001west side elementary school auditorium the address is 800 west main street county schools always preparing students for college careers mr vines here miss times here miss dial i hear you mr collett yeah mrs gal was in right okay just said she was pulling up okay mr mr cunningham okay okay thank you at this time we need approval of the agenda from board member please any discussion hearing vote please mr mines yay miss times yes mr pollock thank you okay i would like to thank all of you for coming out this afternoon or this evening uh this isn't like we said this is a special meeting and this special meeting is open to the public although it's a unique special meeting is it is open to the public and again i would like to welcome all
002of you that are here today thank you at this time we will have the pledge of allegiance if you would stand in a moment of silence i pledge allegiance to the flag of the united states of america and to the republic for which it stands one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice for all thank you at this time we will go into the business session of this meeting and this is the reason we are here i would like to ask mrs uh gets our executive director of instructions to come forward please and um sort of explains the reason why we're here well she's already here explain the reason why we're here this evening thank you yes uh madam chair members of the board just to give a brief summary of what led us
003to this point um the original klb submitted by ms schwartz and mr schwartz stated that the items that they were concerned about were on clever the items ted ed mackin via and discovery education that request was heard by mr thrift and a team at his school he then issued a letter on october 12th to mrs schwartz stating that they had considered the request to remove ted ed discovery ed and mackin via from clevver and they had decided to deny those requests following that um mr lombardo and myself also met with ms schwartz to appeal that decision from smithfield high school and then mr lombardo issued a letter on december 10 stating that he was upholding mr thrift's decision to deny removing those apps subsequently following that meeting we did remove ted ed from clevver for
004the entire division um it is still something that is accessible through you know any website web engine but we did remove it from clever following that mrs schwartz did request to have ted mcia and discovery education removed from her child's device and that was done on january 3rd so that the apps in question are no longer on mrs short's son's device um so what is still being appealed is to have been removed from all devices for students in our accounting so that's where we are now for mr shorts appeal okay thank you very much okay at this time if um mrs and mr schwartz would like to come forward if i agree and while you're taking care while she's taking care of those things i would like to uh let the public know there was
005a meeting this meeting was scheduled for april 7th and that was cancelled due to a lack forum and was called by mr john collick and mr michael vines by policy bdb that allows two members to call a special meeting however neither board member communicated with the other board members to ensure a quorum before requesting the meeting and because we have a very small board of only five members and at this time we only have we are having we have an active void of one member because one of our members is out right now due to a personal illness but will return in may so right now we're working with four board members thank you okay mrs sport um the same as the last time you were here you're gonna have 30 minutes to pretend your
006appeal and um mrs roy will be the timekeeper um so just before we start to clarify the two packets that you guys have yes one is my powerpoint so that's the one we're going to go off of um so that's the one i'm going to read from and then the other one is there's like areas that i'll be referencing too so you'll kind of maybe have that one open because you'll be able to glance at some items that will reference to that all right um so and i have that all kind of written out for you so it should be self-explanatory okay thank you lisa are you ready to start because i want you to get your 30 minutes okay thanks yeah i'm ready okay all right so basically i labeled the klb for march
00730th because that was our original date um we are um appealing the items that were uncle clever which is ted ed mcamee um bia discovery end which she mentioned pet ed has now been removed there was also multiple items of books videos articles and there's attached list which is in your extra packet which is on page one through three the first page on the powerpoint is an example on discovery ed it's a partisan view and that's pretty much what discovery ed has and it's a very partisan app and this particular slide talks about bad things that happen it's a teaching app it takes place for the january 6th incident that happened up in washington dc it pretty much is a fill in the blank for teachers to talk with the students but it's pretty much
008geared all towards angry sad scared unsafe aggravated anxious curious confused they don't offer any type of information that teaches that individuals are still have not received their due process on this day it's very partisan so the app itself you can pull anything from that app and it's a very partisan type of an app all the information very much gears towards one side so i just that's that's an example i pulled um moving on to the next page um this is other um issues that are on discovery end this has this particular app shows or this particular slide shows um issues that you can be accessed from grades k through 12 transgender rights and work rallies intersexuality 101. so i pulled up the iowa white policy for ijai character education in august of 2021 we had
