quick if you look here at the screen there's several photos so this is a bus we rely on every morning this school year this is a 2005 bus and I'll show you a couple other photographs too like I said earlier this should
084have probably been loction off long ago or it should be like a super duper emergency spare uh this thing is really good to us it cuts on every morning no matter what the temperature is um like I said we are we're actually Lucky in some aspects because we have equipment like this that's getting ready to turn 20 literally it's it's going on 19 years old here in a couple weeks and we rely on it heavily and and they come through for us but there are sometimes when they don't uh there it is from the side um the odometer there 311,000 miles and this is actually one of our last this was one of the last years they actually made the manual door if you can remember back when you were a kid and and the
085driver would get on the uh you know you get on the bus the driver would actually use their arm to swing the door the the buses nowadays have a button but this just kind of illustrates how old it is uh I'm going to turn over to Mr Sullivan real quick talk about the vdoe guidance so this is something that's been brought up in the past um I uh talk often with Troy Myers he's my um uh vdoe representative on the transportation side so the guidance that they provide is 15 years of age or 300,000 miles and one of the main reasons for that is most of these buses uh the dashes are now plastic when they hit 15 years as soon as you start taking them apart they fall apart uh we have a lot
086of buses that have what's referred to as an AMU module underneath they're completely plastic when they start failing it's very difficult to find parts for um so these buses especially the c2s all the newer buses 07 08 09 uh when they're falling apart sometimes parts are not available anymore and uh we spend a lot of time putting things together that probably shouldn't be put together anymore um 16 so 25% of our buses exceed this recommendation and 9% of the buses exceed this recommendation with this within this year they will so as you can see that's a very high number of our buses that are outside this guidance all right so like moving forward looking at our game plan what can we do uh what can we do to start the uh the ball in motion
087tonight um so we're looking kind of back over the last couple years so it's been recommended before I came to this position that um due to our bus cycle we should actually be purchasing say five to six new buses a year a year so we're talking like five conventional buses and one special education bus uh so that's kind of the plan that's in place based on the size of our Fleet based on the size of our County and all those components uh so we should be getting five to six buses a year and then if you look at the middle bullet there since 2020 we've added six buses okay so in other words we're really far behind and that's absolutely comp comp compounding this problem um like I said earlier I know you guys have
088heard this before you heard it back in the spring uh you heard it back in January 2023 I believe it was um it's getting worse and not a whole lot has really been accomplished with it so uh once again we know we have your support but we're we're just kind of we're crying out I guess um and then once again like our immediate needs um maintenance costs essentially you know you have these old buses uh they cost more money on average per unit to maintain uh those buses so we do have some broken down buses uh we are pulling some funding from different areas and we're actually going to try to get those buses fixed we need every single bus on our lot like I said a little bit ago with the no spares we
089need every bus we need to get it operational we need to get it fixed and that's actually something that is currently in the works right now and then our future needs so we're talking next school year um and before I fully dive into this I need to give you the disclaimer um this is all the more reason why this situation is urgent when you order a new school bus it does not arrive on your lot for 10 to 12 months all right so like it's a misconception that uh like Sunny marman they manufacture the Thomas buses or Bluebird up in Petersburg it's a misconception that they have dozens of buses sitting around the lot and that you just go pick the one you want and then you take it home with you that's not how
090it is they actually build it they customize it you get to pick the features you want on it all that sort of things so like I said with our current troubles right now where we are we really got to put a plan in place um and our numbers and I can explain where this number comes from in a moment next school year we need 12 new buses minimum all right 12 new buses where did that number come from that number comes from the buses that are from 2004 2005 20072 2008 we have 12 buses we need to get those buses there needs to be a plan to get them off the road and we need to replace them ultimately um and you can see there the breakdown nine conventional that would be nine big buses
091and then three special education buses and you can see the price tag right there as well um certainly there there are some some options there with Leasing and so forth but um and I do want to emphasize something too this is in my presentation but th this is wave one all right this is wave one there's another wave that we're going to have to come up with in the next one to two years because we have once again about 11 buses that are from 2009 and 2010 you know they're getting ready to turn 14 to 15% pretty soon as well so like once we get this done these 12 new buses once they roll in we're not done we have more work to do and it's going to take a little bit of time to
092get caught up and we really um you know we had these meetings up at central office we really have to be unified um and come up with a clear solution and like I said we we appreciate your support and we know that we have your support but uh the time has come uh somebody said last week about the Ken being kicked down the road for years we are at the end of the road right now this this is the time we're going to have some big big problems if uh this sort of thing does not happen and um before we take questions from the board I do want to make sure that that we're clear that um Mr Fike Mr Sullivan Dr Coleman and I we did have recent meetings on this very topic specifically
093the nature of our current Fleet those buses that are currently in need of repair because ultimately as Mr Fike said if we purchase these buses today we still got a problem for the next 12 months and we recognize the urgency so we did as a team identify uh funds within our operational budg budget to get those buses fixed and get them back on the road and that's happening as we speak our mechanics are um getting the parts working on them some are being outsourced depending on the nature of the repairs but we do have a plan in place and it has been implemented the wheels are turning pardon the pun to get those uh buses fixed and back on the road that's one issue we know the purchasing of the new buses is a separate
094relateded issue but just so the board knows we are taking uh urgent action on those buses now to get them back and working on the road go ahead start gentlemen thank you um for the listening audience and and Mr wster Mr Cunningham and and I with Mrs tin was here so last week Thursday we already had this conversation so for the folks watching and listening a lot of these questions have already been fielded so there shouldn't be any surprises there might be one or two I throw at you and catch you off guard um based on the current student population and the number of routes we have what's the number of buses that constitute a full Fleet so right now on a regular school day today or tomorrow um I did the math we have
09543 I'm going to say is give or take one or two if I miscounted 43 general education routes um that's high school and Elementary School and 11 uh special education routes so the total would be 54 is thank you and of those 54 buses today how many are on the road would say about 53 to be honest um we are down several sped buses so we have 43 regular buses in 11 bed that's 54 total but we have 53 on the road so we only have one down no we have we have 65 buses total sorry I thought you were asking about the routes of the total buses we own we do we do have some spares build into our Fleet but they're utilized whenever you know buses break down uh long term and so
096forth okay so we're running on spares we are absolutely of the 11 that are down today what's the plan cuz I want to address some of the questions that Mrs Russell brought up is and not coincidentally we had the same conversation last week so of the ones that are down what's the plan today to get them on the road yeah so some sorry yeah some of them have been down since before I took this position so currently what do we have three of them two of them are at Bluebird one of them is over in Hampton Newport News so some of them are not work that we're doing some of them are away currently uh some of them are on our lot we're working on getting them up we're working on ordering the parts getting
097getting the part parts installed um couple of them how many buses need engines three right now we have three buses that need engines yeah and we have a plan in place for every one of those yeah okay rough cost I think on the side was $68,000 yeah mid-60s so roughly mid $60,000 we're going to have those 11 buses back on the road for arguably a full Fleet yes which consists of some old buses yes okay um historically and this is I don't see Dr Coleman that he stepped out historically how did ala White County Schools fund bus purchases sorry doc colan I'm I'm shotgunning you here but I know you know and your history is only how many years old six years it's only goes like six years um historically what we did was the
098uh eser funds helped us tremendously before then it was LE leasing okay it was leasing funds now if you ask me the exact years of what we leased in we can look it up but it was leasing lease vehicles of five vehicles per year and um I think uh once the breakdown occurred and that was years ago when we took the same issue to the board supervisors I think we talked then um it was uh the leasing option was 80,000 more than the actual uh buy out option and that's when I guess the conversation still made it at that time and we had this Con ation January February this year what was the plan then the plan then was the presentation from the board from this board go to the Board of Supervisors and request
099that we start funding the five to six buses per year and that was the plan so um that plan was never funded it was told to everyone and it was explained but it was never funded I think at the time we were requested to bring a plan to the Board of Supervisors and that's where that actually came from and was that was that applied to the the capital Improvement plan or the operational budget what was the intent the intent was to apply to the operational budget for every single year from then on June 1 five to six buses will be ordered and that did not happen that did not happen so this board did not approve that didn't happen we we cut it bottom line all I'm trying to say is we kicked the can
100down the road okay yes that's what I'm trying to make my point down the road um when was the last time we bought a bus um and the spring I don't know the exact date I think it was about April uh we did order two buses um they have not yet come they should be here in February hopefully how do we fund those um so I've been told that was coid money okay Esser fund money was fund okay um if a bus is auctioned off because it doesn't meet fdoe requirements what happens to those buses someone buys them what do they do with them you got kind of a loaded question I'm sure you there's a lot to it um in this area the primary vendor that's purchasing them is the shipyard they use them
101for transporting uh people from parking locations but we do have um some smaller outside vendors and our public auction is also open to anyone uh we've had people travel all the way from Texas to buy our equipment so it is open to absolutely everybody but uh the shipyard has been our biggest uh customer for those okay I'm going to stop for now and let some of the other board members ask questions I got more but I yield Mr wer okay I've got several more for you as well since uh roughly about the last week in October just so you're aware I've been Fielding emails and phone calls uh from parents grandparents pertaining to buses being laid just as you had just described myself I have actually witnessed buses um at 813 picking up the children
102when the first Bell is 725 or 728 so obviously you've got lateer rals and I forget which one of you gentlemen mentioned it um the instructional classroom time that's missing why am I getting feedback it's close too close to close all right can you hear me better now there's still feedback um so anyway we've already established late arrival we've already established instructional time lost um parents you know they've got jobs they've got schedules activities family time everything is being disrupted by this now my question is for you um you mentioned a staff shortage can you be more specific on that is that bus drivers is it substitutes is it mechanics what are we looking at as far as staff shortages so so we have lost a couple uh full-time contracted drivers this year um like
103I said we are working to replace them we brought some new individuals in uh one of them has a DMV test pending um another one we're we're getting ready to uh bring them aboard as well um so so yeah so it has been staff shortages um so I guess the best way to explain it we have a a pretty good I I would say a pretty healthy pool of substitutes we really do that they might not be available to us every single day um you know because even if they're a substitute you know they might have another job that sometimes pulls them away uh they might go away for a couple of days or something like that so um you know even if we do have like two or three reliable Subs we can work
104them often um there are many well I don't know if i' use the word many there are some days where we have more than two or three call outs I guess is the best way to explain it um and you know with the numbers alone certainly you can't cover all that uh we do our absolute best to combine routes uh there's the one Carolton route where we put two routes on the same bus we've been doing that often because that eliminates the need for a double back um so yeah that there are like I said make no mistake we do have Staffing challenges um and certainly we're still looking to recruit and hire the best that we can um but you know combine the staff shortages with the um the vehicle shortage we have it's
105it's a tough recipe how many days per month if you can give me an just an estimate how many days per month are you winding up being short drivers which is resulting in either buses not being driven at all or arriving late um so you're talking about days in which our drivers that are out surpasses the subs we have available is that correct um pretty much I mean the buses I've been referring to uh bus 6 bus 9 bus 10 and bus 26 that's right um all of which are in the Carolton area the Eagle Harbor Smith neck area um I'm trying to get to the root cause of us yeah yeah you know if you're having drivers that are repeatedly calling out um resulting in delays maybe we should get more drivers or replace
106the ones that are continually calling out that that would help absolutely absolutely so there's probably I'd say between five and eight days out of the month where uh we might not have enough Subs to fit our needs um at this point in the year I mean the newness of the school year is worn off and uh I guess let's just say it for what it is data shows us that our call out rates are usually a little bit higher on Monday usually a little bit higher on Friday so those not saying we don't have folks call out Tuesday through Thursday but statistically speaking um it's a little higher on those days okay um the other question I've got is when you're looking at breakdowns and I get it the older a vehicle gets the more
107breakdowns you have you end up being nickel and dime to death whether it's a a school bus or a passenger vehicle um what would you say the main issues you're currently having is it and we're talking about replace engine Replacements um would you say it's more engine related or is it body related engine related mostly um we've had a lot of issues with turbochargers u we've had a lot of issues with uh variably variable geometry turbo actuators uh and we're having a lot of issues with the uh the 6.8 propane engines uh and that's that's probably the most costly things we have right now okay you also mentioned that it's very difficult to get parts for some of the buses yes it is if you look at the entire fleet what percentage of the fleet
108would you say is difficult or almost impossible to get parts currently we're probably having we're probably having the most issues with our 2017 uh buses uh I'd say a little bit more reliability and as far as the parts chain for Freight larer uh than the bluebird side um but yeah it would probably be the 2017s uh the 2017s those body parts are very easy to find it's the small electronic parts and it's the small plastic parts that are very difficult to get your hands on okay um now would you attribute that basically to a Manufacturing problem they're just not manufacturing it they're just outdated they've replaced it with various parts well on some of those older buses I mean it's it's a school bus part it's it's made just for school buses and we're probably
109one of the few counties that are still operating the 07s um if we were a uh you know a church group or something like that they might find a different way to modify that vehicle so it would operate but unfortunately the uh restrictions that we're under we have to put that bus back exactly the way it has to be uh so we have to use manufacturer Parts in a lot of situations okay um also and I'm not trying to take up everybody's time but um and I don't know who this would be directed to which one of you gentlemen but as far as let's say a bus breaks down the bus is replaced by a different bus number how is Parental notification of bus changes made so parents are aware of what bus their child
110is getting on or what bus is picking them up yeah I'll speak to that when that's my department uh so essentially we have a process I'll kind of summarize it for you uh so in the morning our department um our router Miss Robinson gets there very early she gets there at 5:00 a.m. so essentially we get the call outs we get the buses that you described in the scenario the bus broke down so they're going to be on a sub bus today all that information is communicated with families through connect 5 uh they get the phone calls they know they're coming they expect them um like we keep the language consistent it's pretty much the same because of course some of those families get that call every single day based on changes um we also
111share that information email to the schools uh so this is before the morning run it goes out the emails to the high school middle schools go out probably 6:15 6:30 uh the elementary schools usually we have that information to by 7:15 um now in the afternoon things change quickly certainly with his Department you know buses we don't know if he's going to have this bus ready for me so many times I go to him all the time and and like hey you have this bus ready for me today and like you you think you're going to have it ready and then some something else is found wrong and all this stuff so stuff Chang very quickly in the afternoon uh but to answer your question we let the high school middle schools generally know the
112bus changes by 2 p.m. uh which gives them time to communicate that with their families through REM mind or through whatever whatever other platform they use in the elementary we get it to them around three um there are some outliers I mean we have some time frames where we get super busy and something comes up so maybe we don't send the email till like 315 320 or something like that but uh the schools generally are on board with our changes it it's not a change that's made from scratch every day a lot of the changes we used are changes that we've used in the past and the school takes a look at it and they immediately kind of recognize what it is um or if we have a bus that breaks down for like three
113weeks or so the kids know they're going to be on sub bus 29 and that just kind of continues and then after a little while that change doesn't mean a whole lot to them because they recognize that bus as being theirs until it goes back to the normal one okay reason I ask is I've had Parents again speaking with me that you know they did not know that their child was on a different bus and also the student was not notified so the student didn't know which bus to get on so I don't know if there's a break down there for a better way of making notification yeah so I know us I'll talk about our begas school which is smithfood high school smithford middle school there's 28 conventional buses so I'm over there often
114I was over there this afternoon um and I haven't seen it actually in a little while but for a long time though they had a big whiteboard they wrote the changes on there and the kids would come out and they would look at it uh I've heard one of the administrators on the loudspeaker if you get there like 235 240 they announce the bus changes in some form so um I don't know if they have a way of sharing it with the teachers to share it with the classes before they exit the building but each School kind of has its Knack and like I said most schools have a system for sharing the bus changes with their families right um my next question is probably going to be for Miss Harris not trying to put
115you on the spot off the top of your head can you tell me how much funding is currently available for bus repairs in the budget testing okay good evening good evening um I don't have exact um number for you at this point um we are having conversations with um transportation and working out doing some funding adjustment um we have recently um looked at some of the funds that we had allocated um elsewhere to go towards repair of the buses um transportation has given me a some a number um that they realized would be helped to helped to uh repair the bus that are currently down right now so we have moved funds over to the transportation line to get those buses that are currently down up and running and we will continue depending upon how
116much more um repairs are needed um we will continue we we're trying to keep we're monitoring the budget um we're continuing to keep um up to date with what's happening in transportation so that we can make sure that all the buses that are currently in operable become operable so I don't see a delay um as of right now as far as repairing the bus buses um we know we initially had put in the budget for um purchasing tun buses and so now we're looking at revisiting whether we need to purchase them now um or waiting a little later because there is a a timing on that 10 to 12 months to receive a bus it's more wiser to actually repair the buses that's already within our possession than to wait for buses that won't be
117here till next fiscal year so we've allocated part Port portion of that funding to go towards the repairs of the buses that are inoperable at this time so we do have funding for the repairs correct that is correct okay um given the repairs needed how long do you anticipate these buses being down starting from today they're all going to have a different timeline sir so I have uh a rough every single one that is down right now when will the last one be up correct depending on how quickly we can install the last diesel engine it could be approximately four to five weeks and that's also depending on the availability of the engine and I am actually sourcing quotes from multiple vendors with multiple engine options um so it it it could be several weeks
118for one of the last one to get repaired okay because I think we can all agree that even if we decided to purchase buses right now you're not going to see them for 10 months to a year possibly so what I'm looking at is the most immediate fix to this solution so I'm trying to get some sort of a time frame here um you know it's not what parents want to hear but they need to be aware that this may continue for x amount of days or x amount of weeks until it's resolved so that's what I'm looking for right there um now I do have a suggestion and Miss Harris this is going to come back to you uh I don't even know if we can do it because I I'm not sure where
119the funding came from initially um I do have a suggestion which is not going to be appealing to most but the Hardy renovation that we voted on I know there's x amount of money set aside for that I don't remember if it came from Grants and I don't even know if it can be moved but I would recommend putting a hold on that and diverting those funds for the repair of buses if we need it in that categ because what I'm looking at is the needs of the students come first okay so those funds for new Hardy comes out the school construction Grant so that wouldn't be able to be applicable okay so that's not even an option no okay I couldn't remember where they came from that's all I needed okay Mr w m
120respond to your last question certainly I think it's important to note though and Mrs Harris stated this we do have the resources we've reallocated funds within the transportation budget to get the buses repaired so that's going to happen as you stated as she stated as uh Vice chair Marsh stated if we were to purchase a new bus at approximately what $140,000 yes instead of purchasing a bus and you stated it well that's going to take another 10 to 12 months instead of doing that we are going to use those funds to immediately repair the buses so the the funds are available we've made the funds available we found the funds to get the buses back up and running now so that's taken care of okay um million dollar question when do you think this will
121be resolved I mean not all the buses repaired but enough buses so we're not having this issue I'll go first so we're uh loaded question right it is uh we're definitely taking steps steps in the right direction so and I was thinking this earlier so of the buses that are down like I said three of them are away one of them has been at Bluebird since February okay it's been there since February we think we're getting it back possibly tomorrow so so certainly every single bus counts like this is literally we're heading in the right direction um some of the parts that that were were allocating the money are going to be coming in some of them were quick fixes other ones like installing an engine how long do that take you it can so
122of these repairs also take a lot more time because of the space required I only have one stall that's actually large enough to to perform some of these repairs and some of these repairs I'm most likely going to have to borrow equipment from possibly the farm lab uh or maybe even the county to get them done uh so there's a lot of logistics especially when we start doing some of this heavy work um but uh we're definitely up to it uh but so timeline and how long this is all going to be done and we're going to have a perfect Fleet uh certainly before we Tire right so it's going to take some time so we need to get on a good rotation and the good rotation is going to be that 5 to seven
123buses per year we have to get over this first purchase initial wave and that might last a couple years to get us back to a stabilized Fleet and after that first couple years then we can start looking at that good rotation of that five to seven purchases per year uh but the the main focus here is just get us to the point where we have enough vehicles to operate uh we know that op you know two large purchases one year the next year if we did something like that we know that's a surge purchase we know that 15 years down the line we're going to have to come back and buy a lot of buses again at one point in time but and the situation we're at it's kind of what we have to do
124to get past it so when do you anticipate the delays not necessarily coming to an end completely but at least slowing down so uh it's going to improve like I said the bus is coming back um before Christmas comes I hope to have two more CDL Drivers Driving School school buses they're not currently driving today um that kind of ties back to the the hiring piece I was speaking about so U it's going to help it's going to make a difference so basically about a month and a half yeah definitely we're we're hoping month and a half two months yeah that's what I'm looking for as a time frame sure yes and I know it's difficult to commit to that yeah that's not going to hold you to it but I trust me I was
125a mechanic for years um what I'm trying to do is get something that the parents can look forward to here so how much more time are they going to be dealing with the delays that's all I'm looking for so a month to month and a half to two months if things continue on this path I think we'll be in a much better position hopefully by January like the the repairs we mentioned maybe I don't know maybe half of them or so are up um and of course part of it is fade as well you know we do have breakdowns that come up you know I can't necessarily predict that we've had some days where we've had like four breakdowns in 24 hours knock on wood we've been really good for a little while we're just
126trying to trying to make maintain that but um like I said we're definitely heading the right direction like you're asking for some relief for your constituents I I absolutely understand that um like I said the hiring piece we we're trying to get a couple more drivers behind the wheel we're trying to get some more wheels for them to drive um so we're definitely having the right direction okay are you he okay I do have a couple questions so when we're talking about buses that are 177 18 almost 20 years old get them fixed you know like when we had cars when we were younger we put a lot of money into them we fix them and they break down with something else so the conversation as it's going sounds like okay we get it fixed
127we're good we' got this bus for a few more years so we fix these buses that are 15 177 20 years old what's the likelihood of uh them breaking down with something different how how long do you think we'll keep them be before we have have to put even more money in the older they are they are the more they're going to cost um a good example is you don't see a lot of 1990 Camaros on the road but you see a lot of 1969 you know it's just a different quality of material going into those vehicles um it the older that vehicle gets the less reliable it gets and that's just kind of the nature of the industry so at what point are we losing the battle on some of these buses is ultimately
128my question and you know that's not a that's more of a rhetorical question than anything else um I'd like to see us get the new buses that we need but also the buses that we can hold on to for a few more years by putting money into them without going broke um I think that's important as well I do have a question um we did talk a little bit about kids coming home late and a few uh kids that do arrive at school late on occasion um I I haven't had anybody you know contact me about their kids getting home late but I have had a couple not many contact me about kids getting to school late and uh generally it was after first period and um one of the concerns I have especially uh
129for for some of the kids who rely on breakfast at school what are we doing for them when they get there versus going to class so I can speak um as a former principal we had situations like that that the students who came in late doesn't matter how late it is we go to the cafeteria if they um are wanting breakfast we get them breakfast it doesn't matter how late they are and how do we catch them up on their academics that they've missed that that's the big question and that's the big deficit that we're seeing when those kiddos arrive late because now you've opened up a whole another can of worms where now there's extra onus on the teachers to make sure that student catches up with whatever they've missed um from from the
130beginning of that period so that's a huge hurdle and that's something another burden we're putting on our instructional staff which is the last thing that we want to be doing so you're absolutely correct yes so um I think Miss Russell made some very good comments um and this does need a fix right away and I think we should look at multiple fixes um and come up with the best that we have and obviously fixing the buses is one of them um but I've seen uh schools that my kids went to and that I went to as a kid School District that you know changed some of the times um of some of the schools temporarily when they didn't have the transportation or something you know to that effect and so that may be something uh
131for the superintendent staff to look at and consider is that a possible temporary fix but the bottom line is our kids deserve to be in school before that first Bell and get home in time to do some homework you know so thank you uh does anybody else have any questions comments Mr Cunningham I really don't have well I got one question um but really I got to talk to my fellow board members uh in a perfect world how many spare buses minimum would you like to have or what you really need because I mean we're dealing with lack of funding so that's right minimum I mean like I said on a daily basis we have about 54 routes um I would feel much better if we had like 15 maybe something like if you if
132you do percentages I guess you could say we would have maybe you know 20% of our buses could be extra buses or I don't know the math off top of my head but certainly something like that I would feel a lot better so so number of buses three four five 15 bus buses spare well like I said we do have times where we have breakdowns and and I know obviously the budget constraints like everything's you know well documented but if money wasn't an option it would be really nice to have those options but what's the minimum I mean I mean you've seen it for the last you know month since you've been on board what's the minimum number of buses I mean spare buses that you you believe or you I mean you can look
133at it and say hey I don't 15 is kind of high and I can tell you we're not going to have 15 spare buses just sitting in the uh in the lot so and and the reason I'm asking this we're going to have to go to the Board of Supervisors and ask for money that's right um but we need to know and it's I mean you probably can't answer answer tonight but we need to know the minimum of what we need if we go and say we need 15 spare buses they're going to look at us like we're out of our minds so I guess maybe if I can clarify that so if you look at our current buses right now they're old we require more spares now if we can get our Fleet to
134the point where we are in a good rotation and most of our buses are only six or seven years old then we could probably survive on five six spares something like that so I'm sorry I misunderstood your question yeah and that's what you know that's that's that's what the uh Board of Supervisors is going to say I mean we we've been hit with that issue before you know we're we're asking for too much uh what's the minimum that you can survive with so you know if we go to them and you know with the numbers and say well we could probably make it with five spares but we still need new buses right you know five six buses every year uh that's the way we we got to put this strategy together and uh we're
135all all going to sit down and go over this with uh uh Dr Kramer uh Dr Coleman and uh Mr Christenson because this is going to have to be uh planned out is we can't just go and ask for the world cuz I can tell you we're not going to get it so go ahead yeah m i I couldn't agree more and I think we all agree I bet you if Mrs times was here she's probably watching us right now nodding her head with a cocktail maybe not a cocktail um just kind of sum this all up for the folks watching we we have found funds in our budget for this year roughly $65,000 to get those 11 broke buses on the road which is expected to be complete roughly four weeks give or take
136once those buses are all fixed assuming everything goes you know happy gol lucky we will have 54 buses is on the road correct okay that covers all of our routes yep so that gets us through the year we know it takes 10 to 12 months to get a new one these buses didn't get on the budget for 23 24 I'm looking at a list of proposals here and and I don't I don't suggest that we make a motion for any of them tonight but I think we should talk about them uh and and like Mr Cunningham said we need to make some hard decisions because we all know what's coming down the agenda yeah and we got to prioritize this in my opinion this is a priority you can't kick this down the road anymore
137so I'm a big fan of theou I think that every year instead of hoping and praying we get exer funds or grants or hoping and praying that the county can afford to approve our Capal Capital Improvement wish list that these become a fixed item on the annual operational budget that just makes sense anyone who plans their household finances and they project down the road they do something similar it has to be it has to be a a logical plan um and if something comes up and we don't need to make that purchase then perhaps thatou would say well we'll gladly give that money back you know that's a show of good faith um I just offer that we ponder that we set up a meeting in the near term as we progress through the agenda
138tonight and we have to come up with the priority the minimum requirement and a no kidding we need to get these ordered by whatever the date is um it sounds like you guys have made some corrections Kudos do do and those involved to get us going in the right direction um yes thank you gentlemen uh for your engagement and we met with you you met with our staff last last week and had an extensive conversation immediately no question we need to get any buses that are in our Fleet that are not repaired repaired and back in the fleet I think we all agree that we are at a stage now where I think uh Mr Sullivan used the term a surge of buses we are absolutely going to need to engage the Board of Supervisors
139in a conversation regarding a large number of buses just to get us caught up when I hear uh spares we're actually running spares we don't have any Spears so we need our essential Fleet to be updated and I think we saw something in the neighborhood of 12 buses we're going to need some onetime money this year and and maybe some onetime money the next year before we get back on a rotation uh but if we do not do that we are not going to be able to fix the problems that we have our families our parents uh complaining about students who getting to school late uh the term was used kicking a can down the road I think we've done that we are in a place where that can't be the case anymore and you
140gentlemen know uh with Mrs Harris we are in the discussion now uh regarding the development of the 25 budget and the buses will absolutely have to be an essential uh component of that so immediately uh for the community uh the public listening we are PCH we are repairing the buses and we are trying to expedite that process to get as many buses back into the Fleet as we can albeit older buses uh but long term the fix is going to have to be we need new buses in the fleet so thank you gentlemen and certainly we'll be having numerous conversations with you all and with the Board of Supervisors to make certain that we uh correct this concern one more Alibi Mr Mr chair it sounds like and Mr s you may not want me
141to say this but it sounds like we're not fully equipped to start pulling and replacing engines on school buses is that fair assumption you can make make it happen but when you do that I'm going to assume that you've pulled yourself off of your routine maintenance and you've basically occupied yourself for some time exactly if if we uh if we stop our 45 Day schedule uh one mechanic would have to be pulled off of 45 day inspections and his primary job for approximately 3 to four days is going to be just in our largest stall uh doing that one big repair and during that period of time there other there may be other big repairs that are going to have to come in and that's another bus that's going to have to be down until
142that one can be pushed out cuz your stall is occupi right okay I just want to get that out there I Y okay so what I'm hearing is we probably want to have is this on yeah we W probably want to have some type of special meeting to talk about this so we can dig a little bit more in depth probably for a little bit more time than we were spent here so far tonight um and I'm I'm looking at the agenda there's probably a couple other things on there that we're going to want to do the same thing so we'll go ahead and uh continue running through the agenda and then at the appropriate time I will stop and get the consensus if we do want to have a special meeting if so then
143uh I'll make a note of that and we'll set a time for that uh a little bit later outside of this meeting okay um do you have anything else gentlemen thank you for your time thank you thank you um I'd like to I'd like to take a 10-minute recess now that it's uh just a couple minutes after 8:00 to uh use the restrooms and do whatever you need to do [Music] all right folks we're getting ready to start back up yeah he's coming he's coming okay School Board is reconvened an open session uh we will go to to uh the next presentation by the superintendent staff the rrmm presentation on the Carolton HVAC system Mr chairman school board members at this time we want to talk to you concerning the this be the RM presentation
144of the Carolton HVAC system um as uh Dr Kramer noted earlier when I rabbed in 2018 one of the main issues were the HVAC system at Carolton Elementary School and at Carolton Elementary School we ran tests we did several different things called in different Engineers always trying to find out exactly what was the issue at Carlton Elementary School last year right near the end of school I believe it was near the um June time frame we started asking rrmm to come in and do sketches and find out what from Thompson engineering exactly what's going on at Carlton Elementary School how did it get to this point and then how can we fix it what do we need to do and go further at that time the board asked me to make sure that I got
145the experts to come in and to be able to explain to you and to the public exactly what's going on with Carlton Elementary School and how to proceed at this time ID like to um introduce Mr gossip who is the associate uh principal for rrmm and also Mr Rogers who is the associate principal of Thompson engineering okay all right so uh my name is joris Rogers I'm with uh Thompson Consulting uh engineers and um we were we were asked to kind of come out and take a look at the uh the school um we we uh did a site assessment to try to figure out what was happening with the classroom wings of uh Carolton elementary school so uh we we walked the site with uh with principal Brennan um and we're able to see
146the classroom wings and what was really transpiring in those spaces and you know what we noticed is is basically noticeable temperature variations between space to space noticeable humidity variations between space to space um and just basically the situation where if you are staff uh teacher occupant in that particular uh area you're not going to be comfortable um while you're sitting there trying to learn basically it's it's a situation U when I went there was uh closer to Springtime I believe it was and so it was very no at that particular point in time what was happening um so you you you have a situation where you have students and teachers that are in a hot humid um environment now what's actually happening to the system is is this it's first off it's it's close to
147its end of life that's part of the problem it's just old um the way that the the building is designed is that it has a I don't want to get too complicated with it but it has chilled water and it has hot water um going to units um throughout the building when you get to the classroom Wings you have what we call we consider two two pipe system which allows chilled water when when you want cooling hot water when you want heat but not never both simultaneous um if we talked about a lot of military stuff if you're old old military all the barracks used to be that particular way you knew when the heat was coming on it was on a schedule and it doesn't care it doesn't matter for it's 75 degrees outside
148Heat's coming on right so that's kind of how the systems kind of laid out they have uh unit ventilators in the classrooms and and basically when it's in heating mode there's called for heating enough units are calling for heating you're getting heating doesn't matter if uh teacher Johnson down the way uh doesn't have uh you know students in her classroom or whatever the case may be and she's she's hot she's getting heating as well um what's happening in the springtime is that you're dealing with uh one of the things that we've had to face uh over the past uh decade with with climate change is humidity that's our biggest problem nowadays is humidity it's not actual cooling the space it's humidity and what humidity does to an environment is it doesn't matter if you have