009asked dr thornton if character education has a curriculum and he stated no miss kent stated that the school was doing character or character education is intended to educate students regarding those core civic values and virtues which are to civilize society and are common to diverse social cultural and religious groups in the commonwealth that's what it reads so we ask do these fit with that going to the next page indoctrination it shall not include indoctrination of any particular religious or political beliefs it shall be consistent with the purposes of virginia's civic values which are articulated in our bill of rights article 1. many items in the discovery and books except able to access through clever mac and vbi and n media virginia do not back up and provide these character traits coercive values and virtues of
010a civilized society character education is supposed to have and provide relevant professional development with adequate resources include a method for program evaluation do these methods of software fall into these guidelines that state it shall not include indoctrination of particular religious sexual content or political belief along with supporting virginia's civic values on the bill of rights next page moral education code of virginia 22.1-2 this is also broken down in your side packet pages 506. do some of the books through clever discover ed portions of mcavee support this code of moral education which relates directly to the appropriate reading selections does the read book challenge which is accessible through the app of clever fall under moral education character education in the virginia symbol for our civic bill of rights i had a discussion at my first kob
011meeting and i asked the librarian at smithville high school where the read book challenge came from and she stated from a conference she attended in georgia i stated it wasn't formed from the george wasn't formed from the george ford riots in the black lives matter group she stated no it was prior to that well i stated that the website link on the georgia library page from the conference it stated that she did form it for mr floyd's death with the black lives matter political movement group the black lives matter website directly states it's a political movement founded by three women from the murder of trayvon she then stated well it's a way to get students engaged in reading i was surprised that they were using such sexual explicit books books with such profanity anti-police and
012violence and a challenge that had a political movement behind it to encourage students to read on to the next page the book challenge takes a hashtag straight from black lives matter a political movement hashtags books matter this was then placed all over smithville high school's library last fall before critics label me again i'm speaking solely on the political aspect and the policy of the school regarding political policies used within the school i have a picture there showing the hashtag bookmatter the smithfield high school library did say that smithfield high school did have most of these books prior to the challenge accessible through clever and under the high school app i do not have access to the middle school so i'm not sure if that's under clever the question remains should these books under the apps
013be there i'm not saying ban the books many have said that i've said but is it necessary for the school to have them i do feel that some of the books should not be in the school for children under the age of 18 which is a good portion of our students but the previous solution of parents checking their child's library account nightly that dr thornton proposed in october is not a solution if i can get an email for everything else under the sun from the division we should not be able to get we should be able to get notifications about book the books i did provide an alternate last fall but it fell on deaf ears and i do want to clarify that i'm not trying to attack black lives matter it does have a
014lot of good support with with that group they do a lot of um you know support within the black community but black lives matter if you do go to their website it was created by three women and it's centered around a political will and movement and we need to watch what we do with political movements in the schools so let's define moral next page moral is concerned with our relating to what is right and wrong in human being behavioral and moral problems a moral judgment able to teach a lesson on how people should behave a moral story good entry of sense leading a moral life while morals trend to be driven by a personal beliefs and values there are some common morals that most people agree on they are always tell the truth don't destroy
015property have courage keep your promises don't treat do not judge rape kill be dependable be forgiving have integrity patient loyal don't swear don't use drugs i think we can all agree on that does the clever act the apps that i'm talking about and the things i'm talking about do they fall under the emphasis of moral education which is under our educational guidelines next slide anti-police these are books that are found under the clever in our high school and middle school library applications including my son's smith little high school applications all american boys which uses drugs use violence kidnapping and cop hate and the hate you give which we all know from last fall has 89 f words other profanity like ass fish cop hate drugs sex violence army's moral and duties fall under the character
016education courageous conversations especially with america all-american boys all american boys books was told to create create courageous conversations an email polled through foia from last april 30th sent out from haley cope writer to the team at smithfield high school of the um at the english library group and cc'd with keana jones uh mr lombardo and miss getz was actually bought and purchased for all of the smoothfield high school students they were placing the all-american boys into our english literature classes to create the courageous conversations we were told repeatedly all summer and last fall that the equity coordinator was there when courageous conversations were to be had not to create them the smithfield high school library knew nothing about these purchases when we discussed this at my k i'll be meeting in october this email states