149it cool in there it doesn't matter if you have it uh uh comfortable in there humidity is going to make you uncomfortable and more importantly it's going to Pro you know create a wet environment and we all know what happens when you have a wet environment in in a school right in hocy area so years ago when the design was done outside air rates were a lot less um they have since grown exponentially over the years I think uh I can't remember what the assessment was saying but I think there was an increase of 40 to 50% of outside air I think it's 56% increase that's required really in those classrooms if you were to touch the equipment today and so uh the outside air that they're bringing in um to each space and dealing
150with the Antiquated uh you know the Antiquated equipment and it not operating effectively and the older design of it not allowing the teachers to have zoning capability control capability of their classroom is basically U delivering a product that that know the end users aren't really excited about they they've been complaining about a lot of the different things that were there now when I was there this is another thing that I noticed when I was there is that uh in the classroom Wings in different areas they had uh deemed fires and air conditioning units in that space which are really making the problem worse um it's the best you can do right now until you actually you know replace the equipment but it's making the problem worse because you have to be able to reject that
151that moisture and that heat somewhere normally it's outside or it's to a water loop somewhere in this particular case it's rejected to the ceiling so you basically you're taking heat from a space and or ringing and then you putting it right back into the space in a enclosed seiling somewhere hoping that it's going to magically go away some and it's not you know it's going to create misture and mold not mold growth but moisture and other issues in the ceiling above that you might not be able to see so that is where we are with that and all the equipment that's there minus the the chiller which uh I was told it was replaced four years ago is like original equipment so it's at its end of life so what's going to end up happening
152is yeah that what's going to end up happening is all this equipment is going to start to fail even worse than where it is right now and we're going to end up with what we were talking about before where we're putting Band-Aids on different things paying for more maintenance to keep these things move you know operational temporary units temporary units and whatnot things that are already going on then we would if we would actually try to fix the situation that's currently there um last point that I will say um about what's happening there is that because of how the the project was designed and where we were when we were doing those type of designs back back when this this uh installation happened energy requirements have dramatically increased and so they're not necessarily operating from
153an Energy Efficiency standpoint either so it's cost you even more money operational because you don't you're not varying the speeds of your Chiller and you're you you don't have high efficiency Bowlers in place the 93% efficiency Bowlers and pumps aren't modulating uh and so you end up using more power than you normally would use because of that as well so it's a lot of different things that are happening there but I think the biggest and most important piece to this is that the operation of the equipment like I said it's at its end of its useful life and the the the mechanical pipes are also rusting From the Inside Out uh at some point in time throughout the life of the system uh I think the water was was imbalanced uh and it began rusting
154pipes from the inside out on the outside it looks the F the pipes look amazing but as we replaced a couple pipes the past I think two summers ago um you know we we had some pipes that were cut open and you could see how it was just eating the pipe from the inside out so and all that water's still in the loop you know and the problem's still there uh we we were able to solve The Rusted pipe situation in the gr houses and by replacing the the two-pipe system just the pipes alone though in those gr houses uh but the rest of the system is still a problem uh and to uh go on what more of what Mr Rogers was speaking on with the humidity um when you have a human environment
155Uh Wood uh any kind of fibrous materials like your ceilings uh These acoustic ceiling towels they expand they uh they move uh build all kinds of building materials move uh and their lifetime is is cut in half like significantly when they're in a humid environment um so the opposite extreme is in the winter when it's cold so it's going from you know around here we get a 70 degree day and then next week we'll have a 30 degree day or tomorrow we'd have a 30 degree day so the building is is constantly moving uh in that result and the hbac C systems are not helping that at all um so it's not only affecting the comfort of the building uh the students and staff but it is also hurting the building it's kind of like
156the arteries in your body you know you might be a totally fit amazing person on the outside but your arter is clogged you know so you're going to start deteriorating from the inside out and that's what's happening this building and I just wanted to emphasize when um when they're speaking of the implementation of the system system they're talking about the original system and that's what's at Carolton at this time the original system that from 1993 over 30 years old yep y just want to emphasize it right that's right when when the building was built this is the system that was in place uh yeah and so I mean we can keep going on and on about that but one other one other point that I would say regarding the the equipment as well is that
157we were talked about those ventilation rates and and that's also something that's uh has changed greatly since uh since 30 years to go and it's very important these days that we get proper ventilation into into these areas and if and if we're not going to be able to do that then we all we it's very important to be utilized technology that can kind of clean that air to make sure that the air is fresh and and um you know doesn't have all types of pathogens and whatnot in um in the airspace in the ventilation rates so that's just it's like I said it's a it's a 30-year system this is kind of where we are technology the technology there there is old uh they spent a lot of time trying to repair these these uh
158these units we've looked at multiple different options as to what would be the best course of option uh to to the cheapest best course of option for us and that's that's what we've decided on in terms of uh what to do here and that's going to be a it's a four pipe system so right now a majority of the building is a four pipe uh well the main if the floor plan is up on the screen I don't know if you all see that but the cafeteria the media center the main core and Commons area of the building is a four pipe system it branches out in the two pipes to go to V VAV boxes which Supply Air to different spaces um the gr houses are a two-pipe system so it transitions to the
159two pipes and those are the pipes that we replaced a couple years ago so going with the four pipe system that Thompson Engineers has proposed we can maintain those pipes that you guys have already replaced we don't have to tear that out so that's money well spent we're maintaining that and we're just adding two more pipes to run the hot water circuit culation or the cold water whatever we decide to do there um so that that effort wasn't wasted we're just going to basically what we're proposing is the first phase uh would be which would be over the first summer is to go in and hit those grade houses uh the the where the classroom wings are is what we call grade houses so um we'll we'll tackle that first since there's already two pipes
160rain we'll be adding two more pipes to the system replacing all of the mean systems the uh air handling units um we yeah we would be replacing the uh the air handling units um that's uh so you currently in that area you have air handing units that are providing air flow to some VAV boxes for the interior corri Corridor spaces we would actually take those air handing units we would replace that and make it into an 100% outside air unit and provide what we call decoupled outside air to each one of the classrooms the proper rates for each classroom we would take the unit ventilators that are on the exterior wall that are the two pipe system that we were referring to that hot water either hot water or chilled water depends on and and
161replace those with brand new unit ventilators that are four pipe which is gives you chilled water hot water it's simultaneous so if one teacher wants cool they can get it if one teacher wants hot they can get it or some variation of that um so that's what would happen with with the first phase of it so you basically you would solve um the issues you're having in in the classroom areas you provide better ventilation rates you'd have brand new equipment and you'd have uh control of your spaces zoning control of your spaces per classroom per teacher and just to emphasize uh make sure that we all know uh exactly um what the gentlemen are getting across to us the way the Carlton is set up now everything in the classroom will be brand new and
162it will be able to be controlled by the teacher that's what that's what was just stated everything in the classroom will stay as is they have the box there in the class but now the teacher will be able to to go up to the wall put in thermostat and boom the classroom could be customized I got to ask okay because I'm that old guy that's still works in one of those old broke down Navy buildings and it is exactly what you say it is it's hotter than the Dickens and cold whatever that said I never come across a building in the Navy that had a thermostat on each individual room and I've always presumed or at least I've been told that was because of C cost savings so if you put a individual thermostat on
163every classroom you got M Smith over here with it cranked down to 65 and Mrs whoever over here at 70 it just seems yeah you know the uh the human mind is is funny and this is we do this in school systems all the time you do multiple different things either you put a temperature sensor in the classroom and that's that's all the all the temperatures are reg regulated by someone internal by controls whoever's dealing with the controls not the teachers or you put a thermostat in that space and you set set points between about five to six degrees so you click it it's going to go down to whatever you you have some control but you don't have the total control where you can have a classroom at 60 degrees and then the next
164classroom is 80 degrees where you're fighting energy cost yeah a reasonable so there's system in place to prevent it is and counter production right exactly and so this is pretty common you know we work um our our firm does primarily K through2 schools in the state of Virginia and every classroom has zoning controls um that's typically how it's designed you never you never want to do high occupancy spaces with all multiple spaces all on one thermostat you don't want to do that no one's ever going to be happy everyone's going to be upset and at this time mywcs still maintains a set point of 72 High 68 low when it fluctuates that's when the teachers usually reported to the principal and that's when HV vac is sent out well anybody that's been over there would
165agree that what they have now is not ideal I don't even think that's Up For Debate and the option we have here shown on the screen in phase one uh which could uh I I believe Dr Coleman has presented this to you all before with the cost factors and associated with just the the great house replacement not the rest of the building or the main mechanical systems the pooling Tower and items like that so we wouldn't have the the bipolar I guess we'd have bipolar we would still do bipolar for the we want to do that for the classroom yeah for that piece of it so yeah that would be the the first part of this um like like like uh we were saying here doesn't take care of the rest of equipment that's uh
166you know past its useful life my my concern is and I've seen this too too many different times my concern is um terms of not replacing the rest of the stuff as well is that you end up doing emergency replacement for for equipment you end up paying more money for that you end up uh putting for instance give you an example of the classroom Wing units go down we need to have these classrooms let's go ahead and buy these new units put them back and I would say to you those aren't the right units to be putting back there but you didn't have enough time to do the design because it was an emergency so you put light back in that doesn't is an Antiquated equipment we see this all the time I see it
167in nor Nori schools they just buy equipment set it there it's like that doesn't that's not the right equipment anymore right but they're just trying to put a Band-Aid over at that particular point in time so so the phase phase two would be the second summer that would be the the rest of the building that you see on the screen here um the phase you already know the cost of phase one uh phase two is a a new this is the new uh rough order of magnitude and cost estimate that we put together for the entire project this is a complete mechanical replacement of the building it's exactly what you need uh to avoid the headaches of a of a Band-Aid on a broken arm and in the breakdown of phase one phase two I
168think that you remember the breakdown for phase one was 3.5 million and that's the term I mean that's what you're looking at what I did was ask them to also present a complete building fix um I think that we all know in one report that we're going to hear in a little while is concerning the student yield analysis and the fact of Carolton school will be there Carolton school will be there for the next 20 30 years and the understanding that Carolton school is going to be there for the future we need to make sure that we're doing the right thing for Carolton school to exist at that time so I just wanted to make sure I'd be able to uh present the cause for an overall 100% HVAC fixed brand new the building is
169in excellent the building itself is in good shape it's the bones are good at this point point but if it continues to go on it won't stay that way it is wood frame trusses on that roof is a wood wood frame building how many more years are in that building I would how many more years I'm plenty compared to I mean we have we there's still students in schools around that are built in 1940 1950 yeah we're tearing one down yeah yeah absolutely that's right yeah this was 199 three yeah uh and it's the school was ahead of its time uh in its design so I I really uh do think that this school will last right many many years to come at least I would say at least 30 more years right at least
170which would be the lifetime of the system that you're you're providing so at this time are there any questions because once again I know that you knew totally about phase one and this is just uh me bringing to your attention phase two and while we have the experts here you can ask go we so we had this talk DRC Coleman Ju Just For The Listening audience what have we done today to make the rooms acceptable well in the summertime well in the winter time's use the winter for example um now let's use summon first of all for the interior rooms and that's the 300 Hall all the teachers would know that what we did was bought AC units portable AC units and we plac them in the classrooms and we buy more if needed these
171are bigger AC units and they can maintain temperature to a certain to a certain degree but it still doesn't maintain temperature perfectly and at the same time they're a little noisy for a teacher to try to teach over that um unit but you're blowing the humidity up into the overhead right that's what the gentleman just stated but that's what we're doing during the Summers during the winters we're buying uh individualized once again for the 300 Hall and for other teachers if need be heaters for every single classroom these are smaller heaters that can um they're child efficient you know uh but at the same time can can bring the temperature down in one of the rooms if need be I me take the temperature up if need be so give me a ballpark what do
172we got vested in the portable AC units and portable heaters oh I believe ballpark it I believe they cost 3,000 maybe how much it cost each time okay I would say for the uh we purchased them uh two years ago and we have about F maybe 12 of them approximately like $2,500 each was between uh maybe about 25 $30,000 into those portable units we've had them for the last two years maybe almost two and a half years and we still using them we pull them in we pull them out pull them in and pull them out store the AC units during the the winter and pull out the heaters if need be so 253 Grand on portable AC and heaters um yes for for the heaters that we do have we have a lot more
173portable AC units than we do heater units but that is on call and we will purchase them as needed so you just I'm just just throwing it out there so I I do not recall seeing a budget item about purchasing portable AC so it's another good example of us robbing Peter to pay absolutely if there's a need of that nature and I think was last summer was extremely hot summer and the teachers of Carolton were um I mean they were going through it trying to teach the students and the whole time a very humid classroom yeah we did what we had to do to make sure that instruction contined about the ventilation yes oh um I think what we were saying here is that you know of course like you said the even with those
174just so you guys understand even with those those portable air conditioning units like I said they're not ducted to to exterior walls any yeah they're going up so what what I'm saying is they're not they're not pulling any outside air um to the space uh either they're just basically you know they're recirculating air that's in the space so you still have your situations where you have and I I'll throw numbers out here they don't mean a lot proba to you guys but you still have classroom spaces where you have a potentially 150 CFM outside air where you probably need about 400 uh nowadays so you have that going on and then on top of all of that um I'm sure it's it's pretty taxing on the custodian as well the air conditioning units because you
175have to empty out the condensate right periodically throughout the day right so it's another item there and you're you're saying also the exhaust from them going up into the uh overheads destroys uh eats at the wood and the sir and everything so if we were to keep them for a few years what would the um how much of life of the school itself building itself would that reduce you'd be replacing ceilings I would guess uh within the next couple years uh if if not sooner okay the tiles would I mean if you could live with the tiles I don't know if you ever seen a wet ceiling tile but they they bow they look uh pretty bad and sometimes they'll just fall in um you know depending on how long um how much moisture is
176in the space okay and um would it have the same negative effect on the on the structure itself on the the wood frame and the building you said it was wood frame not so much the structure uh it's protected there is a layer of of sheetrock uh separating the uh the occupied space from the wood trusses okay so um that's not an immediate concern but the but the movement is uh of the uh unconditioned space where we have extreme humidity and extreme cold uh on on a day-to-day basis uh you will have movement Within in the building and you will start seeing deterioration of that okay and is there any way to get humidity readings up up there to see to see what it's like I I would guess so yeah yeah you can put
177a hum humidity sensor up there and try to figure out interest okay yeah the best time to do that would probably be summertime yeah summer time okay end of the school year yeah I mean one of the things that so one of the things that you're dealing with too by the way just so so we humidity is an issue clearly during the the springtime but when you have a large uh population in a in a space you know 800 foot classroom with 27 kids humidity is coming all off right so so you're you're taking that with those air conditioning units you're you're ringing that out you're taking the humidity putting it right back up into the ceiling you never actually got it outside the building okay so you're just basically moving energy from one one
178spot to another spot without actually relieving it to the atmosphere and stay away here all right thank you yes sir yeah Mr Wester I've just got one one question for you um when you're dealing with that extra humidity um you know over in the ceiling areas um and it just sits there it sits there it's damp what is the percentage of the increase in mold growth that could occur due to that humidity just sitting there I I would say this um we I I've we've seen situations in schools where um you do what they they would set the equipment back the temperatures back um so it wouldn't run as much as it typically would over a month let's say in a library or something like that and you come back and it's all covered in
179malt so it can happen very quickly specifically during the summertime months um if you're not able to deal with that with that that uh that uh humidity in the air it can happen very fast right uh that's what I was looking at um nobody wants to say the mold word but I will thank you so that's what I was looking at just roughly about how how much more prevalent is mold growth in that situation versus with an air handling system which is dehumidifying the air and exhausting that air oh very prevalent yeah very prevalent yeah that's all I need to hear thank not bringing in any fresh air stirring it up any other questions Mr Marsh just for the sake of dollars in here so total cost in 2023 that means if I bought it
180today we're looking at $6.9 $7 million yes sir that's the total cost but that's on two summers that's right right yes sir so if that was the route that was taken would you pay for it all up front how how's that work you locked into that price yes sir you would go through the bid process uh you would award a contractor for the bid the at the bid amount it may be lower than that it may be higher today's Market's a little uh it fluctuates significantly uh but uh yes uh so you would get you would lock in with a contractor for that total that's your AR as an architect that's your estimated cost yes sir got it thank you yes sir I I would say this too just to throw it in there because
181he you know he did put in the escalation prices in there as well but um one of the things that you need to you have to think about as well typical you know similar to what we were talking about with the bus bu scenario there's a lead time with equipment as well so we've seen things you know equipment up to 40 weeks now so it if you decide to pull the trigger on a project in 2025 it might not actually happen for a year or two you know so that's something to think about as well that's right if we started the design say um if you all were able to get approval and we began design um close to around summertime that might even I mean that might be in time might even be too
182late uh could to because we would like to bid it and award it in May April maybe yeah in April April of the year uh before that so the students when the students leave that summer contractor can get in there and start doing work immediately with the with the short lead time items uh you know the cooling tower uh the bav boxes yeah those some of those unit ventilators you can get those knocked out quickly as well some of the items that are going to like you said can take 40 weeks which is almost a year so that's where we push to that second summer phase two those would be the big items you know U the big purchase items that obviously you're you're having your contractor on board the year before they can get
183that ordered and have it ready in time for the second summer right when the students are out shut the systems down and start rolling thank you thank you thank you all all right thank you okay next uh Miss Harris consideration of the approval of a 2% compensation adjustment good evening um chairman kic and vice chair Marsh and Dr Kramer and members of the super of the school board um we wanted to recommend um for the 2% uh compensation adjustment that has been issued by the state to um School Board employees the total amount of state provided funds is going to be $312,450 it's going going to require a total amount a local match of $485,500 salary increase was approved by the school board appropriated by the Board of Supervisors for the FY 2324 year and
184so we're now requesting um making recommendation for additional 2% salary increase to be approved by the school board and appropriated by the Board of Supervisors for the 23 24 year which means in conclusion that overall that our employees will have a total of 7% increase for FY 2324 and I will entertain any questions you may have at this time Mr Marsh I'm sorry M could you shoot those numbers up again repeat that again the two the two numbers the state and the local M yes the state provided is going to be $322,200 the local match that we will need will be for just for the sake of saying it out loud so what we're asking for this budget being what it is but for the next budget we're looking for we'll be looking for an
185additional $800,000 on top of what we plan for this year that is correct is there a time limit on this like when's it go to an effect when when are the state funds available what are the like there any specific guidelines on implementing this yes and so we had to certify that we will offer those funds the additional 2% to our employees the deadline was the end of October um we did go ahead and submit the request we can always retracted um I rather go ahead and submit it and then of course if the boards decided not to then we would have to inform the state of such action but as of right now we have certified that we would put in for the additional 2% okay are there any other stipulations no um these
186funds will be available it's effective January 1st of 2024 just so so you say that again it's effective date is January 1st of 2024 so by January 1st we have to um provide the increase to the employees or we lose it yes so we have yes we have to use it by then and if I if I may add this is the state um offering this to all School divisions that is correct right so this is just wanted to state that obviously you know this I just wanted to state that for the general public and this is ongoing so next year next fiscal year the state will continue to provide that 2% yes or no next year we don't know what the state will be will provide this this 2% is in addition to the
1875% that was approved as of July 1st 2023 2023 this current year for 2324 school year so um we would make we would have to ensure that once we approve this 2% here that we will continue to move forward with this 2% I guess and I'll just try to speak plainly because I don't want to get myself confused which is likely next fiscal so you're saying that it's possible that the state won't provide the total 7% for the next full next fiscal year is is that right would you repeat your question I want to make sure it doesn't seem it doesn't seem plausible that the state would decrease the salary for an employee for an S soq funded once you imple once you implement it once you implement an increase or a raise it it's
188ongoing going right it's not so now yeah it's not going to you so we can't retract it back after this fiscal year if that's what you're asking in other words I can still count on that $312,000 next year at minimum from the state I wouldn't put a dollar mount on but yes we would still need to the state the state would honor their portion of that b their share yes right got it okay so Mr chair I I say that uh we've got another one we've got we're definitely got to talk about that we now um Miss Harris uh we don't have the U the ability in our budget to absorb any of this right now correct that is correct okay so that's another one gentlemen like Mr Marsh just said that we have to
189talk through and uh if we were to approve it it would be um with the assistance of the Board of Supervisors yes because the Board of Supervisors is the appropriating authority they have to they have to approve it we we approve it they all and they appropriate okay and this discussion Mr chair thanks for the question is consistent in every School Division everyone is is having this discussion now ju just for the sake of saying it I mean it's kind of unfortunate it's a positive thing to give the teachers a raise at any time but to throw it on any School Division midy year in a fiscal year is uh yeah it's it's just inconvenient how's that and we were actually having this discussion that could have occurred sooner we this could have occurred as
190soon as this summer and it was delayed until now but if I if I'm understanding you correctly Miss saris no matter when we get something like this from the state we always we if we vote we it always has to go to the Board of Supervisors that is correct because they have a they have a local match share so they have a portion if there's any funds in which the state is requiring that the local appropriating Authority has to match we have to go to the Board of Supervisors we have no choice okay that's you know my feeling that um I think if we wanted to approve it we could because it's going to go to the Board of Supervisors anyhow okay it's not something that we have to worry about discussing and him and
191Han about um so so I you know I'd be willing to take a motion on this at any time whenever a gentleman finished asking questions Mr Wester um there there's different terminology I'm hearing this coming from the state the 2% is this a required mandatory increase or just a recommended increase um it's up to the appropriating authority yes there are the the issue of course as we know there's a shortage in keeping and recruiting and retaining staff in the educational system so the governor want to assist by um rewarding as well as retaining our current employees because of course we know that all school systems are having a shortage in keeping teachers on the road which is why our substitute services are continuing to increase because we don't have personnel and so um one of
192the initiative is to try to help the school systems as well as other um divisions within the within the Commonwealth and so we by by choice so to speak we know they give us an option to accept it or not um of course I would advise that we do because we will be in alignment with all of our other um localities and school systems in this area and we want to continue Contin to uh retain the employees that we have and we don't want them leaving to go elsewhere because it's you know it's more advantageous and so um we do have to certify that we will we will be giving this increase to our employees we have to submit that information that is signed off um by the superintendent submitted to the state um in
193order to receive the funds so they do verify that we have um certified the funds and then we also have to certify that we will also do the local Mass share right and if I'm the backstory I think is probably what's missing and if you guys recall back in January February is you know there was word coming down from the VD in the governor's office that there was a 5 to 7% pay increase on the table for schools across the board and we weren't quite sure so when we were going through that whole budgeting process we finally got worded it was it was really it was at the last minute we found out it was 5% and as I understand the inner workings of the Commonwealth but at that level in the very recent past
194they finally found the money and said here's that other 2% so that's why they're throwing it us halfway through the fiscal year so I Y they just want to give the back story so you're say basically part two of a 7% increase yes okay so I I get that um I understand giving the raise increase but the bottom line is where's the funding coming from the that's what I'm getting at the Board of Supervisors I don't me personally I don't want to be the teenager constantly running back to the parents to get money every time I need it I think well unfortunately because we are not our own we don't have our own appropriating authority we have to the Board of Supervisors is the governing Authority for this school system so we have to go
195to them to get it appropriated I fully understand that but with everything else that we have to look at funding as as well you know we just heard the presentation on HVAC system we're looking at bus situations I am not against raises so don't take it that way I'm just trying to figure out how we're going to fund it you know because we're constantly going back to the board Board of Supervisors eventually it's going to be done well I think I think Mr Wester that was uh I think the Genesis of my question um no matter when this comes up we have to go to the Board of Supervisors we have no authority to take this out of the out of the budget we currently have and it seems to me that when we met
196with the Board of Supervisors at the beginning of the year at least one of the supervisors did ask that question is our pay comparable with the with the surrounding areas and what can we do to make sure we keep our teachers this is part of that answer and Mr chair if I may interject I think that's the critical question if we do not um provide this and and and match what the state is offering we are going to be at a significant disadvantage because to my understanding and I meet with the area superintendent everyone is having the same discussion everyone is having a conversation with their Board of Supervisors we would be one of the very few and actually I think as I'm aware maybe the only at least in this area who would not
197be doing that we would be at a significant disadvantage I think the only um stipulation was divisions who gave seven 7% prior were not encouraged to do this there was a division who gave 10% While others were given 5% so if we don't do this we are going to be at a significant disadvantage and retaining quality teachers is going to be even more difficult because we're already one of the lower paying uh divisions in the area um relative some to some of our neighbors that Gap would grow exponentially and fi finally before we um finish this conversation it's ultimately the authority of the Board of Supervisors and I don't want to take that Authority away from them okay even though it's got to pass through us I think we give it to them they make
198that call hopefully they they give the raise to the teachers if they decide that they don't they don't want to they don't have the money for some reason um ultimately that that is up to them that's one of the few financial decisions that we do not have so just the reality of the situation is it's it's our our purpose is to decide what the priority is and whether or not we recommend it um and it's for the better the worse it's up to those five gentlemen to decide how they're going to pay for it absolutely unfortunately it probably wasn't budgeted for and they're not going to like it but the situation is what it is it's it's bad for everybody uh for the sake of the teachers so I think that's this is an instance
199where we have to take it across the chin y push it up there and say gentlemen this is what we want this is what we recommend uh and we respectfully request that you guys figure out how to fund it and I you and I think to your point earlier we were expecting this we were expecting this actually much earlier so this isn't um something that was unknown right okay I'd be willing to entertain a motion Mr chair I move to approve a 2% compensation adjustment as recommended by the administration second okay we have a motion and a second is there any further discussion hearing none the clerk will take the vote okay uh Mr Mar Mr chair if I may while while before we move on I think it would behoove us all to uh
200we'll talk about it later on but I think in addition to Mrs Harris and whoever else needs to be there that certainly one of us should be at that supervisor's meeting alongside the staff oh certainly yeah I would you know I would be planning to be there myself actually um because I sure they have a few more questions besides just this so no absolutely um um and yeah I'll definitely be there so but uh that was unanimous so we're sending that recommendation up to the Board of Supervisors okay next we have the uh consider Rec resending resolution requested an increase in the FY 2324 textbook fund yes before you um we have a resolution to resend the U fiscal year 2324 resolution that was that required an increase to a textbook Fund in the amount
201of $ 23,46 this was submitted back on the September 14th board meeting and so we are proposing to resend that above um resolution um that was held on September the 14th okay is there any questions okay Mr Marsh I hate to be that guy all the time but I'm that guy so bear with me people so this is for the lessening audience we we as everyone has figured out by now we have a standing deficit of $438,500 that we're trying to make up right from the budget yes we do have a deficit yet yes that is correct this but if if I can just say the the we have an audit that is occurring so the Auditors will determine what that final number is it just don't want to lock in on I just so
202full disclosure that number could be plus or minus pending audit results that's correct for the sake of conversation here let's just say we have a deficit of $38,000 we're going to take this fund of 171,000 and some change from the textbook fund and use that to offset some of our deficit that is correct okay and that is a follow-up resolution um in 15.5 that forur the disclose getting ahead of us getting ahead of us I just want to make sure everybody knows what we're doing here so if we get take the 438 and we pull out 171 what's that leave us with and keep in mind that what you're calculating is just an estimate until the audit is completely final don't I'm not holding nobody to the fire on this so we're looking at we'll
203still have roughly 260 some thousand of a deficit to recoup somewhere that is possible yes that is possible well well I think you're saying the answer is yes the number is certainly not going to be accurate because we don't know what the auditor's final number but that should be in the ballpark would I would that be correct Miss Aris that is correct all right point being this is a good chunk of our existing deficit and we're going to use textbook funds and is an option to offset some of that yes because it's in the same category because the Board of Supervisors um appropriate based on lump sum um we can actually shift it over we just had to make this as an internal um approval from the school board it does this is not that's
204this portion does not require um border supervisors approval just within the our school board right so normally we wouldn't pull funds from one textbook fund to the general fund willy-nilly without the board's approval that is correct okay just want to get that out there and Mr Vice as you're doing this I just want to go along with you just to be clear these are not textbook funds for the current fiscal 24 budget these are textbook funds that were left3 budget it's important right that's important yeah I just want to get that out there I'll yield okay any more questions okay I can entertain a motion Mr chair I move to resend the Schoolboard resolution requesting an increase in the FY 2324 textbook Fund in the amount of $171,000 572 second okay we have motion a
205second any further discussion hearing none the clerk will take the vote okay that's unanimous and it moves us into the consideration of approval to transfer FY 2223 textbook fund carryover to the general fund yes so following up onto what Mr Marsh had already precluded with um we are now putting in this resolution to move um 17157 to to the general fund for the fy22 23 year um the remaining balance of the $ 41,8 N4 those were the incumbrances the purchase orders that we had so we're still asking the Board of Supervisors to still appropriate that portion because we still want to ensure that those payments are made to those vendors so the 171 572 will will remain in the FY 2223 year to go towards the general fund deficit the 418 the 41 894 will
206carry over into the 2324 year to pay for the purchase orders that were encumbered in the 2223 year okay any questions okay will entertain a motion Mr chair I move to approve the transfer transer of the FY 2223 textbook fund to the general fund as presented tonight second motion second any discussion none heard the clerk will take the vote okay that's unanimous and that takes us to the next section reports from the superintendent staff and we will start with the financial monthly reports yes so before you we have the October monthly Financial reports um the check register the financial reports the facility usage um as well as the large ticket items I would like to interject um there on the financials you will see for the general fund that yes the revenue the expenditures are
207over the revenues and the amount of 4 let put my glasses on 458,000 and this is due to timing of Revenue as well as um expenses that came in that are not on on a regular basis what I mean by that um we have some expenses that come in that may be on a quarterly basis or semiannual case in point one one of this um one part of the variance was the tuition for sped um so the payment went out for that in October as as well as a capital lease payment that good old Al Moresco um that's paid twice a year and so those are kind of your anomalies for October so that is why between that as well as timing of Revenue that's why the expenditures are have exceeded the revenue for this
208current period I just wanted to point that out because it was mentioned earlier so I want to clarify and if you have any other further questions I'm willing to answer any questions okay go for go for it Mr Marsh Miss Harris so we as we talked about a few minutes earlier we're looking at ballpark $260 some odd thousand of a deficit we have to figure out where we're going to recoup it from do we have any idea where that's coming from yes and I know we're pending an audit and all that other jazz but I'm give me a warm and fuzzy that we have another $267,000 in the budget to offset our def deficit I truly believe we do yes okay and this is all going to come out post audit post audit yes in
209anticipated date for the audit brief now the audit we are still going through the process um and preparing um the statements and Gathering all the documentation that's needed for the audit and speaking with the audit that was on site um last week um they plan on they have a December 15th date in which they try to have everything completed so there's possibility they may not have everything finalized before our school board date however if if they do they are willing to be able to um present for our December I think 14th date if not they will come in January to present okay I I would I would suggest to my colleagues here that we stay tuned to that projected date because we'll have a lot going on in January we'll have a new member that's
210going to be sucking from the proverbial fire hose trying to figure this out we'll have our organizational meeting there's a lot going on so just keep dialed in with that and if I can that's actually not within our purview we are hoping that they are prepared for December 14th but if the Auditors come back and tell us they're not ready and aren't going to be available until later then the January whatever the January board meeting uh is is that the 11 would be the date but they basically are letting us know when they are prepared to present their findings is that correct yes understood and that's important I just I know that there's people out there watching and listening and as are we um Miss Harris with respect to the the reports themselves uh $228,000
211on a large ticket item for amesco reest was Mr go that is for um an equipment lease equipment lease that was done back in 2014 I believe that was a um energy upgrade um Georgia Tyler Westside and old Hardy if I'm not mistaken so that's a lease that was done back in 2014 we're still paying on that lease I think it ends in 30 33 out the double check but yes we're still paying on that lease so that's what that portion is for so in essence that's a loan that was taken taken out 2014 almost 10 years ago 9 years ago and we're still paying on that now so that's an obligation that we don't have any choice but to pay and it's that a semiannual so the 228 how often do we get that
212I think it is a semian yes that is correct okay thank you Doc and that was certainly a loaded question as you well know we had this conversation months ago in for the sake of a disgusting transparency report we're paying a lease on a loan for stuff that's currently being torn down at Old Hardy fact partially at least we're saving some of it okay okay I had to get that off my chest um hindsight is what it is that was from 2014 uh for my own edification on the check register page seven we paid the US Treasury $18,000 plus dollars what's that yes so that is for for the um claim for refund request for abatement um from the IRS so our employer taxes the 941s they were submitted a few days late the reason