017exactly that you're looking at that they were bought to create them this book is also found under the clever alexandria app so they were purchased and they're found under the apps what is courageous conversation it's an intentionally giving space to complex issues of social justice race and white privilege with people it's built to where to build awareness and knowledge on how race racism and white supremacy are perpetrated in the country's city and schools the process in schools has been built with the intention and those are challenging at times it's offered space for staff to begin the process but why are we creating this this will build and create a more equitable for schools is what we're told but it is the role of whiteness did this open up a can of worms there was an
018english teacher that sent out an email that felt like this would so she proposed that we at least send out a letter to parents in regards to this she was shot down for that but she she actually thought maybe parents should be told about this it didn't happen it was also led by miss jones that this would be a pilot program by putting all american boys into the classrooms which is found on clevver how does a pilot program work who approves this and how do parents get informed on page your extra packet 7-12 it talks about pilot programs under our um engagement igbc which is a policy that we have mr lombardo stated that it was a great idea and that was an email that went back and forth parental choice under e-media virginia there
019is a video and a lesson that can be taught for students to engage on having getting around parental consent for vaccines the lesson is to encourage conversations among peers to go behind their parents back to obtain this controversial medical treatment at this time pbs cannot filter the items ms gutz and mr lombardo state they are working with whro on this but until this can be confirmed it should be removed from iowa white county students devices as there are many other controversial issues with this app mcav categories religion and spirituality this is one category underneath mcavee virginia there are six books that are listed under religion and spirituality those books are the birth of islam a christmas carol early islamic empires islamic beliefs john calvin and malcolm x an islam leader so that's four books on
020islam one book on a protestant reformer and a christmas time play when i asked the smithsville high school library about these books in the category and why it seemed one one one sided to me and where was the representation on other religions the response was that there's hard copies on other religions within the library well i asked how does this work for virtual students and homebound students she stated they could log on to a school site reserve a book of their shows and then come and pick it up curbside so i inquired on how often are the books checked out under mcavee app she said they're not checked out often so i inquired why are we paying for this she said well some books are paid for and some are free it's not a one-time
021purchase for the books they're renewed so we paid for them again well i inquired if they get rid of books that are not getting checked out why do we keep renewing them she said that they don't really monitor that the fiction books they don't expire so our inquiry if we can then add different religions to the category to make it more diverse she didn't see a reason for that since there's hard copies in the library go on to another slide eight and ten police officers say that the media generally treat the police unfairly if you search police under discovery end the first seven articles on the page relate to police brutality if you search police on e-media virginia eight of the ten articles show police in a negative way on page one we're placing school
022resource officers in our schools in iowa white county that's a positive step towards bridging the safety in the community gap but the act seemed to undermine this when they're promoting anti-police and we're putting them in the children's hands and medias and the books and apps if you look at studies emotional and psychological desensition to violence and sexual assault and rape there's a uk study that recognizes a 400 rise in child and child assault related to porn evidence of exposure to increased aggressive and anti-social behavior and there's diminished emotional and psychological reactivity with repeat encounters with violence the book off to the side there which is accessible through clever is out of the darkness it's a book that we did read last fall i'm not going to read it again tonight i think some of us
023remember it but it is full of rape incest and so forth and that's accessible to our students on clever and in hardback there's longer term effects that have been suggested with 12 to 14 year old adolescents exposure to media violence predicting lower levels of empathy one year later so as they're more and more exposed to this they become used to it this book over to the side is another book that's found on clevver it's a book about short stories there's one account of sexual assault a girl goes off to a private place with a boy and comes back bruised with warm clothing there's stories exploring dating and crushes the same and opposite sex there's a detailed description of a boy and a girl kissing um there's a boy describing waking from a dream about his
024male love interest with an erection sticky shorts and one story a kid takes naked photos on their forums and phones and they share them we all know that that is not allowed within our school so why are we not offering more positive selections for our students when certain rape porn sex sexuality or even a rape survivor there is one book on rape survivor in our school apps one i think we need to offer more positive selections for our students as a parent or guardians of our students we have the option to opt out of our students of family life yet we do not have control over what they view in the library or what apps may show up on their devices the apps just show up they kind of magically appear you kind of check