213for the submission being late was because it was the end of the year um of course we have one payroll person and they were trying to manually input over 3,000 lines for benefits and so it takes time unfortunately so we were late and so we have submitted a request to um to IRS to the US US Treasury to ask for um a refund on the penalty um for filing late because we've never been late before we've done the same thing with the state the state has already refunded us um the penalties um and interest so now we're just waiting on the IRS we do believe that we will if not get full amount back that we'll get part of the um funds back the penalties back fair enough um page 10 had a gental individual
214that got mileage reimbursement for $2500 yes so um this individual they transport their um child um back and forth we talked about this back in I think in August for their mileage for um the trip yeah forgive me I forgot we've heard that before thank you I Y any other questions okay we're good there next we'll go to support services Mr chairman board Support Services operations update first I would like to update you on the new central office warehouse as you all already know this was a central portion of the Hardy site that weone needed to keep um at this time everything was transported out of the back of the Hope Presbyterian Church which served as a warehouse for the last three or four years and now it is located at the new central office
215warehouse and with this stated these are the rollup doors so we have two rollup doors there um I do not have any pictures from the inside at this time but of course to provide walkthroughs when necessary but now we have an area once again that is HVAC controlled um that we are the only keyh holders to the area so we can ensure confidentiality for that and now we're finishing uh putting some of the finishing touches on the warehouse so we're currently already using the warehouse at new Hardy so I know there was some talk in previous meetings concerning pausing and it's kind of hard to pause when we already are using the space because if it wasn't for this space we would not have a warehouse at this time so all deliveries and different things
216that comes in at a school system we would not have an area that we can even unload those items to in order to distribute them to the division Mr chair and Dr you stated this uh very eloquently but I'd just like to U augment what you're saying because I think it's important to note one of the recommendations and the request to retain old Hardy for central office wasn't just for central office it was Al also for a warehouse yes and we would have needed a warehouse uh for our School Division and in the past couple of years we've been using uh Hope Presbyterian Hope Presbyterian Church and we've been paying for that monthly and we've had Personnel files and other things in there that should have been in my view with the school division as
217a result of retaining old Hardy we're using the gymnasium has been converted into a warehouse and the warehouse would have costed approximately someone in the neighborhood of a million dollars M million dollars and that was um a non-ac certified right there million dollars so I just want to note when we talk about savings by virtue of just retaining and and and modifying the gymnasium that's saving the School Division and our community uh some in the neighborhood of a million dollars and I I think that's important to note so thank you for allowing me to enter right no problem so are there any questions concerning the new central office warehouse um it's still under construction it will be under construction for quite some time leading into the other portions of the building as you can see
218right now the slabs for the warehouse doors are about to be poured so um we can fully use those with tractor trailers and other deliveries that we normally get during the summertime thanks Doc and for my colleagues up here there's a upcoming agenda item that we'll probably come back to this on so okay how you and I think a few of you board members have actually seen it and uh I would encourage the rest of you if you haven't seen it how that space is being utilized uh to house items that we have and and also some of our computer equipment I think uh it equipment is also being housed there as well any more questions okay all right just wanted to uh also brief the board uh Dr Kramer in the community on some
219of the conversations we've been having surrounding uh traffic pattern projects the one specifically that I'll be uh referring to tonight is is here at Westside however we all understand this is a much broader issue Westside is certainly not the only school that has overflow from parent pickup and drop off in the morning um the examples go on and on um in terms of uh where that's an issue we saw the increase of uh traffic as a result of coid and it never subsided it's it's it's been an issue and it remains an issue so what we're doing is we ultimate goal is to reduce traffic overflow we want to get that traffic here on at West Side we want to get it off Main Street we want to make sure that it's uh that it's
220safe out there uh safety of course being our our number number one goal so what we're doing now is we're working with Transportation uh School administration local law enforcement emergency Personnel um to figure out what options do we have because each School presents its own unique challenges some schools are going to be very complex um some schools are going to require us to bring in vot to the conversation The Architects into the conversation it's going to be very costly um certainly not something that we have in our budget but we want to explore the options at least come to the board with what those numbers look like what Solutions are out there so that we can at least have all the options on the table here at Westside it's a little bit different though because
221here at West I we've been having conversations surrounding a potential Solution that's um slightly less uh complex and I'm G to pull up uh Google Earth Here oops I'm allowing this Eric and while this is pull pulling up I do want to emphasize um this team Mr Brinkley Mr fight uh said law enforcement and of course Mr christon are not only looking at Westside Elementary School but Carlton Elementary School and carsville elementary school they're talking with the principls they're talking with the administration and they're working through those issues to find out the best solution right here yes and and absolutely those are those we know are going to be more complex options because it's going to require basically building roads it's it's going to be very complex at those locations uh Carolton has uh wetlands
222in the back which is going to make uh the ability to build there limited and the spaces we can use so anyway what I wanted to show you tonight is is what we're considering at least at Westside we're in the process of getting quotes on this to see what it would take what we would do is we would take uh so here you come in off of um Main Street the loop goes around the back right now this is where the buses go each morning each afternoon what they do is they loop around here and circle all the way back out so the idea is to take this space right here and and build a road and connect to the existing Loop and so what that would allow us to do is you would then
223move the uh cars in the morning in the afternoon and instead of them because right now the cars are coming here the cars loop around and they stop and then traffic goes out here and probably back further than I can go so if you can make this whole thing an entire Loop and then move the cars there you've now increase the capacity for cars off of Main Street by four to five times we know the buses can work out front here because they've been working out front here since pre-co they were always working out front so if you can connect this right here we can pull significance amount of traffic off of Main Street that's going to require the building of the road knocking down of a fence there's a irrigation thing we're going to
224have to look at there are trees we're going to have to look at there's the curve we're going to have to look at so you know there still complex but that's the solution that was discussed at Westside here that we're going to be exploring to try to alleviate some of that traffic I got to ask have you been over to Windsor Elementary to see the little magic gck that those folks are pulling off uh yes I've seen I've seen Windsor elementaries yes I listen I tipped my hat to Mrs couch and everybody else who had a piece of that they have literally pulled off a magic trick the parents have figured it out sometimes it's more painful than others has that been discussed over here I mean that's a cost-free option looping parents through the
225parking lot yes because because you can go to wns elementary school tomorrow at the bell and you won't see any cars out there on the highway anymore thank goodness so what we did is uh yes we discussed that we discussed it with Mr Johnson actually just a couple of weeks ago I was meeting with Mr Johnson and Sergeant Brinkley and we literally discussed that option so that option has a couple of um complicating factors number one is Staff Parks out there uh out front right now west side so all the vehicles out there limit our options to snake around what you would have to do is You' would have to get all staff to park out back behind here with central office to clear that space once you do that you'd have to repay that
226parking lot that parking lot out there is is too wobbly there's too many cracks and crevices um to operate that right now so it is an option we did discuss that as an option but it's going to require moving the traffic that's parked here out back so so long as we're out back uh there's really not enough space to do that I'm not I'm not calling you a liar but the the staff parks in front of the wsor elementary school just the same they're literally I I do it every day with a longbox dual wheel truck I drive right between C's uh staff's Vehicles double stacked I I I don't know you guys are the experts y'all figure it out it just seems like that's that's an achievable goal today to get cars off that
227Highway and of course that's always option that's something that we de definitely look at I know that uh what Mr christon is referring to with the parking lot um the uh how should I say if you if you've been over here at the west side you know the parking lot is completely uneven so if we're going to start using that in the in the way that we're talking about that wsor elementary school use it we might do have to make some other adjustments not saying that it's impossible at all but we just have to look at the square footage that we're using at wesy elementary school and how we can actually duplicate that plan if it's feasible I'm I'll leave it at this I just hate to invest a whole lot of time and energy
228reconfiguring a school that's on the short list to go away anyways certainly had that well pouring money into a building that we're trying to replace yes sir we don't we don't like it either we also don't like the traffic out on Main Street um so we're trying to figure out the the least bad option and we know it's going to cost money and time and resources that frankly we don't not want to be putting into a building that we're trying to replace but we also don't like the safety concern that's being poured out on the Main Street right now and we know the community does not either any other questions if I may Mr chair I certainly I've had conversations with uh Chief how as well about the different options and the option that uh
229Mr Christenson and Dr Coman I'm mentioning is one that's been considered by uh Smithfield officials as well we do have more students here at Westside I think westside's the second largest um School in in our division so that might be a part of it but I I appreciate your recommendation um Vice chair I think we need to look at every option and and I think you stated it well Mr Christensen we're looking at um the least bad option because no option is going to be good and we don't want to spend a ton of money but we absolutely and and you know you and I have had this conversation Mr KCK and other board members as well uh it's not safe now to have cars on the main road so we absolutely have to get
230them off but uh I think we need to exhaust all options and look at what is the best bad option for lack of a better turn y I would agree are there any other questions not yet I'm sure I'll think of some later may may I ask uh gentlemen are we looking at bringing a final option back to the board for the board what share with me what are your what your thinking around that it'll probably be cost dependent if if the contractors can come out and Quote us something that's that's realistic and we feel like is is safe and is going to meet our needs and we can work it into our operational budget then that's great um realistically it may be something that exceeds what we have this not something we budgeted for
231um and if that's the case then yes we'll have to come back to the board let you all know what our options are um and and see how how we'd like to proceed and we'll continue to have these conversations with the other schools as well we know this is not unique to West Side we know Carlton's a mess we know carsville is a mess um we're going to look at every single School we're going to work with Sergeant Brinkley local law enforcement to figure out how can we snake through how can we loop around what can we do to get the vehicles off the road because it's it's not safe it's it's it's not right okay yes sir appreciate that thank you Mr Christi is there anything else no there's nothing else so I I
232do I do have a support service related question if I okay sure yes sir and I don't know how to make this nice so I'm just going to throw it out there absolutely I've been coming to these school board meetings in this building for a long time now as a board member and before I was a board member if we don't have the funds to do it soon we need to make sure that we put a budget item this year to do something with the toilets and the restrooms in this building they're disgusting and they're unacceptable there's been a sink in a little boy's restroom that hasn't worked I know at least 12 months it smells like urine tiles are popping up we can do better so I don't know what we got to do
233to figure that out in my opinion it's just unsanitary and we can do better may I respond Mr chair yes I totally agree with you I 100% agree with you I've had conversations with community members but we shouldn't need to have ation with community members or you the board to take action uh Dr Coleman and I have had this discussion I've met with the staff here they've actually literally taken me around uh to see classrooms where tile is coming up and we have shared with our new contractor ABM that this is a priority so I'm 100% in agreement with you uh some of these things I don't think are uh going to be a an exorbitant cost um we just need to make them a priority obviously it's going to be a cost and it's
234going to require some resources uh but Dr colan and I have had this conversation as as late as early this week uh about making uh some of those improvements a priority so thank you for noting that thank you sir thank you you good Dr kmer yes I'm good you ready for the next subject or you still have something else um I'm ready for next subject student y y analysis student y analis I think U uh confused Mr Cooper out a little bit I'm gonna hit the student there we go all right m l breaks you join you want the video or the presentation I want the video video sir all right do not start the video yet all right hello wait a minute that was do not video up take that PowerPoint down all right
235so while Mr cooperat is helping us out and getting everything um um straight just want to do a little small introduction and show how we got here what occurred for us to get here at this time so in 2018 the Alaway County schools embarked on an initiative aimed at ensuring the effective measurement and maintenance of facility capacity with the ultimate goal of sustaining the high quality of student learning experiences within the division now consequently a student yield analysis was conducted in response to a request from both the Planning Commission and the Board of Supervisors this analysis was instrumental in guiding their planning efforts for the families within our School Division so in March 2018 we engaged uh with the services of Cooperative strategies to perform a comprehensive examination of the subdivision and student potential within
236alaw County Schools this involves meticulous collection scrutiny and Analysis of various factors including student demographics migration patterns and housing data permanent to ICS now fast forward to the present five years later and we find ourselves in a in the county experiencing remarkable growth in specific regions this growth has necessitated the creation of a new learning environment to accommodate the needs of Westside Elementary in the form of a replacement school to address this development I did WCS once again turned to an updated student yield analysis that considers current and planned residential development to assess the potential for significant additional student enrollment so in 2023 we re-engage Cooperative strategies to conduct a comprehensive study of student demographics to develop a subdivision yield analysis specific to the Alaway County Schools this report represents the culmination of extensive processes
237involving the collection review and Analysis of student demographic data housing information related to the division the primary aim of this analysis is to ascertain the growth potential associated with planned housing developments and the resulting impact on the AL of White County school student population by Furnishing the subdivision yield analysis to division we aim to better equip our institution to make informed decisions that are directly influenced by our future enrollment consideration and with that stated Miss um Jenkins yeah Miss Jenkins Miss Jenkins Miss Jenkins uh prepared this for us and we've been working hand inand me and Miss Briggs actually have been working um alongside eel along also with Randy Keaton Amy ring and Don Robertson in preparation getting ready um early this month the I just wanted to for the public who may not know
238who those individuals are oh uh County Employees the uh County Administrator um the assistant County Administrator absolutely and director of planning yes thank you BRS now also the Planning Commission after speaking with them they wanted they requested a lot of information coming from our student yield analysis they were told that they could not get that analysis until first we showed this analysis to the school board we'll just state that um uh the person that we worked with at Cooperative strategies the plan had been for her to kind of remote in and narrate this live I think with the change in our regular meeting date from Thursday to Wednesday she had a conflict so she graciously recorded over the the presentation so you're going to hear her going over the uh the slides we're getting ready
239to present and I'm going to say this before we start and I'm going to say it after all of these are examples and proposals this is data that has been gathered and data that's being shared this is not a final decision in any form of fashion so I want the public to make sure that they hear they're going to hear a lot of different examples of what we could do based off of growth these are only examples these are not final decisions or even decisions that we even contemplating on at this time this is just to get everyone thinking in the mindset of how to move forward and we can go back uh after we play this we can pause it on some slides if you need to go back and see things again so
240are you ready yes is that my name is Karen Jackson with coopera strategies I will be reviewing the results of the 2022 2023 housing study we completed our housing analyses measure the impact that housing has on student enrollment the study is based on student yields which is the ratio of students per housing unit for example in the housing image on this slide we have 10 homes and five students that reside within these homes in this example this gives us a student yield of 0. students per housing unit this student yield can then be applied to the housing developments within the division to predict the number of students that each development will produce this map shows the subdivisions and complexes within the county apartments are shown in red manufactured or mobile home parks in blue single
241family subdivisions in green and town homes in Orange the chart on the right shows the students compared to the number of units in 2022 23 the Department yield was 0.338 the manufactured home yield was 0.364 the subdivided single family homes were yielding 0.345 students per unit and the town home yield was 0.298 these yields are very similar to the other counties within the state that we've worked with so on this slide detail the student yields by boundary by grade configuration for example the Carolton wests side boundary in the top left is yielding 0.09 K through3 students per apartment unit within its boundary 0.12 K through3 students per mobile home within the boundary 0.13 K through3 students per single family home within the boundary and 0.09 students per town home within the boundary the student yields
242are conditionally formatted to show relatively higher student yields in red and relatively lower yields in blue these Maps show a closer view of the subdivisions within certain areas this is the same information shown on the map a few slides ago where green areas show Single family subdivisions red shows apartment complexes blue is showing the mobile home parks and yellow is showing town homes on the left we have the subdivisions and complexes in the Smithfield area and on the right this is the Carolton area in this Slide the map on the left is showing the Windsor area and the map on the right is showing the carsville area these Maps show the student density or students per square mile within the division no color to the blue colors show fewer students per square mile and reds