025in on them and oh there's a new app but we're trusting that these items are vetted properly and within the character education and moral compasses as described at this fandom rights meeting the last time mr thor i'm sorry dr thornton and miss heinz both stated that when these devices are in the student's hands at school it's up to the teachers to be responsible for the students and when they're at home with us it's up to our parents to be responsible for men but yet we have highly educated um individuals within the central office purchasing the apps so we're trusting them to be the ones to vet this process so supplemental material is supposed to be guided by the teachers to put it into the children's hands so then you're you're you know all these highly
026educated people to purchase the apps and then it's now the teacher's responsibility when they're in class to monitor everything and it's our responsibility now in their home to monitor what what they're looking at but yet you're bragging about the highly educated people that have purchased the apps so it's a little bit of a contradictory to us parents so i'll say this my child is mine and his and every parent or guardian and we're always gonna be their parents in guardian until they graduate and they move out and yes we loosen the reins as they get older but i can tell you as a boy mom boys make some dumb decisions as teenagers and to add this other information into them that we can't really kind of monitor it's not easy i know some of you
027guys are parents it's not easy and for us that have adult children parenting never ends we know that so we'll move on to anti-racism books found on clever and in the school library there's the ones called stamp racism anti-racism menu this book is anti-racist american street dread nation much of the subject matter found in these books articles and videos are specifically prohibited on the iowa white county school's i.t uses policy yet it's readily available in our school library books through the students clever and on our apps of the discovery ed mcavee and e-media va in the videos on the discovery ed they do not promote unity their anti-bias lessons help preschoolers hold up a mirror to diversity lessons on racism the hate you give themes plots controversy the hate you give by angie thomas racial
028tensions on the soccer team and a racially divided soccer team so what is wrong do we need them are these resources materials apps books especially the all-american boys bought from the entire english department at smithfield high school are they part of an approved curriculum are any of these resources materials apps required to teach academics will there be an adverse impact on iowa county schools ability to teach academics if we didn't have them if someone else provided these books videos on in a digital form or a hard copy to a minor that person would be considered a criminal we will look at why policies were emailed to the administration when discovery egg was being purchased concerning juveniles do these items promote the enemy that we want in this community are youth better behaved are they more
029respectable they're destroying property at the high school levels most recently there were sex crimes reported on turner drive and are we seeing results of defense expectation within our public schools these are questions we must stop and ask ourselves and that's why we're here and i know it's just two of us right now that's come forward two families but we hear a lot and they're not coming forward because this is hard this process has been hard husband has told me many times to quit why are you doing this our son it's off his device but we have a lot of parents that are coming up to us and thanking us for doing this process because they they can't or they won't so the review of materials policy iiab teachers must carefully carefully review materials prior to
030use and exercise a high degree of professional judgment in their selection and use of supplemental materials to ensure that the use of such materials serves to both support and complement the basic educational objections within the specific subject areas and classrooms that's your policy during my appeal with mr lombardo who was placed by dr thornton for the second appeal process and this gets attended i was told that discovery ed was purchased as the supplemental material so let's look at the process of the purchase of discovery ed on october 20 2021 the check registry for discovery ed was paid for it was pushed purchased as a supplementary um material which was stated to me on my december 3rd of kobe appeal me shouldn't have been purchased with the same high degree of a professional judgment in that
031selection i mean it was being placed in our children's hands 24 7. why was it not considered a big ticket item it was sport if 42 000 is considered a big ticket item why was it not purchased and listed under that ticket item in the october 31st spending we had something else for student laptop insurance at thirty eight thousand dollars but it was categorized as thirty six thousand dollars for nine schools of digital services for supplemental material and it was it went along with cultural responsive training so i'm just wondering why it wasn't listed as a big ticket item um it was proposed for 51 000 from august 2021 to august 2022 but we're really not sure what the total cost to date was how did this purchase come about who decided on the purchase
032and does this purchase truly align with the curriculum purchase from hampton city public schools we were told by ms guest and mr lombardo at my ap on december 3rd that it was purchased to align with the curriculum as a supplemental material we didn't have a current curriculum when the start of the first proposal on february 11 2021 for discovery ed the hampton curriculum had not been purchased yet on march 30th when the cares act funding was rewritten to make the purchase for discovery ms getz stated to us on december 3rd that discovery had had studies to back up regarding alignment with curriculum miss vanderbilt asked for those names she then called those names and spoke to those people to see if they had data and studies to back this up they told her they didn't