243to yellows indicate more students per square mile the Northeast Corridor of the division is experiencing the highest student density these maps are identical the map on the right just shows a closer view of that Northeast coridor this table details the housing developments that were proposed planned and actively under construction during the time of our report when we apply our student yields to these developments we get an additional 255 k33 graders 69 4th graders 120 fth and sixth graders 14 4 7th and eighth graders and 278 additional high schoolers from active and planned developments from our proposed developments we get an additional 57 K through third graders 15 fourth graders 26th fifth and sixth graders 32 7th and eighth graders and 61 high schoolers the map on the left shows the locations of these housing developments
244as you can see the devel velopments are concentrated in the northern Carolton boundary which is the pink area in the map and the South to Mid Hardy boundary which is shown in yellow all the developments are outlined in red the chart on the right shows the student potential for these active planned and proposed developments by boundary the most heavily impacted schools should the boundaries remain exactly the same will be Carolton Elementary Hardy elementary Westside 4th through 6 Smithfield Middle and Smithfield High School school this chart details the current and future utilizations at the schools the First Column shows the 23 24 enrollment at each building and the capacity column shows the number of students each school can hold the utilization shows the enrollment divided by the capacity the plus development column shows the number of
245students expected to be produced by the housing developments within each boundary and the future utilization shows the resulting utilization of each facility once the developments are built out as you can see once the developments are constructed and occupied we're expecting to be over utilized at Carolton elementary Westside Elementary Smithfield Middle and Smithfield High School my firm does quite a bit of facilities planning work and we typically do not like to operate buildings above 90% as it offers very little flexibility for especially large cohorts pull out resource spaces and special education programming needs the sweet spot for utilization that also maximizes operational efficiency is typically anywhere between 80 and 85% using your existing capacities I've put together a few facilities ideas that would create consistent grade bands across the district while utilizing your existing space all
246of these options would require redrawing attendance boundaries to better balance enrollments among buildings my first idea was to create a pk6 78 992 12 configuration Carolton carsville Hardy Windsor and Westside would be pk6 buildings Georgie Tyler and Smithfield Middle would be 7even eight buildings and the high schools would remain as is in the short term the overall utilization at the pk6 schools would be 82% the 78 middle schools would be 72% and the high schools would be utilized at 75% once the housing developments are completed and occupied we would expect to see an overall utilization of 97% at the elementary schools which would likely warrant additions or a new Elementary School somewhere in the division the middle schools would be utilized at 87% and the high schools at 89% Westside Elementary is highlighted in each
247of these options due to its age and current plans for replacement the next option is a K5 68 912 configuration in this option Carolton carsville Hardy and Windor would all be pk5 elementary schools Westside Georgie Tyler and Smithfield would be 6 through eight middle schools and the high schools would continue to house grades 9 through 12 in this option the overall future utilization at the pk5 elementary level would be 110% upon development completion If This Were to move forward consideration should be given to constructing a new Elementary School on the north side of town to relieve that overutilization the 6 through eight middle schools would be utilized at 74% and could be left alone other than realigning the boundaries and the high school enrollments should be tracked as they are approaching overutilization I also looked
248at a pk3 elementary 4- 6 intermediate 78 middle school and 912 High School option in this option the middle and high schools would be well utilized in the short term I would recommend watching these enrollments as in the future we are showing these buildings approaching overutilization Carolton carsville and Hardy would all be prek through three buildings in this option with an overall future utilization of 100% should this option move forward I would consider either additions to buildings or constructing a new PK through3 Elementary on the north side of the county Windsor and Westside would be four through six intermediate buildings with a future utilization of 93% in addition or constructing Westside at a larger size than the current should be considered lastly I reviewed a PK through 4 Elementary 5 through 7 Intermediate 8-9 Middle
249and 10 through2 high school option Carolton carsville and Hardy would be prek through four schools Windsor and Westside would be 5 through seven intermediate schools Georgie Tyler and Smithfield would be eth and nth grade middle schools and Smithfield and Windsor high schools would house grades 10 through 12 at the elementary level with an overall expected utilization of 125% including developments it is recommended to construct new Elementary School looking at the intermediate schools an addition or constructing Westside at a larger capacity should be considered one or more additions should be considered for the 89 middle school and the high schools are expected to be utilized at 64% in the future which wouldn't warrant any building projects thank you very much for your time this evening we appreciate the opportunity to continue to work with the aisle
250of White County public schools and as as Mr kuat is pulling up um uh slide number seven I just wanted to you to see get a understanding of the full capacity of all of the data when we're trying to put together schematic of that housing complexes that are coming online the housing comp lexxes that are proposed the ones that are active and plan slide seven and you will get a copy of it this will be available and just slide seven off of the PowerPoint slide seven BR pinpoints the active and Planned subdivisions the park at Battery mallerie Point Timber pers preserve Ben's Grant St Luke's Village Brew station so on and so on and liter literally has the number of students based off of the um yeah it the well yeah looking at the student
251generation index determining how many because that's based on the county currently has a student generation index that determines the number of students that are going to be coming at the elementary middle and high school level it's a different index based on level um and also it's based on the type of structure so they have one for apartments they have another index they apply for um single family attached single family detached and then um um mobile home units so with that said you see the amount of students that are active in playing because those homes and Tow houses are coming online and then of course they propose the gra at 10 m sweet grass km's Village East in Carolton those are proposed um Avenues there yeah now a couple things if I can interject some of
252the things that have already been um it says active and planned you'll see some things up there the status might be approved and it's just sitting there um those are some things a lot of times the county will consider dormant I cons I compare them to locusts you just never know when they're going to come online but they've been approved uh the parket battery right now is um is not active but it was recently approved mallerie point it says under design construction is really underway if you've gone down Battery Park Road you'll you'll see that Timber preserve was approved probably 20 years ago and uh it's just been sitting um Ben's Grand Apartments as you are well well aware is under construction St Luke's Village has been approved but actually St Luke's Village is coming
253back with an amendment that would take the units from uh 179 to like 315 so they're proposing an amendment that would increase the number of units to 315 um we stations under construction so archers me is uh kind of quiet right at the moment uh in addition we know there are others out there that have not made it onto this chart because they are they have come before the uh the county and they're going before the Planning Commission for consideration but they haven't made it that far yet um and you could probably guess where they all fall yeah out um but this is I think critical to show you that based on what has been approved you see the number of projected students coming in at 866 that that's already approved and I want to
254go show one more more slide and then uh we'll take questions it'll be slide nine and slide nine this is another takeaway slide seven and slide nine of the takeaways utilization where we stand at right now where are we at right now the capacity of the school and the student enrollment based off of the October 31 um enrollment date Housing Development the number of students is supposed to arrive and the future utilization rate based off of the housing devel elment that's already been approved that's where we stand at right now and as you can see Smithville Middle School is at 95% utilization um what's in Westside Elementary School 87 and Smithville High School 84 if everything stayed as is we did nothing we changed nothing at all just kept moving forward future utilization Carolton Elementary
255School would be at 107% westad elementary school 110% % Smithville Middle School 123% Smithville High School 105% uh in the 2018 student yield analysis there was a discovery that we would not go beyond 85% in any school that was a um that was a one of the standards that were put in for the school division that we'll seek to every time we get to 85% that we have to do another student yield analysis and we move forward with the planning for new areas of growth yeah it they were called triggers and it uh 95% in any school would trigger um planning for a a new school so you can see even though Smithville middle doesn't get a lot of conversation regarding capacity they are sitting at 95% right now I think some of the conversations
256that's been held uh before always talks about um individuals and housing that already exist exist but one thing that we're not taking in consideration is the housing developments in the students that are coming here based off of the new housing developments that's here not what's already existing so we just have to keep that in consideration and I think that all everyone knows the last thing we can do is wait till the last second and then start planning um when you already know new Hardy took two years or 18 months and two years to build yeah and if I could interject one other thing I I know a lot of times people will look at maybe the past five years past six years and say you haven't seen a significant amount of growth when you're when
257you're looking at schools you've got to go back decades because you're building schools for decades right and I want to say it was in 1993 uh around that time Smithville High School had about 800 kids and they they moved eighth grade they used to have eth grade they moved eth grade to the Middle School and it was 9 through 12 and that dropped the enrollment down to about 800 today they're about 1500 so they've almost doubled in size in that amount of time so so I do think that you have to look long range at the growth that's happening it you just can't look five years and say it's it's fairly flat good is any questions at this time yes sir there'll be a few questions but comments more than anything really so I don't
258know if I mentioned it to you doc crer I think I told Mr KCK for you guys down here I have had the ear of a couple members of our Planning Commission they actually reached out to me and um it's no coincidence that this pops up so this is all goodness from my perspect you guys do this for a living y'all have done this you've done this for years right so projecting growth and whatnot I look at it with a different set of eyeballs and I'm pretty sure these gents done here to do as well um we rezoned last year which is always an uncomfortable decision it's a difficult decision but we did it and if I recall and I don't want to put Miss gets on blast because she's not here but I I
259I asked a question how much time did we buy at Carolton by rezoning and if memory Sayers it was about three years I don't know if that accounts for the future utilization I don't know and I'm not asking um um it seems obvious that we're going to outgrow our capacity my concern as I sit up here on this board for at least the next four years is that we know make a recommendation to the Planning Commission that says we can handle it and then couple two three years down the road we end up trying to buy portable buildings because we've maxed out to me that's unacceptable with all the security stuff going on today's age is just unacceptable um at some point unless we know for a fact that we're going to grow facilities we
260got to start saying no we can't do this or if we do this you folks at the county Lev level better be prepared to start stroking a check for a new building and that's the conversation I think that has to be had um we talk a lot about students and capacity but there's more to it than that right there's certainly a lot more expense we're looking at our operational budgets year after year there's more to it than just rear ends and chairs yes there's teachers yep administrators how many AC I don't need an answer how many PE teachers do we have today that are sitting with 30 some odd kids they're already maxed out so there's going to be certain instances where you're not going to need just a teacher you're going to need PE
261teachers or or band teachers music teachers whatever school buses right school bus routes fuel um we've talked before about coming up with a set student teacher ratio I think that plays directly into this um zoning I mean arguably that conversation is going to happen sooner than later again I we've talked a lot about ripping this down and building a new school somewhere I haven't heard much talk about adding on to existing schools certainly needs to be on the table um my point is there's there's more to it than just butts and chairs there's the total cost and I think it's incumbent upon the board that we present that to the Planning Commission and certainly the Board of Supervisors that if if you guys keep doing this you need to look for X number percentage of
262growth requirements and cost so I I certainly don't have the answer you guys are professionals with this but this new guys sitting up here looking at this and this makes my head hurt if I may Mr chair and thank you Dr Coleman and uh Mrs Briggs for your presentation and as Dr Coleman stated this is just the beginning we need to be having this conversation on an ongoing basis and it's not just about the one potential replacement school this is a a a multi-layered conversation we need to have and I think to your point Mrs Briggs we can't wait until we see the increased numbers it's already too late right that's why we look at projections to see where we're going um and I think that's somehow missed by some in the community they want
263to look now and see well I don't see the growth well you see buildings in in one of the slides uh hold developments that are approved some are already under construction remember we are I think it was the seventh or eighth fastest growing seven seventh in the State and Virginia is a large State we are growing and if we aren't in front of this to your point sir then we're going to have to build very expensive modular units and and we don't want to do that so this is a conversation we're going to absolutely need to have then we're going to this is just the beginning I I look forward to inviting uh our professionals from Cooperative strategies here as we continue this discussion but this is just the beginning and I think you know
264your point is absolutely correct there's so many variables at play here it's not just building a replacement school there's a lot of discussion and we saw just some of the options there are probably even more options that we could look at uh but thank you all for allowing us to begin this dialogue doc well I I know the Planning Commission is p pinning a response from the schools what's next what what what are you going to give them at this time um at this time me and Miss Briggs discussed going back in and now that we have all the data really emphasize what do we really need and how do we see this County forming out because that is the next discussion a lot of the examples that was given even out they took the
265data and spread it across the entire division they didn't take in consideration that some of those students would have to be busted from turn or drive all the way down to carsville they didn't that wasn't taken in consideration so as I guess you can say humans now we must look at the data and decipher between that what's really a optimal choice so the next choice I mean the next step is for us to come back as a team and sit down and start working through the process and get two or three options that are very valuable to what's really what what we really can stand behind and present that and Mr Marsh I know a couple months ago you you asked almost can we track like what is the student yield for the developments when
266a proposed development comes up can we plug that in and say okay what is the that going to make the capacity of Carolton of Westside is that going to take us up to 90% 95% 100% I mean you can see where we are right now with um the housing developments that have already been added in now I will say that out of the 1,57 in there that does include some that are proposed but not yet approved so I think we've got to do a little bit of work on our end but we should be able to say hey if you approve um sweet grass which is on proposed that is counting all of these in already that have been approved Carolton is now going to be at what percent in uh West give them what
267the capacity is going to be when that's approved and then giving them a more comprehensive look of what's that total impact on the school division now I know some things like operational costs don't factor in with proffers and how they work with it's got to be um I think Capital there's there's some stuff that the county gets into where you we can say it's going to cost more for technology for buses and Etc which we should but it really comes down to like Capital like does it require new school that's some of the things they look at but but still we should be able to provide them with a comprehensive picture of that impact I just my my point is I want that those five gentlemen up there to know what they're asking yep know
268what they're approving the full scope of it I think I think the Planning Commission nailed it when they said we're we've looking at individual growth options but we're not looking at it in totality and and I couldn't agree with that more yeah it is interesting too on the proposed ones even if we know they're four in the queue um we can only speak to the impact of that one so it's almost it behooves them to be first one in on approval because that fourth one may be the Tipping Point that now they they are going to require you know they uh tip it to where we need more space so we can't say well there's three others and you guys all three of these are going to cause us to go up above 100% we
269have to look at that one by itself yeah it's an amazing thing it's complicated it's a makes my head hurt sometimes so just just just for the sake of the question this company I forget their name on the slide Cooperative strategies that was in a free service who funded that bill that bill was funded and if I'm I'm well Lissa is gone um I'm have to get back to you I believe that it's uh I believe it came out of the school construction it was came out of the school construction yeah I think you're right yeah okay mhm and school construction and yeah that's it are there any other questions oh no more questions we'll be back again all right probably multiple times yes sir we'll go on to the CTE update Dr kale this
270on okay I always get up here forget to cut it on good evening chair colleague members of the board Dr Kramer so I'm here to provide your annual CTE update I know that you um received certification update from Miss forel back in August so this is kind of the other part of that um so just kind of giving you a look of where we are right now um so some highlights and happenings uh in welding we are super excited to have four students currently participating in welding apprenticeships with all first and power mechanical um we are also excited about hosting the skills USA contest in the welding lab in February if you'll recall we had students who participated in that last year for the first time ever and both of our participants play second and
271third in the in the region so we were excited about that um and we have a new partnership with Newport News shipyards and their seekins program which is a direct pipe line to um job placement so they have a recruiter that comes once a month and works directly with students and really they're kind of scouting them for um employment Beyond us um and then I ALS I didn't include this on the slide but I know Mr Marsh has brought this up a number of times um just a tidbit of information Mr Miller's been tracking his seniors from last year and we're very proud that 14 of last year's 20 seniors from the welding class are currently employed with local companies in the industry of welding so I think that speaks volumes to what's going on
272with with RCT program and the placement there at the land lab we've had um you know it's it's a very unique program so we get a lot of outside interest um we've already had visits from patan public schools um and they brought a whole crew of people out there uh but they were very excited and to with New Horizons Regional Education Centers um our students were received some awards for their um old-fashioned salted country hams uh at the ISA White County Fair they're very proud of those big ribbens and of course we'll be presenting next week at the vsba annual conference um with regards to our Workforce skills our Workforce Readiness award in culinary we are um they've been working hard to to do good for others as usual um they've already raised $1,000 over
273$1,000 for the Smithfield High School United Way campaign just by selling um lunches to school staff so they would put together a menu and then School staff could order in advance and all the profits went to United Way um they have increased our um Helping Hands Thanksgiving boxes if you'll recall from last year we did this um we're going to do 105 boxes this year and we're already in the planning process of identifying those families and making sure that they are able to receive um this wonderful amazing box um and then Chef horn and Chef Hagen have really worked together to build out some uh individual cooking stations you know in a big huge kitchen you can have but so many guys on the fry side and so many in the in the Prep Station
274and then somebody has to wash the dishes um so now they have um smaller cook tops and mixers and svids um different tools where the students can get in groups and take turns leading the team being able to practice different skills so it's really cool to see that in action um in our little Sprouts program they were also featured in the vsba showcase for 2023 so we're excited about that and they won the hammy um they are the best preschool in town so we're excited about that um program changes for this year so we flipped the order of classes so that our teacher Cadet twos are more experienced students are working with the littles when they're coming into school when the littles are kind of learning school and then in the second semester we do
275early childhood one when the students the little students have a little bit more experience and know what's going on that gives the big students an opportunity to really focus on the processes um and that's really going well well miss uh Branch reports great feedback on that and um copying is the greatest form of flattery Franklin City Schools is looking to open their own very similar Little Sprouts program so we had a visit from them as well um Building Trades uh recently completed new storage sheds for both carsville Elementary and Windsor Elementary we're excited about that um and we've been working on this for about 18 months um but we are excited about our new collaboration with the town of Windsor um I guess it's been almost two years ago uh Mr Rogers came to me
276and he said I really want to build a whole house and give kids that Real World experience of from planning implementation design cost permitting going through all of those processes beginning to end so we started working with the county and they had given us a list of properties and finally we identified one um the town of Windsor agreed to deed a parcel of that property to us for us to do this to build a house um and at the end we would sell the house and we would give the the taxable value of the Land Based on the most recent tax assessment to Windsor in addition to the um tap fees but then all the profits would come back to the Building Trades Department to do it all over again so we'll be adding to
277the population study that um Mr Cole Dr Coleman and Miss Briggs just talked about but we think it's a really cool experience for our students and just a positive rewarding opportunity for them um we are also excited about the if you've been there recently you've seen the small house the man cave she shed hunting cabin mini Mansion whatever you want to call it so we are actually going to be raffling this off it is a collaboration between the marketing students and the the building trade students um so if your significant other is looking for one of those things you know a little Sheed in the backyard makes a nice Christmas present might I add um but be on the lookout for information about those raffle tickets because we are excited about getting that moved off
278property um and future projects that are currently in the works uh the carsville elementary school ramps some additional storage at Georgie Tyler middle school and also some trophy cases at Smithfield High School their request from the principales uh we had an excellent turnout for our first CTE Academy openhouse we had a little over 40 families that showed up across the district to tour programs um learn about the different offerings to get a chance to walk around the facility and talk to the teachers um we have another spring event scheduled for the a for April 16th and it is our goal to get our Middle School tours completed before Christmas break so that they are ready for spring course selection um some program goals and initiatives this year so we've been working with our CTE teachers
279to really level up those certifications across all CTE programs really hoping to help students stack credentials so if you get your workplace Readiness credential in level one what are you getting in level two what are you earning again in level three that's continuing to build that resume um so we're very excited about that um and all of our teachers have a plan so we're looking forward to that increase opportunities for high quality work-based learning experiences across all of our Academy courses we're really pushing that idea of students getting out there and getting into those internships job placements job shadowing type opportunities um and then we are looking to improve our college career Civic Readiness index at each High School to ensure we reach tier one status so that was um something that when it came
280through this year we were just below the state Mark for um college career Civic Readiness and if you don't know what that is um it's a non duplicated count of your senior class having participated in an honors course um a CTE completer with a certification jrc with a certification a service learning experience or highquality work-based learning so really pushing that are you ready for the workplace um some other program initiatives we are partnering with gova to build and launch go tech labs at both Georgie Tyler and Smithfield Middle School these are handson simulation equipment that helps middle schoolers explore trades um and industrial type jobs so like think simulation for welding um which is a really cool machine by the way um robotic arms different things to that nature so we'll be touring um a
281go Tech Lab in Hampton uh on Monday actually and then also taking the two Middle School teachers to Brooks crossing the Innovation Center Center in Hampton where they'll get a chance to kind of play with some of the equipment um and this is all in partnership with Hampton roods Workforce Council um where there's some Grant funds that would help support this um and then we are very excited I know Mr KCK you've asked about these before um about collaborating with poy Camp to establish the first lab school in Region 2 I met with uh Dr Atkins Brady and Dr Tony Johnson today with Newport News and they are very excited about about the potentials so we're looking forward to submitting that soon um and then our my favorite thing we are going to launch the
282first ever ICS reverse job fair um this is planned for May this will be an opportunity for graduating seniors to Showcase their talent to employers we'll be inviting employers to come in and interview students they'll be able to give us feedback anonymously of course for students that would help them improve improve their resume help them improve their interview skills but then they also have the chance to say hey I'd like to give you a job next week so and these kids will be ready to go to work so we're excited about that too looking forward to that getting bigger and better every year um so I put this information up here because I want you to know who we're really talking about when we're targeting CTE classes courses and expansion I know this is something
283you'all have asked me about before um so this is a picture of last year's graduating class and you can see there the number of advanced diplomas versus standard diplomas it's pretty even split for most of the time um but you'll see there on the right this is the breakdown of where kids go and they leave us so last year 48% of our students went off to a four-year college but the remaining 52% twoyear went to a uh excuse me 21% went to a two-year college or trade school um 5.8% went to another training school of some sort 3.6% went into the military but 20.7% left us and went directly into the workforce and there's one there one random outlier that we did not have a recorded postgraduation plan for um so really we're we're targeting
284being helping to prepare that 52% that 240 kids in a graduating class that are looking to go some pathway direct into industry um One Way or Another and remember that j2c is also part of CTE so that's where the military component comes in last year we launched our CTE application process um and I tell you all of this so that I when I get to the results of that you'll kind of it all makes a little bit more sense um our courses are at capacity we are filling them uh we have we want to make sure that we're putting the right kids in those classes um that the we're now remember the application process is only for entry level slots so if you're a level two student you're guaranteed a spot if you're a level
285three your guaranteed a spot this is only for entry level positions so when you see the acceptance numbers they are reflective of the number of seats that are available in the courses um we require in that application every student to apply app to each program of interest um so if you are interested in multiple programs you have to submit multiple applications align it with your career goals tell me how this class is going to be important for you what are you planning to do down the road um provide evidence and references so they had to to have instructors that and employers that were willing to say this student is going to show up and give us their best every day um they had to address any discrepancies in their records and that includes massive amounts
286of attendance um problems or you know substantial discipline referrals um any other things that might kind of be off in a students record um and then we always prioritize people over geography so it's not necessarily just about what school you attend it's about what program is best for you because these are countywide programs all of the applications are reviewed individually by a team of seven so we are definitely looking at them one by one this year this past year we received 515 total applications from 483 individual students so that's that's a lot of applications to go through um 95.6% of those applicants apply to only one program so that tells me that kids know what program they are interested in it's not like oh just put me in anything um 633 references were completed by
287teachers counselors and employers um and then we were able to accept 193 total students which is only 37% which tells you just how popular these classes are um when you look at the total applicants in each column there obviously culinary art stands out but everybody loves to eat um welding was was a really really popular selection um 94 students there Building Trades also and then the land lab all very very popular programs um so you can see there to the far right the acceptance rates for each of those when we conducted a student survey last year we uh surveyed all students in grades six through 11 so I had 1617 total responses and we asked students to tell us what is your what are the top three careers you are considering what do you want
288to be when you grow up um and we gave them a list of things that were easy to recognize kind of career titles but they weren't just the standard do you want to be nurse doctor teacher police officer um they were a bit more involved than that um so this is kind of where how the applications broke down how their selections broke down there are a lot of students IA White County that want to be professional athletes um that also want to be movie stars um and influencers so the entertainment category is very very large um but that's not really as under the CTE umbrella so um some things that really stand out we already have programs in place for computer science we have programs in place for Education we have programs in place for
289construction and we have a very large um stem pathway already built out at both high schools and at both middle schools um so looking outside of what are our options for really really expanding and accommodating the courses that our students are interested in um considering all of it and job market trends some recommendations some things that the CT Advisory Board is going to need to to take a look at um expand welding program I think that we have a real opportunity with our welding students and also with the demands from Newport News shipyard to be able to expand that welding program um probably relatively cost-efficient as well um a vet assistant program when you look there at the animal services the 234 that's one of the only ones where there was such a heavy concentration
290of individuals that knew that veterinary sciences were where they were going of the 234 113 of them want to be veterinarians and 36 of them want to be vet techs so there's 149 students in that animal services category that would really benefit from a vet assistant program um when we look at criminal justice or legal work um looking in that particular in the public service category we had 173 students that wanted to go into the military um 88 potential police officers um 153 lawyers and 33 game wardens in that category so those were the ones that really stood out um so I think that there's a real opportunity for us to expand some criminal justice legal type course Pathways um and then finally additional Health Sciences when you look at that medical segment right there
291a large majority yes there are quite a few that want to be pediatricians or surgeons or dentists um but the largest majority of those are going to fall into your nursing um skilled nursing trades things like that and then the one last thing I didn't put a slide on there but I did want to make you aware the CT Advisory Board will meet on December 5th at Turner and 10 at 9:00 a.m. yes sir I'll send you a calendar invite any questions that you have about CT got lucky I was at the end thank you Dr better run while you can Dr Kramer you're next alrighty I will be quick first um I wish to thank all of our military veterans and those who are active duty for your service to our country and a
292special thank you to the military veterans who are also staff members and board members so thank you gentlemen and those of you sitting out there and thank you Mr for that salute to our veterans I thought that was awesome I been here my starting my second year and enjoyed that so thank you very much for that tribute to our veterans um wish to congratulate our school board members Vice chair Marsh and board member wster on their school board election congratulations gentlemen and I look forward to working with you gentlemen as we work collaboratively to meet the needs of our students and staff I would like to note that we will be reaching out to board member elect Perkins uh to schedule her board orientation in the coming weeks uh before she assumes her role on
293the board uh so the slide um I've had the pleasure of meeting with all School staff members who desired to meet with me and it was totally voluntary to discuss school division concerns or recommendations and again it was totally voluntary thus far I have met with seven of the nine schools and uh will'll be meeting with the other two schools had to reschedule uh those but we'll be meeting with them later uh this month and it gave the staff members an opportunity to have direct access to me to share with me whatever they so desired their recommendations their thoughts concerns not pertaining to the school because that's a principal's responsibility but a School Division or Community concern and I shared with them many of those recommendations and thoughts would be uh shared with you board
294members as we get ready to develop the budget as well so I've enjoyed those opportunities and have learned a ton last month I attended wer High's homecoming and since our last board meeting I had the pleasure of attending Smithfield High's homecoming football game uh the photos there illustrate some of the many activities and events that occurred that week unfortunately we did not win the game but our young men uh played well and the band did a great job as well uh next had the privilege of being present uh and in attendance at that game actually when Smithfield Foods uh the representative there Mr Jonathan Toms in the middle um presented a check to the Smithfield High booster club uh we certainly thank our our friends uh from Smithville foods for that generous donation and certainly
295just wanted to highlight that and note that um with the pleasure also of participating in the Smithfield High and Windsor High academic jacket ceremonies uh where they presented these beautiful jackets uh to our students for high academic achievement and um I attended the ceremony at Smithville High was planning was scheduled to attend the one Monday but uh due to a family emergency was not in Town Dr Coleman represented the division at the wender high uh academic jacket ceremony um so acknowledgements to the families and those awesome students who are doing great work and you often we give academic or give uh letter jackets to our athletes we're giving our academic Scholars and stars that same level of uh of attention so I think it's a great tradition we've started here in the county the annual
296bus driver appreciation breakfast was hosted by the transportation department uh for bus driver appreciation week uh special thank you to Mr F uh Mrs bab and members of the transport other members of the transportation department for recognizing our wonderful bus drivers and bus aids for their many contributions to our school division we certainly wouldn't be able to do what we do uh without these talented individuals so that was just a to of our appreciation and uh again we repres recognize uh the Smithfield drivers in the Smithfield area at Smithfield Middle School and the drivers in the wsor area at Georgie Tyler Middle School I also had the opportunity to attend the special education advisory committee meeting also known as cak I think uh Cher kollock you've attended quite a few those in the past uh
297special thank you to our special education department Mrs Magner Mrs Daly and Mrs pronovost uh for a wonderful presentation at that meeting had a chance to learn about more about dyslexia and uh how we utilize the woodro Wilson Rehabilitation Center uh and the dates of up upcoming meetings uh are listed Mr he's moving quickly he is getting me through here I'm sorry let me jump to the next slide here all right very good um our aisle Awards uh monthly aisle Awards and as you see all these very deserving recipients uh so assistant principles uh Dr Culp and Mrs hod hjas received the lead Isle award Mrs Terry Andrews from the Smithville Library received the Inspire aisle award our own Mrs Tina Clifton received the succeed Isle award and Mrs Shan Carr from the wo Community
298received the Empower Isle award for all of her work uh with our agriculture land lab and providing our students uh internship opportunities so uh thank you and congratulations to all of the Isle award recipients uh had the opportunity to attend the Virginia Association of school superintendent conference um last month and it was a real pleasure to interact with and to listen to uh the comments from Secretary of Education uh for the Commonwealth of Virginia The Honorable uh Amy guidera and state superintendent of public uh instruction Dr Lisa Coons who I've gotten to know uh pretty well there who is on the right uh she was going to attend actually the crunch herd around the Commonwealth um and I reminded her that she didn't attend because she was actually on travel but has agreed to come
299back to our school division hopefully in the spring so Mrs uh Briggs we will uh give her a special invitation and gentlemen we're working on hopefully getting another special guest with her and the last update I have is my favorite activity for uh last month uh of all the events I engaged in last month was the opportunity uh to interact with our students through the read allow to a child week and to read to uh I had the opportunity to read to many of our second grade students at four of our uh Schools carsville elementary Carolton Hardy and wsor Elementary so an awesome opportunity I think some of you also participated for those of you who have not I encourage you to uh take part in that the students are amazing and it was probably
300the highlight of my month no offense to you know board meetings and other things that we engage in but just being able to interact with students is it's why we do what we do uh thank you Mr chair and members of the board that concludes my superintendent update great thanks Dr crer okay next we will go into action on the closed session items motion Mr chair I move to approve the Personnel report as presented a copy of which can be obtained from the school board clerk second have motion ask second is there any further discussion on this hearing none the clerk will take the vote okay that is approved unanimously we will go to action on the old business Mr chair I move to approve the consent agenda as attached and presented second and we
301have motion a second any discussion no discussion the clerk will take the vote and while the clerk is taking the vote I'm going to go ahead and uh read the donation uh memo for this month and it's uh Smithfield High School received uh from the United Way of Southampton $4,400 for next up Mentor program and $3,000 for the ignite Mentor program so thank you uh from the the United Way of Southampton and that passed unanimously so next we will have the action on new business and Mr Marsh School admin building School admin building okay um gentlemen uh we can roll through this High where you gentlemen see fit so you have been provided everything um that was shared with the Board of Supervisors uh as well uh just kind of an just kind of a
302hit the wave tops here as you guys well know in January in fact it was January 12th this board voted unanimously to approve Dr Kramer and staff's proposal to repurpose the newest wing of old Hardy into a new central office in a warehouse and as Dr Coleman and Dr KR related to a little bit earlier uh we've already saved roughly a million dollars of Al White's taxpayer funds just on the warehouse alone um and if you gentlemen recall back I we were all I believe we were all compelled by the presentation we voted unanimously to approve it um the Lynch pen for that today is that we sat up here collectively and we told the Y white taxpayers that we were going to accomplish this task at no expense to Ala white tax dollars and
303other words it was going to be funded solely and exclusively with school construction Grant funds that was the place we approved it we moved forward uh Dr Kramer has been moving forward and it continues to carry on uh because that's what we voted to do um we found out later on I believe it was uh early October we found out that for a variety of reasons the county had pulled approximately $735,000 do of those School Construction Grants that this board had previously earmarked for this project and those funds were pulled as they were construction related they went towards the new Hardy construction the point being is we the schools had those funds earmarked to rehab a portion of old Hardy uh so as we sit here today it's no longer the situation we cannot in