033when we gave this information later at another kob um meeting that i attended with mr and mrs van der breck in february with mr getz for i'm sorry miss getz and mr lombardo miss getz said that they probably didn't really know what miss vandenberg was talking about but i can assure you she had an hour-long conversation with them they knew what she was talking about does anyone use it the teacher i met with during my initial klb um meeting in october was not aware of the discovery ed app and how to actually look it up yet there was supposed to be training to teachers for this prior to it being placed in the student's hands the student who was invited to the meeting had no knowledge of the discovery ed app she knew a little
034bit about the ted-ed app because she had one teacher that previously shared an article from an ap class i spoke with other teachers and anyone i spoke with had not used the discovery and app i questioned both mr lombardo and ms getz than why have it on students devices to search on if teachers aren't using it if told by them that it was for teachers for use resources with curriculum and if this was purchased for supplemental material for teachers easy search tool item rather than google then why have it open for the students for 24 7. so the policies were emailed from ms getz to mr lombardo and ms jones are march 29 2021 at 3 35 pm this is after two weeks of meeting with the discovery ed those policies were teaching about controversial
035issues equal education corporal punishment and regarding prosecution of juveniles as adults so that was march 20th at 3 35. on tuesday march 30th at 8 17 in the morning miss cummings notifies miss jones that mr lombardo has asked her to rewrite the cares act 2021 grant to include the discovery education quote so the discovery education is a learning plan and it's an experience the discovery education is to support equity focus on cultural responsive training focus on sel and special education there's lots of keywords i've written off to the side there equity in a very variety of ways authentically represented focused on relative uh relevant equity topics like dissent equity and inspiring education and there's even a video for the children on the app to watch that um i've submitted to you the whole partnership proposal
036all this was found um the whole proposal for the partnership proposal for discovery end is there um there's some keywords in there it sounds like my time is being shorter so i'm not going to go through it all it talks about over 190 000 engaging standards aligned resources talks about how they're going to use it in the classroom with students trained teachers apps on the aisle white devices digitally culture culturally responsive again training [Music] and then there's the purchasing to put it on the student's devices there's one particular module which is 1.3 to look at again it talks about locating saving and usually using digital resources and setting the stage to engage with our students once again they're setting the stage with our students to use this on february 23 2022 an email went out
037to the teachers of iowa county that training in regards to the cultural responsive has ended under the executive order number one the discovery education bundle was purchased for this training so my question to you is if we stop the training for the teachers under this discovery ed purchase why do we still have the discovery ed app on our students devices it is full of racist police brutality sexuality and culturally responsive resources why does it take parents having multiple special meetings six months of time to bring this to the school board's attention why do you have plan i wrote this the last time to change the k obvious he'll be policy to make it harder for parents to get to this point why did it cost thousands of dollars of information with foia to find this
038information out um i've been a parent for many years i need to admit that um i've spent a lot of time volunteering as a room parent a teen mom ptsa i've served on boards of the ptsa i've been to regional and state meetings for ptsa and i've spent my time as a parent a whole lot different than i have the last 10 to 11 months and it hurts me that i'm spending it like this now and not the way i used to spend it i'd love to spend it in a different capacity i won't read this one but i'm asking you do you feel like what i've presented to you tonight really fits with what we are supposed to be doing for our children the ted ed has been pulled and it has the same
039type of information as discovery end does it align with our executive order number one it does it is that why the teachers are no longer being trained under the discovery education they're not remove it discovery ed and other racism anti-police sexual content that also includes rape and child pornography material from the children of iowa white county schools thank you [Applause] thank you mr mr schwartz for coming with your appeal tonight the board has heard you and at this time madam chair do we have the opportunity to ask the mr mrs schwarzenegger okay thank you i haven't gotten to that yet but i was going to get to that thank you did you have i do i do give us a call okay uh mr schwartz you are one of only two parents to appeal the
040use of these learning resources to the school board so can you explain why other parents have not taken issue with these resources well i kind of mentioned that a little bit but we've we've had parents reach out to us saying that they first of all they didn't know that these were on the children's apps and then they'd gone looked i know that parents have started to reach out to principals at their schools requesting the devices to be reached out some parents have had an easy process i know other parents have said that um i think it's maybe one particular school maybe two that have said that they need to come in and have a meeting with the principal and i had said well i don't know if that's actually true because i know miss guts