304any way shape or form complete this project as we promised the taxpayers because those funds no longer exist um as a result of that we formed a committee at our joint School Board supervisors meeting uh the committee consists of Me and Mrs tines Mr GCE Mr Jefferson doc Coleman was there um Mr Keaton the County Administrator showed up and Mrs humph the county CFO was there and we met uh over behind us a central office and we went through all the attachments you see on the agenda tonight we went through it in detail um bottom line the money is no longer there we can't do it so the last direction that this board give gave Dr Kramer was to carry on and complete the project um the outcome of that meeting was a couple of
305recommendations quite a few discussions with Mr GCE Mr Jefferson County administrators so on so forth um Mr GCE had recommended that we halt the project and take it into a phased approach and everything spelled out in that email um Mr fesi from the Smithfield times there and I thought he did a pretty fair job of articulating how that meeting went down I'm glad he was there uh so as we sit here tonight we have to figure out we've been we've actually been forced into a position where we're probably going to end up up having a prioritize the completion of that project um I don't like that I think that's a unfortunate circumstance that we're in um Mr Mr Grace's recommendation to Halt the project and phase it out you know that was an that was
306his recommendation uh he doesn't have the authority to make that decision no more than I have the authority to tell any of you guys how we're going to move forward so as I sit here tonight um my recommendation to you and I really wish Mrs tines was here because she was a part of this discussion was you know we my suggestion is the supervisors have the football it's in their Court um we're going to be coming at these gentlemen with quite a few other asks uh we will very much likely be told to prioritize how we're going to complete this uh I I don't necessarily agree with that notion that's probably what's going to happen um my suggestion is we carry on smartly Mr Dr Coleman carries on executing his plan and we wait and
307to see until we hear back from the supervisors on what they're going to do how we're going to move forward I I don't know the answer um I would certainly welcome your thoughts and suggestions moving forward well yeah when when you say executing is planned um that include a significant expend expenditure of funds because that's that's one of the the key things there right now um we're watching every dollar very very closely um so that's that's one of the concerns I have um I understand we've got the warehouse uh being done that's a must have the warehouse portion um but are we moving forward with the rest of it or are we waiting to identify funds for it if I may respond Mr chair Mr Vice chair and thank you very much for the work
308that you've been doing uh with the Board of Supervisors and our colleagues uh Mr Vice chair I do want to note and you stated this and you well know this this is just for the public who might still be watching uh that school construction Grant those are State dollars that we had committed to this uh project and that was money that was given to the school Division and as you stated for whatever reason uh some of that was used for new Hardy so what I would say you're absolutely right um Mr chair front of mine for me is ensuring that we resolve the deficit whatever that number ends up being following the Auditors um there are still dollars in the school Construction Grant um Dr Coleman that number is approximately approximately 180,000 approximately $180,000 and
309you know certainly we will not be able to do all that we were planning to do and we would have to move more cautiously but what I would say is as superintendent and I think you would agree we're not going to use any other funds other than the school construction monies for now uh I will say that Dr Coman and I we meet with uh County Administrator Keaton uh monthly just to have ongoing conversations and I don't want to speak for him but we are still discussing These funds as well right so the hope is that they will find uh the funds and reallocate funds back to us to finish the project uh but with what we currently have in the school construction uh Grant we can move very strategically and there are certain things
310that we can do paint um you know um insulation and other things that might not be as significant of a cost and move forward uh remember that we had students in that building less than a year ago so we just doing some very deliberate things with the limited amount of money that's right for that's right and we were able to move into the warehouse with the rollup doors and and move some shelving in there um so we are being very purposeful very strategic in terms of how we move forward uh so that's what we're doing and I think you gentlemen would agree that we're not going to take any money from the operating budget right to to right to in in any way move forward with the renovation of the building but again we do
311have some funds in the school construction grant that we can use in a very deliberate and purposeful manner Mr Marsh and I thanks Doc and I'm getting tired so I don't have my Edge like I did earlier um as this conversation shifts over from this board to back over with those gentlemen down the street uh I just want to make sure that everybody understands it we've already invested into this we we're in it for I don't remember the total amount uh between $675 and $700,000 and may I ask why before I don't want to interrupt you but can you tell would you state what those funds were used for yes those funds were used to tie in the current sewer system to to the new sewer lines those ones are used to tie in the
312water lines to the new water tank Tower that's there those ones were used for uh the parking area all permits all engineering everything for that building was a one lump sum for the exterior of that building so all of those the engineering the Landscaping the plumbing the utilities all of that was tied into the 675 that would improve we paid those those funds at that time thanks a long yeah continue to interrupt me um it's also worth making sure that everybody understands that if the suggestion or the direction is to Halt and and halt the project it's worth noting that the existing central Office Buildings while they are currently occupied we're looking at some significant cost over the next year or so to continue to occupy them refresh my mind on the cost of AC's
313and whatnot it's going to be 135 to 150,000 for all the HVAC systems on the back of the unit there are approximately 10 units on the back it's only one or two that's actually working on the back side of the building and then you have to reinforce the floor um it's easily I think that all of y'all have visited it's uh you can walk down the hall and you can find the sink holes that are located in the floor all around the building um uh also the railing the ramps and things leading up to C central office it's going to have to have repairs to it different things of that nature so there are repairs that need to go into the building so as you stated Mr Marsh if it's a pause on the new
314central office then it's funding for the old central office what I'm what we're going to need to do to keep continue to proceed and in and and I think it's it's it's important to point out because because you know taxpayers are watching how we spend their money the average taxpayers is going to hear this and and they've heard us talking about and I see ladies sitting back there looking at me about the school buses right so we can't use this money to buy new school buses and in a perfect world we certainly would go out and buy five or six school buses that would make more sense but right these different pots of money have to be used for different things so absolutely it's important that we as as the board make sure we convey
315that appropriately to appropriately to the county because that's that's important right um I could go on and on I I don't like this situation I can't stand the fact that we've been forced into a scenario where we're now unable to meet our commitment to the taxpayers uh but it is what it is so we're just going to have to work through it and I'm just going to yield at that and hear you guys out any comments Gentlemen Just real quick the grant funding remaining is I'm looking at it 18, 454 is that correct 154 180,0 454 I don't know the 454 I know the 180 approximately I'm just looking at the Grant I think he's saying it's 18,800 or whatever it's it's it's the same number yes sir okay how far can we get for
316that amount that's when it's going to come down to exactly the plan for proceeding so um the building will be sealed so to say meaning the building is structurally in sound there will be um there's a roof there's water there's electricity um of course uh the there's working HVAC units and different things of that nature um customizing a central office building into a central office something for the community that's going to be a little tougher that's going to have as Mr col pointed out that's going to have to be a little bit more direct intentions on it um so I I'm kind of reluctant to say how far we can get because how far is a little bit more subjective um I've been in school divisions where the central office is one big classroom just
317a gigantic classroom that cost uh uh lots of money to heat and cool and I've been in central offic as where it's a closet so yeah let me just rephrase my question could it be operation for that amount not necessarily the best situation but it could be operational well as Dr krma stated before it was operational less than a year ago so to answer your question operational yes the lights can come on the um you know all of the water the AC is working individuals can come into the building and if I can add and and this actually speaks to what one of our wonderful community members stated in regarding the restrooms the portion that we're keeping was for primary classes so there's a restroom in every classroom there so we're not putting restrooms private
318restrooms in as was stated restrooms are already there we merely have to uh convert children sinks and toilets to adults so we're not putting in additional restrooms just wanted to correct that uh statement from earlier and I I'll I'll piggy back on this so I a lot of this I'll probably take for granted because I have worked intrusively alongside Dr Coleman to pick this apart um and I know a lot of times we all think the same and have the same kind of questions I give Dr Coleman nothing but Kudos and accolades for squeezing the dollar as much as he could to make this happen and and the one example that keeps coming back to me is the architectural fees right so he had some initial plans and the cost of that was expensive and
319so he reached out to our Mr C rider in the back and you know they did it in house so they saved a lot of money and and there's there's several other instances that we could sit down and talk about where he's certainly save money to make this project happen um and it's also worth noting that a part of this proposal was that if and when we vacate central office and and move Mr C Rider and his it Department out of Smithfield High School we've bought ourselves back three classrooms so that's a big part of it right so you have to look at it in totality and that's why I think we all unanimously approved it when we did in January because it just made sense so and if I can add to that in
320addition currently the new central office is on the CIP uh we would be able to completely remove that off of the CIP and use an existing building which I as you stated uh much more eloquently than than I can Vice chair it just makes sense and it's often i' I've lived this in other places I've worked I would never recommend building a new building for central office but we have a building that we can convert for a fraction of the cost of what it would cost us to build a building and at some point the modular unit isn't going to last um so it already isn't and I think you can see the nods on our staff members uh the units do not work they are hot in the summer and cold in the winter
321um and we we need to take action while we can and I think we're in a great situation where we have a new building for our students and the adults can take the old building uh I think it just makes sense last thing I'm G to say on this and Dr Coleman keep me honest because I'm I don't know where I put my notes but this total project cost warehouse and all um I don't have the notes for me remember Mr GCE asked the questions about the cost per square foot for a new facility okay well that's easy the uh square footage for that site is 22,000 square feet the average cost square footage right now is 450 so I think it came to um I don't have a calculate on I think it came
322to something like 8 million dollar if we renovated I mean if we built central office New or as Dr cram alluded to on the CIP for the last 10 years that have been a central office building on there at $2 million for the last 10 years and um with no inflationary cost or anything of that nature so for no you know no cost to the taxpayer for a central office that at the cost that we're getting it at yeah it's it was yeah so so we're getting the same thing for roughly $2.4 million whereas we bought it from scratch you're looking at eight plus million absolutely and that's and that's $2.4 million of State funding that we were using not even local money yes sir and I would like to emphasize also the 2.4 million
323didn't all go to central office I just want to make sure corre it was over a million dollars went to other projects within the division uh s um sewer at the annex and different things of that nature Windsor High School all the torium Furniture um uh different things of that nature so it wasn't 2.4 million that went toward central office I just want to pinpoint that that's correct and that's all on that spreadsheet you gentleman are looked at the the line items that are highlighted blue were dedicated directly to the project and the ones at the bottom that are in this pink fuchsia color that was outstanding and and those are rough estimates so I yield chair okay are there any more comments okay thank you Dr Coleman and thank you Mr Marsh next you
324have policies for first read does anyone have any questions I'll just if you're wondering why we're proposing we delete these been here long enough I'm reading your mind um these were both local policies uh student demonstrations is a local policy and actually it's covered in the student code of conduct which we have and the other item which is Le uh relations with college universities that's covered in two existing policies well as well Ellie was a local policy too it's covered in jhd human research and j o administration of surveys and questionnaires so we're just trying to clean up our policy manual a little bit okay and next no questions on the first read we'll go right into policies for second read there any questions no questions so policies for second read Mr chair I move
325to approve the policies for second read as presented second motion a second any discussion no discussion clerk take the vote okay and that passed and we will go on regulations and Exhibits if anybody has any questions on those and then we will go go into board member comments and we'll start with District Two yeah it's pretty late District three okay District Four I'm sorry gentlemen I know it's l gentlemen Dr Kramer staff in the coming months we're all going to have to have some difficult conversations we've already started some of them tonight we got lots of needs lots of expenses and we're going to have a lot of asks when we go to the supervisors in my opinion waiting around hoping and wishing that we get approved for various grants is a pipe dream you
326can't plan your future on H hopes and wishes um I'm I'm confident and in conversations with Dr Kramer I know that there are various applications for various grants being applied for and we certainly hope we get awarded those and as they come in things will change but we can't move forward hoping to get grant money um one of the supervisors said at our last board meeting that we just need to throw it all on the table I'm a huge advocate of that and I told Mr AE that last night we'll throw it all on the table we're going to have some tough conversations um and we have to keep in mind that when we make these asks those guys are the ones that have to figure out how to pay it and those are the
327guys that have to answer to the taxpayers to figure out whether or not they're going to raise real estate taxes um that weighs heavy on me and I know it it does on you guys as well at the same time as the school board it's incumbent upon us to make sure that we're taking care of the schools and the students have what they need uh and we have to be very deliberate and separating the needs from the wants and I'm confident the supervisors would appreciate that um we're still looking at figuring out how we're going to overcome the $260 some OD thousand of the last year's de deficit um this year since the since the start of this fiscal year we've approved $90,000 in a hiring campaign that was not in the budget we approved
328a supplemental pay scale we approved roughly $60,000 in an addendum to the ESS contract so in totality we've we already wrote nearly $600,000 or better in checks that weren't budgeted in years past as I've learned over the last last year the schools have depended heavily over what I used to refer to as fluff in the budget and we can keep using that word I think it's probably appropriate but when you budget for X number of Staff members and you don't hire that many staff members obviously there's going to be excess funds but the reality that in years past Dr Coleman has had to depend on that fluff in the budget to fix things like toilets and sinks and tiles popping up in the restroom I think is an unfortunate reality and uh you just can't
329get you can't be going like that if you know that the roof on your house is going to fall off in three years then dog on it you need to plan to replace that roof in three years you can't hope and pray that you're going to have fluff in your budget that's not the way to operate in the past 12 months we've talked about purchasing weapon detection devices that didn't happen um as we roll in the the budget season I'll I will be beating on Dr Kramer to give us some evaluation of a positive or negative return on investment of his hiring of two deans of students and ssos um track and Fields you still got those slides up doc if if you don't that's okay I asked Dr Coleman to get us a couple
330pictures so that you guys can see what you may have not already seen that we've got two tracks at two high schools that are unacceptable first one you see is the Windsor high school track um this just four quick pictures of exactly what the students see and what the staff see every single day at this time and the second set of slides of course is Smithville High School and that is what the students see and the staff see every single day there thanks Doc so in my position that's unacceptable uh earlier in the year we were talking about condition of the Athletics Fields I don't know that those got taken care of this year we've heard proposals about Transportation garages as have the supervisor we just heard about the HVAC at carsville we know we
331need a new school that's a lot of needs in my opinion so we gentlemen we've got to prioritize that and figure out how we're going to Rack it and stack it and while we're doing that I'll close you with this Friday Mr collock and I sat at the alaw Education Foundation which was an awesome event and I learned this afternoon that they raised a total of $23,000 that's 3,000 more than he did last year and as I sat in the event having my cup of bourbon during the auction I uh it dawned on me that we're sitting in a room with with roughly 150 people generous people that dug into their po pockets and donated their money and it took the foundation members which is in the big group and 150 people quite an effort
332to generate $23,000 and I say that because as we sit up here we're going to raise our hand and vote yay or nay and we're going to arguably approve hundreds of thousands if not millions of worth of our fellow citizens tax dollars and um I don't take any of that lightly so as we March forward and I know you guys share the sentiment I'm confident of it let's make sure that we're spending it wisely and we're not spending on stuff we don't necessarily need so that's it and it's late and I Y chair okay I'm gonna try and go fairly quickly here um I was supposed to have a couple Town Halls uh this month but unfortunately I was incapacitated both days so we had to cancel those and hopefully we'll be able to have
333those after the first of the year um we got to skip over a couple of these uh couple of my notes but I'm not sure if I'm going to make the December meeting or not U my daughter-in-law is due around the same time at a meeting um so I may be in North Carolina watching my grandson if so then I'll be on uh virtually um but over the last year um it was great serving as the chair of the board and um I want to thank each one of my fellow board members for your support recommendation advice over that time period and it was an interesting experience to say the least uh I would also like to thank Dr Kramer and the entire staff of their patients as they taught me more about the inner
334workings of a School Division than I could have ever have imagined I did have many questions and concerns and even have a longer list of things I want completed before I leave the board including fixing our athletic fields and tracks and as I said earlier I was incapacitated for a short time last month so I didn't get an opportunity I have many opportunities to get out but I did do a few things in my capacity as School Board member and as Mr Mar said my wife and I attended the Al White Educational Foundation gala where we spent a little bit more money than expected and for the first time ever I spent $120 on a bottle of whiskey that I had never tried before and then on Saturday I attended the Smithfield pack Youth Sports
335playoffs for a little while that was very enjoyable uh I hope to get out there again next season and finally as I close I want to wish everybody a safe Veterans Day weekend and a Happy Thanksgiving and I guess we will be talking about uh a special meeting sometime in the next few weeks as well does anyone else have anything before we adjourn this meeting is adjourned