041when when we had gone back and forth with getting i said i wanted a letter because i wanted to have proof i didn't just want to call the principal and say hey remove this off my child's device um and you said well it should be pretty simple just just call the principal so that's what i i have been informing the parents um and some of them are running into walls it's not been as easy so i'm not sure if there's a way to put that out to the principles that it should should be a fairly simple process um but most parents i mean i even got a message from a parent today that was like oh you're my hero and i was like that makes me go feel good because a lot of them say
042that it's it's not an easy process they've seen what we've gone through they see the personal attacks we do get from some some parents themselves but they just don't have the time the energy trying to some parents tonight we're like we can get there at five o'clock tonight i mean it's just impossible so it's not an easy process well you mentioned the process um and i'm trying to really wrap my head around the entire process particularly since we're looking at changing it um so when you first file the kob to the principal of the school um was there a committee formed and you sat in with the committee so there was um yeah so there was there was um a teacher the librarian there was a student that i thought it would be my student
043but it was a rant it ended up being a student you know privacy yeah no perfect well i would probably change that because i felt like it did violate teenagers teenagers speak you know what i mean so i personally would change that but well i think a lot of what you mentioned tonight is some of the same concerns that that i had when i uh first ran for this you know i think we need to focus like i said last week on reading language arts history civic science foreign languages visit to prepare the students for college careers in life so i i agree with you anything divisive we've got to get rid of and that's divisive on both sides whether it's on the right or the left we've got to be right down in the
044middle of the road right so i want to thank you for coming forward tonight and um just you know keep moving moving forward thank you i have a question ms forbes uh now you can help me a little bit uh miss vanderbilt you know when she's always brought things to my attention she's always sent me an example of things she found and he discovered and stuff so i'm trying to get her give me an example of what you mean by anti-racism what do you mean well you said anti-recent books found on clever give me an example uh she sent me some screenshots of movies and some things that was very clear to me to define exactly what she was trying to say so i'm asking you give me an example [Music] there was like one
045specific thing was like you couldn't take this quiz um unless you were i think it was one of them was like you can't take english and white or you couldn't take an unless you were black things along that line i mean to me that's setting up a race issue why why are we why are we defining by color to me that's a race issue is that anti-racism it's a race issue i mean there's anti-racist but what i'm asking is you said anti-racism actually defined that for me and what you just stated that does not define it that's just you know i'm trying to grasp what you're saying and grasp what you're hearing because he kind of winning me over to be honest with you because some of this stuff you see is really true um
046i mean i just never seen it i've only done what this is my with my sixth month so some of this stuff i see is [Music] my mindset isn't looking at it i'm looking for other things uh because i mean some of it just comes out yeah i was pointing one specific direction what i was looking for um but i wasn't looking for anti-racism i wasn't looking for that um that's just one of my questions i don't want to talk about that too much i want to go to the religious go ahead go right ahead my question i just want to write this i wanted to ask you the question uh well i guess but you said that you saw there was a test for wife or you could only take it to your wife
047or you could only take it if you were black my question is did you actually look at it to see if it was a cultural thing because if uh i am of the black culture and if i wanted to go over here and take this test of a white culture maybe i would fail it because i don't know about the culture same thing you know vice versa so maybe that is what it was about but it's really not teaching racism it's just teaching about cultures yeah it wasn't that it was and there are tests out there that teaches about cultures okay and if i go out and take a test of any culture that i'm not familiar with i will probably feel it right but i'm just asking you that question i'm right sure so
048this one was called grade 10 challenging confirmations on bias okay and so take the challenge but only if you are white okay all right thank you i i just wanted to clarify right okay all right thank you the six books on religion did you find any more books other than just six not on an app those are the only books listed under that app for spirituality in religion and one is a play any books and references john brown those are the only books under spiritual religion so i looked in her spiritual relationship who john brown was now you're gonna educate me he's a preacher evolutionist creature okay okay okay uh we're gonna have to um are there any more questions at this point then i'm going to make a motion that we as a board
049will remove discovery air and mackin va from our school systems madam chair checking that okay [Music] okay all right you have a motion on the floor and you've heard your motion any discussion okay at this time yay okay at this time the motion fails because the motion failed then ted ed discovery it and back in via will remain the same in alawite county schools thank you nothing else comfortable